Danny ChenWhen advocating collective climate movement with stakeholder market demands, one question is often asked:
How do we invite climate stakeholders to pay additional environmental costs from corrective action when they did not need to pay for before?
It’s a good question. Every decision making should relate to their relative benefits, costs, and the risks. If we reframe the question to the following one, it will make the answer becomes more clear:
How do we invite climate stakeholders to accept the products/services that they now enjoy will not be affordable and available in the foreseeable future, even they are rich?
Climate action itself is future-oriented that people expect to have a better life quality or at least not worse than the current one. When we decide to take climate action with our finance, we are voting our future with the capitalism we live in.
To clarify, not all climate action will increase the financial costs toward our goals. Sometimes, the climate action itself will lower our overall costs. Despite all that, when the climate solutions are new and innovative, it is common that the cost will be higher. Accordingly, we need the financial planning to support people in achieving their long-term goals with positive impacts based on their limited resources.
