 Welcome to the London Climate Action Week event hosted by IED about hidden handbrakes exposing the unseen blockers of climate action. I'm James Persad and I'm Director of Communications at IED. Delighted to be moderating this conversation today with four great panel members. Really delighted today to have a distinguished panel who are the sort of founding members, if you like, of this hidden handbrakes concept and campaign. And I will come to each of them in turn shortly, but just to sort of describe the hidden handbrakes concept. So I'm coming up to a big birthday this year. I won't name the number but I've been working in sustainability now for 15 years. And I did itself has been around now for isn't it's 51st year. And, you know, progress is painfully slow. And certainly in my lifetime. If anything the challenges around climate change have been accelerating and certainly warming has been accelerating and ocean warming is accelerating. And despite all of the science and all of the action that's been taken so far and the terrific action that's been taken so far. Things aren't moving as fast as they need to. So we at IED put our heads together and sort of identified a number of complicated technical issues that are little sort of little aired in public unseen by most because of their complexity because of the technicality. But we believe they are proving to be huge blockers of the swift progress that's needed to halt and reverse climate change, nature degradation and social justice. Now what I'm encouraging you all to do is contribute your ideas of what these unseen blockers to swifter action might be. I'll come on and talk about it a bit later we have a web platform that's launching in mid July, which is deliberately designed to encourage contributions from all of you, and actors all across the world to name these blockers and start a conversation about them and we're hopeful that the platform acts as a catalyst for change. And the partners can get together and collaborate together to tackle these problems in a joined up and systematic way with the relevant actors around the world that can contribute to the fight, the good fight. So yes, without further ado, I will introduce our panelists. So kicking off with Grace Eddy, director of the Generation Foundation. Good morning Grace. And yeah, great to be here. I'm Grace. I am the director of the Generation Foundation, and we are the philanthropic arm of Generation Investment Management, which is a sustainable investment firm so it was set up in 2004. And I think the sustainable investment was was quite as commonplace as it is today and the foundation was established alongside it really to, to accelerate the transition to a sustainable economic system and I think we share your impatience James on this. The focus is on grant making and research where we're very much aligned on on these issues of trying to find what are the barriers to a more sustainable economic system and how, how can we contribute best we can so looking forward to the conversation. Wonderful. Thank you Grace. And good morning, Megan Rowling from Thompson Reuters Foundation. Hi, yes, morning everybody. We are at the Thompson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Reuters News, which is obviously a big global news agency. We run our own journalism service, and we have been covering climate change for well over 15 years. And, yes, what we find on a daily basis is that, you know, you can look at both sides of the coin, you can look at the doom and gloom side of things from a media perspective. You can pivot to what lots of people call solutions journalism, which is, you know, the good examples out there of things that are happening to solve climate change to slow it down to help people adapt. For us that's not that that's too much of a kind of dual way of looking at things we prefer to integrate the whole picture and you know, look at the situation where we're not doing enough, but also ask why are we not doing enough and look at those solutions but also say well, why are those not happening? And, you know, what needs to change in order to push action forward. And as a result of that kind of approach, which I think is more of a real world approach than doom and gloom versus solutions. We come to, we sort of stumbled across this issue of the hidden handbrakes as well. So we've been discussing with our journalists, you know, look around you, if you can see something that's happening where you are that's really stopping a move to clean energy or a shift in a community to help them protect themselves better from climate change. What is it? Let's report on that. Let's identify it and let's show people what's going on because I think when it comes to this, the role of the media is to expose the handbrakes in order to be able to try and release those handbrakes. So that's why I'm here today. Thank you, Megan. Professor Lorenzo Cattolo, would you mind introducing yourself now please. James, thank you so much. I'm very happy to be part of this conversation. I'm Lorenzo Cattolo. I work at IED. I had the law, economies and justice program. In our team, we collaborate with partner organizations around the world to renegotiate the law in order to promote fair sustainable economies. We are very mindful of the advances made in environmental diplomacy, for example, in the context of Paris, but we're also concerned that the nuts and bolts of the global economy remain primarily driven by other considerations. So our job really is to rethink patterns in trade and investment, ranging from rethinking treaties that channel payments to polluters, all the way to acting at the local level in collaboration with partners to reconfigure investments that undermine the land rights of indigenous peoples and local communities. Thank you Lorenzo. And in a in a late change to our lineup. Unfortunately Claire Shakia, Strategy Director has been taken on well, but I'm delighted to welcome Tom Mitchell, Executive Director of IED. Morning Tom. Morning James and hello to everybody and delighted to be part of this session, albeit as