On Tuesday, I hosted a meeting of our Sustainability Leadership Roundtable on the theme of financing Sustainability. The mindmap I compiled of our discussion is below, although it may not mean much to you if you weren’t in the ‘room’. But my overarching takeaway is we have got to get much better at embedding the full financial benefits of Sustainability into our financial systems. Those systems have often evolved based on the old assumption that Sustainability is a bolt on and a cost, and not a driver of competitive advantage. If we ‘correct’ those systems to embrace all the benefits as well as the costs, then to an extent you don’t need to make the business case anymore – it is truly integrated into the process.

In the outside world, similar tensions have come to the forefront due to the conflict in the Gulf. My social streams are full of competing takes on the costs of different energy paths – again these are predicated on what you include or exclude from the equations. But there is a growing feeling that we are at a tipping point where people are increasingly embracing clean energy on narrow economic grounds alone (without factoring in, say, the cost of future climate impacts). And you can see how this is likely to accelerate – India is currently suffering heavily from the blockade of LNG through the Strait of Hormuz and they’re bang in the middle of the sun belt where solar is most productive. If I was an Indian policy maker, I’d be pushing hard for solar to protect against price shocks.