Nature finance: can markets provide innovative solutions or are they the inevitable problem in saving nature?

Simon Zadek is currently a Founding Partner of Morphosis, a platform dedicated to investing in ‘transformative adaptation solutions’ relevant to life in a severely climate-impacted world ‘beyond 1.5℃’. 

He was until recently the Founder and CEO of the Swiss-based, not-for-profit organisation, NatureFinance, is Senior Advisor at The Paulson Institute and the Task Force on Nature Related Financial Disclosure, and a founding member of the International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits. He was Senior Advisor on Sustainable Finance to the UN Secretary-Generaland led his High Level Task Force on Digital Financing of the Sustainable Development Goals, building on his role as co-Director of the influential UN Inquiry into a Sustainable Financial System. 

He co-Chaired China’s Green Finance Task Force and ran the G20 Green Finance Study Group under the Chinese, German and Argentinian Presidencies. He was Founding Chief Executive of the international think tank, AccountAbility, Development Director of the New Economics Foundation, Founding Chair of the Ethical Trading Initiative and Senior Advisor to the World Economic Forum and the Global Green Growth Institute. He has been Visiting Professor at Singapore Management University, Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Martin School of the University of Oxford, a Visiting Scholar at Tsinghua School of Economics and Management in Beijing, Senior Visiting Fellow at Harvard`s JK Kennedy School of Government, Visiting Professor, Copenhagen Business School, and Honorary Professor at the University of Southern Africa, Senior Fellow. 

He has a PhD in economics from the University of London, published as ‘An Economics of Utopia: The Democratization of Scarcity’, and a M.Sc. Econ. from the London School of Economics. His writings cover diverse topics ranging from workers’ rights to sustainable finance, and from ‘migrant nations’ to Buddhist Economics. Most recently, he released, ‘Time to Plan for a World Beyond 1.5C’, and co-authored ‘Financing a Sustainable Bioeconomy’ as a contribution to Brazil’s G20 Initiative on the Bioeconomy. 

His book, ‘The Civil Corporation’, was awarded the Academy of Management’s prestigious Best Book on Social Issues in Management. His Harvard Business Review article, ‘Paths to Corporate Responsibility’, has been widely used for strategic planning by the corporate community.

Header image credit: Urban Vintage via Unsplash.