James said as a last minute entrant. I'm also delighted to see so many people from all different parts of the world joining this session and that's, that's fabulous because I think fundamentally this is a topic that does link everybody globally who's trying to create a better world. And we all know that there are things that are stopping that, and actually having a conversation about those things, whether they're global considerations or whether they're local ones. Fundamentally we need to get on the front foot and I'm really pleased that we've got such a diversity of people coming in to listen to this and really keen to get into the discussion thanks James. Yeah, so to sort of kick us off. I thought I might ask each of our panelists, what it is that excites them or engages them about this notion of hidden handbrakes, and what can be done to further the campaign, encourage participation, grow its reach to the world by partners. What we can do about the storytelling. My strong belief is that the more you expose these issues to the sunlight, you build a sort of public pressure and a consumer pressure which is very important at influencing policy. There's the sort of behind closed doors evidence and research presentation. It's important to be mindful that politicians need public votes, and that the public deserve to hear the truth and can be very influential in the choice of their votes so you know what we're trying to do here is build a public awareness of fairly complicated issues but in ways that resonate with that interested public. So I might come to grace first. What is it in your line of work that you think has resonated with you about hidden handbrakes grace. Yeah, so for me, I guess, you know, obviously I think it's important to open these these ideas up to the sunlight and as you say get get people interested and knowledgeable about these things. But I, from a funder perspective, you know a lot of my work is is grant making and research and in particular, often on some quite nerdy sounding topics and for us, you know, as as a grant making foundation we're looking for opportunities to fund things that aren't going to get loads of funding for out from elsewhere so where we give a grant it's not that there's 50 people lined up who would also be great funders for that work but maybe finding stuff that maybe isn't getting the attention. It deserves and so this concept really resonates with us as what are the avenues of funding that there's amazing kind of potential for action, but just aren't getting the funding they deserve and we're, we're in the lucky position as as a foundation funded asset manager, you know we get a proportion of the profits, and each year, we don't have to fundraise and so we don't have to, you know, make beautiful decks about the very exciting things that we're doing you know we can fund some really unsexy stuff, and, and that's kind of the sort of thing that we're looking for and I think the, the beauty of the hidden handbrakes framing is that it takes some of these quite complex difficult issues, and brings them to light in a way that's, I hope engaging to people so you know we've already started talking to other funders about some of the things that that you've highlighted of, you know, interstate dispute settlement which doesn't immediately ring to the ears as as an exciting point for people necessarily but you know once you have the conversation people get really excited about the potential for change so so that's what's interesting to us in our line of work. Thank you Grace and just for the audience's benefit Lorenzo is going to explain what investor state dispute settlement actually means in the real world thank you Lorenzo for coming on a bit later. Megan what is it that you find intriguing about the hidden handbrakes concept. I think for me it's just that it's really drilling down into something that's often said about why are we not seeing climate action at the level we need to see it which is, you know the stock response is often oh it's a lack of political will. But you know as an explanation as the years go by and the situation gets more urgent that just isn't a sufficient explanation it's not good enough we can't stop at that and basically just point to all these potential things that could be done, and the speed and scale at which they need to be done and just sort of throw up our hands and say well you know, because politicians don't see the benefit within the electoral cycle or whatever it might be. I think that, you know, we're also, you know, a charity funded news service and so that also gives us a little bit more leeway like the generation foundation to kind of take on some of these subjects in more kind of complex and nuanced way, because we don't, you know, we don't have to sell what we're doing. But so for us, you know, we were asking ourselves these questions. I think I hope on a daily basis about really know actually why isn't isn't something happening. And I see that this is a problem at the global scale is also a problem at the national scale, but also for individuals, which interests me too. And I think it's really helpful, especially after the pandemic, you know, want to change their lifestyles once politicians to act on their behalf and they're asking for this but you know still the talk during the COVID-19 pandemic was, you know, this is a window of opportunity for action to green everything we can't lose this, this opportunity and yet, you know, emissions are still going up. Consumptions is still rising. And, you know, we really need to ask these hard questions about why we need to ask them now. And so for us I think in our work it comes down to a few issues which are much simpler than the hidden handbrakes themselves but it's, you know, what what is it within policy that's stopping something happening. In the financial level, why isn't the money flowing, you know, are regulations wrong. The regulations actually working against what they should be doing also is there enough information going to the right people about a certain subject and also you know where is the