Response to Mark Carney’s 4th Reith Lecture 2020 - From Climate Crisis to Real Prosperity

I’ve just been listening to this fascinating Reith Lecture by Mark Carney on the BBC.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000qkms
 
He quite correctly identified the main features of the Climate Crisis and some of the ways many people in the worlds of finance and economics are trying to solve this presenting problem, and even to go further to build a sustainable future beyond just stabilising the climate.
He is to be commended for such a salient and well-constructed series of talks, of which this one was the fourth and final one.
He seems to place a lot of confidence in the ability of market mechanisms, operating alongside government policies and regulatory legislation, to provide the shift in investment required to rebalance human activities and reflect changing citizen values on the planet and sustainability.

In my view, if I can be a "critical reviewer" for a moment, he gave only a partial response to the question by Tanya Steel (WWF) – about 42 minutes into the transmission – regarding the lack of valuations being placed on standing rainforests (as opposed to felled forests for land use change into agriculture).  Although he mentioned Natural Capital, he expressed some concerns about using Natural Capital approaches to put a value on nature.  His main concern, which has been expressed by others (including the famous environmentalist George Monbiot), is that putting a value on nature could make it easier (and more attractive) for businesses or individuals to make profits by exploiting those natural assets, in particular by converting them from capital assets into produced goods (eg cutting down trees to make wood and changing the land from forest use into more profitable agricultural use.

This is a well-worn concern about Natural Capital but it can be addressed.  The key thing to realise is that, in most forests, the fact that they are not valued at all as a standing capital asset makes it much easier for them to be exploited for profit than if they had a standing forest value as a capital asset.  This is because the cost of the raw material is currently essentially zero and no economic damage is recognised when the trees are felled.  Placing a value on the standing forest as a capital asset (Natural Capital) would make it clear that felling the trees in an unsustainable way would be destroying value, by reducing the value of that capital asset without a larger compensating value creation from that activity.  The main solution is to emphasise the necessary change of priority from a “flow” model of the economy (as typified by GDP) to a “stock” model, with managing national and global Balance Sheets being more important for a sustainable future than just managing the annual flows (equivalent to a profit and loss account).  

Stock Flow Consistent (“SFC”) economic modelling has been around for several years, and it was a missed opportunity for Mark Carney not to mention this in his lecture. The SFC approach follows the premise that it is important to manage balance sheets as well as income and expenditure if you want your enterprise to have a long-term future.  If that enterprise is an entire country (or the whole world) then we have for too long focussed almost entirely on the income and expenditure (eg GDP) and neglected the national and global balance sheets (incorporating Natural Capital).  SFC modelling is, in fact, one of the most obvious things to explore as part of current moves to implement Natural Capital in National Balance Sheets (in National Systems of Accounts), and ultimately we should be maintaining and enhancing World Balance Sheets over time, including the whole of the Natural Capital of the Earth, as this is what the continued thriving of our species (and many others) depends on.  For more about this concept, see WorldBalanceSheet.com