John Elkington's 'Green Swans' engaged me with it's careful and informed studies and reports about the sustainable future that is possible. I have known of John and his work - e.g. the Triple Bottom Line - for 15 years or so, though I hadn't been fully aware of the breadth and depth of his sphere of influence. I’m 72 and I’ve been working at this for 50 years, but I think my career’s just starting. The next 10 to 15 years are going to be the most exciting, challenging and politically dangerous of my entire working life. We know what needs to be done and there is a sense of urgency building all around. Now really is our time. It really is now or never.” Younger people have every right to be angry. I’ve gone on a couple of school climate marches, talking to younger people, and I sense something happening. We’re facing an intergenerational crisis, the like of which we haven’t seen, where younger people not only lose confidence in older folk, but actually start to see them as a very big part of the problem. Engaging all generations is crucial – giving all of them a vested interest in what comes next, and, for younger people, the experience and resources to make sense of all of this. Mariana Mazzucato, Professor in Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London and Founder/Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Author of The Entrepreneurial State and The Value of Everything.

Rejection is followed by Responsibility, a phase where one or few leaders—corporate or governmental—start taking responsibility for the emergence of the Green Swan outcomes. Elon Musk’s decision to start Tesla, producing electric cars himself because no other car manufacturer would invest, is a good example. In essence, it is the ‘system value’ model that will best enable green swan dynamics. Hence, moving towards such a model must be a priority for businesses, if they are to be part of leading the change.When we announced the first-ever product recall for a management concept in 2018, through the Harvard Business Review, we soon after launched the Tomorrow’s Capitalism Inquiry. That, in turn, gave rise to the “3Rs”: Responsibility, Resilience and Regeneration. To speed up the journey towards this upgraded, regenerative form of capitalism, we need to embrace uncertainty, and dare to experiment with new economic and political models. In Elkington’s words, “we must move well beyond the development of new frameworks and tools, and towards new thinking, and critically, toward new operating systems for our economies.” Furthermore, he advises to use the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals as a North Star to guide the way forward. To close this gap, the NGFS has published macrofinancial scenarios on the potential long-term consequences of the climate crisis and climate policies. Under the leadership of the Bank of England’s Sarah Breeden, the NGFS will next week publish new vintages of the scenarios that were first released in June 2020. These scenarios provide a framework for analysing the impact of physical and transition risks under different climate policy assumptions. While they have been developed for use by central banks and supervisors, they may also be useful for governments, academia and private sector entities. With these scenarios, the NGFS provides – and intends to regularly update – an important public good for all stakeholders, public and private, to help them engage in forward-looking climate-risk analysis under a common and consistent global reference framework. The underlying concept posits that from a Risk Management perspective Climate Change introduces (besides other changes and risks) a new type of Systemic Risk that involves interacting, nonlinear, fundamentally unpredictable, environmental, social, economic and geopolitical dynamics, which are irreversibly transformed by the growing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Over the hour-long discussion, the two covered a lot of ground, including Elkington’s newest book, the "exponential decade" and why, in the midst of all of the uncertainties of the present moment, he’s arguably more excited than ever before. Below are some highlights from the Q&A. Coining green swans

However, despite the growing movement towards sustainable finance, FSIs will continue to fund and interact with “climate-negative” and “climate-exposed” companies and assets. A “green swan” event is a climate event that is unexpected and rare, with far-reaching impacts. Combined with a more traditional financial crisis, a green swan event could theoretically threaten the stability of the global banking and insurance sector. The biggest mistake today’s leaders can make is to think of this system as an alternative to the one we currently have. Instead, our interconnected global economy requires it to be one and the same. We firmly stand by Elkington’s perspective that businesses play a deciding role in supporting and accelerating the evolution of emerging green swans, who in turn will solve the most critical challenges humanity is faced with today.John Fullerton, Founder of Capital Institute, author of Regenerative Capitalism: How Universal Principles and Patterns Will Shape the New Economy, and former Managing Director of JPMorgan. There’s is an optimism that comes from doing things," he said, "and one of the great privileges of your job and mine is we're meeting extraordinarily interesting people the whole time who are experimenting with new technologies and business models and regulations. I couldn't have wished to be born in a better time." My father was very keen that I either went into the armed forces or become a merchant banker. I was completely ill-suited to either of those worlds. Instead, I went to a brilliantly creative and liberal school which suited the way my brain works way better. I then spent a couple of years wandering around, not knowing what I was going to do. We're going from a world where we talked about responsibility through a time where resilience will be on everyone's lips," Elkington said, referring to his book’s subtitle. "How do we build resilience into our companies, our supply chains, our economies, our societies and communities and the biosphere? In the end, the only way to do that is through regeneration." Gearing up for the exponential decade Bank of England chief Andrew Bailey said his bank - one of the more forward-leaning on the effort - was exploring ways to green its monetary policy portfolio after a disclosure report last year showed the carbon footprint of its asset holdings were consistent with a rise of as much as 3.5-4 degrees by 2100.

But it’s more than merely the volume of initiatives. There’s a process too. As with many disruptive ideas, it starts with Rejection, the phase in which people simply reject the possibility of a Green Swan happening (think “people will never give up combustion engines”).

I decided to go to Essex University, and it was wild – you may have heard of the student protests in 1968. This was the epicentre in the UK. I met an army general who told me he was about the send the tanks in. I gave up my economics studies that same year, because the only economists that made any sense to me – Nikolai Kondratiev and Joseph Schumpeter – were loathed by my professors. But their ideas about rhythm in capitalism stayed with me. The gist of it was that there are long wave, hard-to-predict cycles – periods of investment, growth, inflation, deflation and disinvestment. But before we get carried away, the operative word here is “potential”. Yes, Future-Fit offers a clear destination to aim for, and a way to guide progress toward it, but it will only have any real impact on the world if it is adopted at speed and scale. Early adopters know the Benchmark works, but now we need to make that adoption exponential — among companies, investors, advisors and policy makers — and that’s why for me the idea of the Green Swan is so compelling. Enter the Green Swan Thierry Philipponnat of the NGO Finance Watch warned, however, that the data gap should not become an excuse for non-action. "It is a convenient euphemism but a dangerous one because we don't have the data and will never have it." What is exciting about Elkington's Green Swans is, as he describes them, that they are 'dynamic trajectories to seemingly impossible outcomes and solutions'. This isn’t the first time Elkington has injected a new word into the sustainability community’s collective language. In 1994, he introduced the concept of the triple bottom line (and the following year, "people, planet, profit"). In 2018, 25 years after he first introduced the first idea, he distanced himself from it.

One might ask whether we need yet another sustainability concept added to our vocabulary. We’ve heard terms such as the Sustainable Development Goals, the Triple Bottom Line, ESG, Regeneration, Circular Economy, various ISO standards, and so forth many times over the last decade. How does the Green Swan concept add to this? We are disrupting and degrading Earth’s natural processes, upon which we as a species and all other life depend.This all sounds vast and beyond the scope of any individual company or person. So, what can one do? According to Elkington “Any individual will find it difficult to move the needle. And if you say you’re going to do this over the next six months, that may be an illusion.” See Nuijten, R., Wood, K., Haitjema, T., Rees, E. and Nolet, B. (2020), “ Concurrent shifts in wintering distribution and phenology in migratory swans: individual and generational effects”, Global Change Biology, Vol 26, No 8, pp. 4263-4275.