cooperation that's needed that's lacking. And these are the kind of questions that we're looking for when we're reporting story and then sort of trying to show some of those things. And, you know, for example, I was just thinking it's good to have, you know, some examples of the type of thing that we're doing I mean just within the last couple of weeks, some of the hidden handbrakes that we're going to talk about a bit later. And we've seen coming up in our coverage for example the big debt problem faced by developing countries that's stopping the Mactorn climate which was exposed by the, which was very much in the limelight at the Paris summit for a new global financing path so we reported on that. Take India as an example we've had a couple of stories in the last couple of weeks one looking at how the way the Indian government was conducting its power capacity options was basically working to undermine the wind power industry which has had a really really tough five years or so in India. So we drill down into that and now the governments realises and is changing some of the rules on that. Another story we had was about the solar supply chain and in India where problems around certification and the way that the market is set up and government requirements for tenders is working against small suppliers in the solar supply chain, which if that isn't going to basically go to cause problems for India and meeting some of its renewable energy targets and then we published an unopered this week by the exponential roadmap initiative which I think is really trying to sort of scale up promising things, arguing that you know there may be trillions so there may be billions there may be trillions of dollars available to fund clean energy but there's a massive problem in the sense that there is not a fundable pipeline of projects, which this money can flow but by using machine learning and AI within two years you could basically prepare a $2 trillion pipeline of projects to for that money to be deployed. So those are just some of the examples of the ways that we're trying to kind of point to these issues and then some of the solutions but one thing I would say from a journalism perspective is that like exposing these human rights and and writing about them doesn't always make the sexy journalism either and it's quite hard to address issues such as the one Lorenzo is going to talk about but we have an ongoing explain on the energy charter treaty, which was born out by the fact that European countries started to kind of withdraw from this treaty so it's, you know, it's a tough, it's a bit of a heavy lift on the journalism front too but we're doing our best. Yeah you are doing remarkable work thank you Megan to you and your team and your institution it's absolutely vital work. Tom I'm going to come to you now if that's okay hidden handbrakes what excites you what are the opportunities. What's the potential. Thank you James. So, I think we're in a position where there are the kind of shoots of a, I suppose a new system that is aligned with the fact that we need to repair and restore nature that we need to live in a much more equitable way. And we need to do so in a way that is essentially around zero emissions, and that that is starting to emerge not fast enough of you talked about, but fundamentally there is a system in place now that is trying to protect itself, protect itself essentially from change where there are a lot of winners in that system, including, you know the shareholders of big fossil fuel companies, including investors around the world in different ways that are seeing the benefits of a kind of essentially carbon economy, and that there has been now for what I know a couple of hundred years and an entire mechanism in which to protect that. Whether that's through regulations or whether that's through the main way money flows or whether that's through legal structures and so on, and that actually just focusing on the small amounts of money going to climate action. And without really getting into the details of what is protecting that existing system, we're kind of missing the point. And so when every time somebody quotes and says well actually there's more money going into the green climate fund, or that there is more attention being paid to scaling up renewable energy what we're not doing is asking the question of what are we doing to weaken the support of a system that is fundamentally broken and is not tackling those environmental externalities. So I think the great thing about the hidden handbrakes concept and you know I want to make sure we get a language that can resonate in many different parts of the world acknowledging it's only English is to have a discussion about what are those hidden things that support a global order that is fundamentally damaging the planet and I think we're only just scratching the surface on some of those at the moment. So what I'm going to talk to you with me about, for example, certain types of accounting standards and the way in which we're running accountancy practices, we've talked about the way in which we support credit ratings, whether that's sovereign credit ratings or, or even down to how we class groups of people and the whole credit ratings agency and credit scoring and so on. The only way that's happening in many senses on the sovereign side is that it can be done by people sat in gentlemen's clubs in London discussing whether or not it's nice to go on holiday to a particular country now I'm characterizing a little bit but that's the that's the kind of nature and the reason why that's so important is because it radically changes the cost of of capital how much you know you can afford to invest in what the future looks like. I think in the few months that we've been talking about this the number of people who've kind of come forward and said, actually I can spot what these hidden handbrakes are from my perspective and actually there's some really scary stuff but unless you're in the details of it, you don't really see it. I think it's a really valuable place to be and having