38: Wales and Scotland Election Debrief On What This Means For Nature

Brilliant.

Thank you very much.

Yes, so there's a, a new report come out that's another new report warning of nature loss as a, a major issue, this time on our major financial risks.

So we've got a significant new report from outside the environmental sector.

There seems to be more and more of those that's adding to the growing number of voices calling for nature loss to be treated as a systemic economic and societal risk.

So the new report is called Planetary Solvency: Tipping into the World Unknown, Global Nature Risk Management.

It's published by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, the IFOA.

I had not heard of them before, but obviously the Institute for Financial Professionals, and it's co-authored by Georgina Beddenham, head of climate and disaster risk at the government's Actuaries Department, GAD.

And it argues that nature is critical infrastructure underpinning food systems, water supply, human health, climate regulation, and economic activity, and that its loss poses urgent financial risks that can no longer be ignored.

The report is the latest in the IFOA's Planetary Solvency series and calls on actuaries, policymakers, and financial institutions to integrate nature risk into their models and decision-making frameworks.

It highlights near-term risks already emerging, including soil degradation, water stress, and pollinator decline, as well as acute shocks such as breadbasket failures, so affecting food supplies and trade disruption.

It also flags the link between deforestation and land use change and zoonotic disease spillover.

We all remember COVID, I'm sure.

And warns that ecosystem tipping points such as coral reef and pollinator collapse could cause irreversible harm in the very near future.

Crucially, the report concludes that climate-only modeling is no longer fit for purpose, given the deep interdependencies between climate change and biodiversity loss.

It calls for biodiversity metrics and qualitative narrative approaches to risk management to be adopted alongside traditional quantitative methods.

For us in the environmental sector, I think this publication is just another valuable addition to that evidence base.

It's showing how important nature is.

It represents another example of a government-linked body operating outside the environmental sector, reaching the conclusion that we've all come to previously already, that nature loss is a critical issue that does demand urgent action.

The financial and actuarial communities are increasingly speaking this language of ecological risk, which is really good and great to see.

Reports such as this can be powerful tools when making the case to policymakers and decision-makers who may be more receptive to this economic framing and this economic language.

So it's another one for us at CIEEM and the policy team to add to our toolkit as we talk about it, as another piece of evidence on just how important it is that we need to push back against nature loss and push for nature recovery with this evidence coming from a huge range of sources now.

So just another one for the toolbox for us.

It does seem significant that it's from outside of nature or environment body.

Yeah, absolutely.