To make COP27 a success, finance is key – POLITICO

Robin Millington is the CEO of Planet Tracker.

Simon Stiell, the new chief of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, has his work cut out for him. Indeed, there’s no magic wand to greening the global economy, but he does have the convening power to help bring policymakers, investors and financial institutions together in a more aligned way.

Investors and policymakers need to join forces to protect natural capital — i.e., the sum of the world’s stocks of natural assets from which we derive services like forestry, fishing, materials for building our homes and minerals to run our phones and electric vehicles. 

From deploying mitigation and adaptation measures and easing the impact of environmental loss and damage to ensuring the green transition is fair for developing countries, good policy and good finance have to go hand in hand.

Take aquaculture, for example, an industry that supplies 49 percent of the global demand for fish, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Around 3 billion people rely on seafood as their primary protein. Meanwhile, aquafeed for the industry has an increasing reliance on soy, which is, in turn, driving deforestation. But innovative green bonds, issued by leading companies like Mowi and Grieg Seafood, are providing the capital needed to scale the use of more sustainable feed with novel ingredients, such as blackfly larvae and algae.

Such debt financing is…