those conversations and raising them up. The challenge that we've got collectively as a group of people who care about this is how do you give them enough visibility and have enough mobilization around it that can actually do something to change it and I think what Megan's highlighting is super important saying is that you know not all of these are sexy stories in fact if they were sexy stories that have been told these are almost the opposite they're like deep code in society that you don't really get excited about but fundamentally are blocking and are there for a reason that they've been put in place whether intentionally or unintentionally to protect an incumbent system. Anyway, that's the reason why I think this is a fabulous topic and one where I'd love to get into the details of some of these but I'm acknowledging that there are many of these hidden handbrakes and I can guess that almost everybody on this call if they think about it would be able to spot one of those things in their work life or their personal life that would be actually acting against positive action on climate and nature, whether conspicuously or not. Thanks James. Thank you Tom, and yeah just just a very brief aside on the on the language point I did want to acknowledge that you know I recognize this is very much a sort of Northern European based panel and that as we reach out across the world with this sort of initial webinar we are seeking collaborators and the voices of experts from all across the world, particularly people in vulnerable countries to climate change who have the lived experience that we want to have the levels of power and wealth that exists so this is very much a sort of acknowledgement that this this panel this this community will grow and very much welcome participation from experts and communities all across the world thank you. In my Lorenzo before I come on to you I just wanted to come back to you around the collaboration point and the sort of the working within a system that's complicated and volatile and uncertain and whether you have any reflections on how how this community that we're building can sort of work effectively together to get the change we want. So, I remember sat in one of these tables of power in in New York James that you were referring to at one of a UN session where they got together the heads of several different organizations who were intending to be striving for a kind of a world essentially and asking the question of how can those organizations collaborate better to be able to create the movements that we need in order to tackle climate change at the speed and scale necessary. And I found that fascinating because somebody in that group said that if you think of it as a battle that the opposition are coming with a full Kalashnikov rifle and that we are trying to tackle it. With a plastic spoon. And in that regard, I think we need to acknowledge that there is a way of supporting that incumbent system that is both covert and less covert and incredibly well organized very well funded. And the fact that you've got a whole bunch of negotiators working on climate change around the world that are now funded by fossil fuel companies. And very directly so, and that you've got climate negotiations which are now becoming increasingly swamped by those fossil fuel companies. Then we know that we've got a significant problem. The only way in order really to be able to tackle that is by really radical collaboration around the world of those organizations that that can work at community level and around social movements to be able to disrupt that market create something different create the political pressure in order to be able to to throw the the windows open on some of those practices. But we need to be aware that this is now a really tough game. This is not a, this is not a kind of always knit nice that we all work on climate change and publish nice pieces of work and do community projects. There's a real battle out there, and I think partly the hidden handbrakes work is to say, let's at least expose what some of those support structures are for that, and do so in a way where we join together around that this is not just about one organization writing its latest insight into the latest problem that they spot. It's a genuine concerted attempt to build a campaign movement to tackle some of those underlying support structures and those underlying codes. I think for that what I'd love to do James and and and I know you've highlighted it already is to start to use events like this to think about how we can join hands both in raising those hidden handbrakes we need to raise the visibility of them. But we need to say what can we do next in terms of working together in order to be able to shift the structures of power around those things. So it's not just about visibility. This is also about an action agenda, the action agenda is only possible through numbers. And thank you Tom for helping us understand what a what a sort of systematic approach could look like. Okay, we're going to move on now to a illustrative example of a hidden handbrake that we have been working, particularly Lorenzo and his team have been working on for for many years. Lorenzo, do you want to take it away. James, really fascinating to listen to this conversation about just how many hidden handbrakes there are out there and how significant they are and also possibly how perceptions of their significance might vary depending on different actors where they stand. And yes, my role as opposed to discuss briefly one illustrative example of a hidden handbrake, very much building on some of the reflections from Tom about how legal structures support unsustainable systems. And I would like to talk about the system of international treaties that protect for an investment and treaties that also typically enable foreign investors to bring disputes with states to international arbitration instead of national courts. During public discourse the system is often referred to as ISDS, which stands for investor state dispute settlement, and this is a wording that