Welcome to another week of Shaken Not Burned! 

Sometimes it’s difficult to believe that ‘the markets’ could be the solution as we look around at a world that seems to either be flooding or on fire. Yet, Sean Kidney has built a case for it.

Sean is the co-founder and CEO of the Climate Bonds Initiative, the organisation that helped turn green and climate bonds from a niche experiment into a multi-trillion-dollar global market.

In conversation with Felicia, he explores how we can steer capital towards climate action in a world already in crisis, without collapsing trust along the way.

Amid increasing insurance costs, fragile supply chains and shifting norms, we need to move beyond mitigation to focus on resilience and adaptation. That doesn’t mean we leave mitigation behind, but we must establish financially rational preparation for volatility, such as flood tunnels, heat-resilient cities, and buried power lines.

There’s certainly no shortage of money; there’s capital everywhere – the problem is where it goes. The real bottleneck seems to be the pipeline: credible, investable projects that meet climate and resilience criteria at scale.

And with all the debate about ESG and labels, it’s worth pointing out that labels themselves aren’t the issue – bad ones are. Taxonomies and standards have been created to create trust, speed and clarity in markets that move faster than any individual can keep up with.

Some of the key questions we ask are, is climate change a finance problem or a time problem? Who are those with the power to drive change, activists or pension funds with obligations they need to plan for 20-40 years ahead? Is the ‘green premium’ of lower borrowing costs the real prize for investors, because green bonds hold their value better in volatile markets?

As we figure out the markets of the future, we must remember that green finance today is sensible long-term planning. That shift, from should we? to how fast can we?, may be the most hopeful signal of all.

Further reading:

• UK Nature security assessment on global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security

• AON 2026 Climate and Catastrophe report

• Climate Bonds Resilience Taxonomy

• Returns on Resilience

• The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

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