came up already in some of our discussions earlier in the, in the, in the webinar. Now in Europe there has been a lot of debate about the energy charter treaty, which is one treaty that protects for an investment particularly in the energy sector. And so there has been so much debate because a multilateral treaty that has over 50 parties to it and as such it covers a particularly large share of fossil fuel assets. But I think it's important to remember that there are over 2,600 treaties that protect for an investment worldwide, mostly bilateral. There are many also original, often with developing countries, and that to date they have been well over 1000 arbitrations based on these treaties. Now the way this work is that they if the investor wins the case before the arbitral tribunal, the tribunal will typically award damages, and these can be very large amounts of money. So why does this issue matter to our conversation today. The energy transition requires governments to move away from fossil fuels, and yet worldwide enormous sums are invested in fossil fuels operations that are protected by the treaties. The research showed that at least 75% of all foreign owned coal power plants worldwide are protected by at least one of these treaties subsequent studies found that the treaties also protect a sizable share of oil and gas extraction projects, and preliminary estimates of the possible liabilities running the hundreds of billions of dollars. So we're talking big money, and concretely this means that if governments are looking to regulate a restrict or phase out fossil fuels, they may well face claims from businesses seeking damages. In fact, this has already happened, climate action in some contexts has already triggered ISDS claims. And even if there aren't formal legal proceedings as such, the threat of a claim could affect the negotiating outcomes between businesses and governments, for example around the timeline for a phase out in the terms of compensation payments and so on. So this can affect climate action in several ways. It can significantly increase the costs of climate action. First of all, secondly, it directs payments towards the polluter towards the fossil fuel companies that have been effectively driving the climate change and in doing that potentially diverting public resources away from other users in investments in the energy transition support to other groups that may be affected by the transition from a just transition perspective. Thirdly, and very importantly, the IPCC reports that came out last year, noted that because of the steep compensation bills that may be at stake here, that the treaties can actually make it more difficult for states to take climate action in the first place. So concern over compensation payments, concern over potential investor claims, I have already been documented to have slowed down progress, particularly with regards to the most progressive countries ambitions to end oil and gas exploration as part of putting in the climate change talks. So we as ID have been working on on this topic for a while, we have been working to generate evidence, evidence of the problem, its nature, its scale is different dimensions, but also evidence of possible ways forward that can possible responses look like to address the problems. And, and we've been feeding that evidence into policy processes at different levels, including multilateral reform talks that are happening just now in different contexts including at the UN. And the reason why we value the heat and handbrakes framing, particularly its emphasis on media work is the fact that there is is very important in order to build momentum for reform to reach out to a wider audience to establish broader relationships with a wider constituency of actors that perhaps I'm not so familiar with this particular problem just now, but we think they should be because of the way in which the system intersects and affects space for climate action so pushing the agenda forward is really about creating connections, creating alliances, and the outreach activities that are planned as part of this of this initiative are really helpful in that regard. Thank you. Thanks Lorenzo that's terrific and a great explanation of a very complicated topic and yeah fantastic work to you and your team for pushing, pushing on that issue. I wanted to take a quick pause because there are a number of questions coming through in the chat. The communities afford to compete with large companies in the market that dominate environmental harmful subsidies hidden handbrakes certainly one that we've we've we've we've considered and discussed and will will publish on in due course. The assumed discount rates in economic models which implicitly places a lower value on future lives versus today. The digital needs a GDP financial value if we don't understand how to value natural resources. The industry won't be able to understand the consequences of overuse vested interests. So people who are in roles which make decisions have benefited from the current system and will likely feel conflicted as a minimum. So we address that sense of misplaced loyalty and gratitude towards the system that's enabled this situation, and then another comment about vested interest and corruption. Politicians make more money after they retire into lucrative consultancies, which have a greater influence than the public very little success in anti corruption save for the ICAC in Hong Kong, which took a generation to do a cleanup. That's what they do around the corruption handbrake. Really interesting. Thank you for those questions. Megan, would you like to come in. Yeah, just to pick up on a couple of points that were made by Tom and Lorenzo and just to on this question of vested interest I think what's going on for example within the UN climate talks around conflict of interest and the presence of fossil fuel industry lobbyists and people who are sponsored by the fossil fuel industry is quite an is a key example of what Tom was talking about in terms of like the need to have numbers behind change and collaboration between different organizations. Now things work for example at COP 27 where there was a decarbonization day which was basically pretty much an excuse to get oil and gas people, industry representatives in the room and sort of chatting with governments, many of them African you were talking about more investment in fossil fuels, albeit perhaps abated investment in terms of like you know trying to capture some of the emissions or reduce the emissions intensity of oil and gas production for example. You know, there was this is this whole day where I sat in on a discussion between these industry executives and government officials from state run fossil fuel utilities and they were pretty much delighted that they were in the COP 27 talks and being able to have these discussions now, you know it's not my job to get into an ethical argument over whether it's better to bring people in or keep them on the outside, but the point is that there has to be transparency around this at least in order to be able to have an intelligent conversation about it and as journalists what what was very useful to us was to be provided with information the numbers of people who were in those talks who were basically lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry now this information was published by I think in the press and some other organizations like oil change international worked on, you know, doing this research, then they published the numbers around the start of COP and then they provide that to the media and then we can write about this subject that enables us to cover this subject to ask the questions and you know at the end of the day this is pushing towards some kind of rules and regulations around, you know, who is allowed to go be in the UN climate space and for example I think even just a couple of talks, campaigners were applauding the fact that now there is going to be a need requirement for attendees at the climate talks to publish their affiliations, right, and this is not maybe good enough from their perspective but this took years, you know, someone who's covered the climate talks for a long time I have, you know, many discussions with organizations that are pushing against this involvement of fossil fuel industry in the climate talks but it really takes it's taken a long time to get to the stage where, you know, this is even having some kind of rules put on it, just to show the huge nature of what has to be done as Tom was saying it can't be done in drips and drabs it has to be everybody who's interested in this subject working together. Thank you Megan and whilst you were talking a question came in specifically for you which is around from Richard Pala, thank you Richard. How can climate reporting be made more exciting and climate messages more effective. There seems to be a shortage of reports and whenever reports do appear, they almost never reached the most frequently read sections at least on BBC and Sky News, what's your thoughts on that. I think this is an ongoing discussion in newsrooms around the world, I think that you are seeing more and more climate change stories and reports, reaching the tops of the or at least getting into the news bulletins. I would say that there's, you know, it tends to go in waves. So, for example, when there are meetings at the end of the year then there's usually a spike in coverage around IPCC reports, and you know when there's a big international moment. And I think the difficulty is keeping it on the agenda in between those big moments of which there are, you know, more and more, for example from September through to COP 28 in Dubai there's going to be, you know, the climate summit, you and Secretary-General's climate summit, there's going to be big anti fossil fuel protests in September. You know, there are the media jumps on these things as good opportunities to talk about the climate change issue. So I wouldn't, I would say that things have changed. The question is, you know, how do you, in between times, you have to look for specific ways of telling the stories that maybe a little bit more human focused and issues that affect people in their daily lives. And, you know, just, just another discussion in newsrooms these days is mainstreaming of climate change coverage throughout business, sports, arts and politics so that, you know, it's not just a few climate change reporters sitting on their own in the room trying to persuade their editor that's a good, you know, that we really need to be seeing more on climate change. The move now is towards introducing a basic level of like literacy on climate science and climate change issues so that reporters who are on different beats from fashion to sport to whatever it might be are actually looking for those types of stories because, you know, this is something that's touching everybody in their everyday lives in terms of heat or floods or, you know, the impacts on people, air pollution, those types of things. So it's not that hard. And I think that if you listen and watch carefully and read carefully you will see that there's a change going on. Thank you, Megan. Okay, we're going to move to some other examples of hidden handbrakes. Grace, are you happy if I come to you next. In your title, the ESG myth that you might have another way of describing it. Please, please carry on. I'm sure that's much more catchy than anything I was going to share and stop me with this if I'm using jargon because this is one of the challenges is that it is a bit jargony and, and this is one that's probably, you know, is interesting in a way because I think it's an example of a progress and an example of getting some successes but also, you know, there's been some pushback recently so one of the things that we in the foundation, you know, I mentioned that we can fund some of the unsexy stuff. One of the things that we have focused a lot of time on over, you know, the past 10, 15 years is fiduciary duty for investors and this is all that means is just investors who run pension funds or major investors have an obligation to act in the best interests of their clients so they're not spending their money on yachts or their own holiday homes. You know, they have an obligation to consider the best interests of their clients and to consider all the risks and opportunities associated with investment decisions. And the reason why we find it really interesting is because in the early days of sustainable investing so in 2004 and five, you know, often when we would go to investors or pension funds and say, you know, actually investing sustainability, sustainably is the right thing to do, and also the lucrative thing to do so, so, you know, get on board and let's all do this and let's, you know, get money into sustainable solutions. And the answer would be, oh, well, that's really nice that lovely thing that you're doing and so great that you've got that side project but, you know, love ethical investing for you but we're real investors we have fiduciary obligations to our clients, and we can't consider all that other stuff, you know, environmental issues or you know climate change or human rights all that all that's outside the bounds of what we care about. We've been a long time and wrote a lot of reports and, you know, did some of this work and tried to really get people excited about fiduciary duty because what we found is that, you know, if you're an investor you have an obligation to consider all material risks and opportunities that are carving out environmental social and government governance risks as you know that are material to your investment somehow is actually it's a violation of your fiduciary obligation so in those conversations we were they've been able to say, you know, you're a fiduciary. You can't say that you're excluding these things and you have to consider them and so you're going to have to get, you know, skilled up on this you can't sit in an impact fund alone it has to be a core part of the mainstream effort of your business and we've seen this really change over the last 15 years and you know there's obviously headwinds in various places but one thing. A staff and the other day, it was capital group put out that 89% of investors now are incorporating sustainability in their investment practice that's mainstream normal investors, and I read a report the other day from 2011. So not that long ago really at least to me where Bloomberg was citing it excitedly that now 1% of its users were we're looking at the sustainability data on the Bloomberg terminals so investors 1% of all investors considered it, you know, 2011 and so the shift has been enormous. And that's as a result of people spending a lot of time with not just generation all sorts of people spending a lot of time trying to get people excited about fiduciary duty. And writing reports and getting together and doing some of this stuff but a sustained long effort did work to make this slightly boring topic kind of front of mind. So I'm very hopeful for for this effort and for accelerating that change much faster on some of these issues that have been uncovered and that you know I've seen coming through on the chat as well as really exciting to read everybody's ideas of hidden great. I think it's really nice to have a live example of one that's really worked. And, you know, we can, we can point at that as how, you know, revealing these hidden handbrakes can drive change changes in hearts changes in minds and changes in policy and procedures which is exactly exactly what the, what the campaign is intended to do. Instead of the one that are we were suggested in the in the notes for the event, Tom, I just wanted to knowledge the question in the chat around environmental harmful subsidies as a hidden handbrake and whether you were happy to speak to that one. Absolutely. Maybe let me just start I don't want to pour cold water on Grace's example at all. Absolutely not but I do remember very clearly from climate action week last year that somebody and I can't remember who had done had done a study looking at the extent to which of all funds flowing through the London system, all investment funds through flowing through London, what proportion now were actually taking account of the climate and environmental damage or benefits of that money. So that we got to about 40% last year. And so, yes, I think there's massive progress, but to think that we're in a situation now where of the investment flowing through the London system there may be 60% that is paying absolutely no intention. So I think we've got a lot of attention to the environmental damages seems to me still a crazy situation to be in so I think we've got a long way still to go. And then the question is about 40% is it genuinely having a positive impact or you just simply considering the environmental risks and so on so a lot of work to do on this. I think one of the hidden handbrakes is that we've got an awful lot of people in London sat in the city or in Canary Wharf, trying to make climate positive investments only on the basis of spreadsheet data. And not necessarily considering what the impact might be on the communities and so on that are actually seeing those projects on the ground. A long way to go on this. So then an environmentally harmful subsidies, just to put this in perspective right so we've got a target under the UN climate system that is about reaching $100 billion per year of money pledged essentially by richer countries to channel to poorer countries in order to be able to help them tackle climate change whether that's in terms of mitigation or adaptation and so on. So the target we've not yet been able to reach. So it's not been reached, just to put that in comparison just focusing on harmful agricultural subsidies. So subsidies going to the farming industry to support practices that are damaging the climate, five times as much each year, five times as much so you think that we're not even essentially tipping the balance so there's $500 billion US dollars each year, going to large scale farming companies not always but mostly large scale farming organizations in order to support the production of meat, or of damaging animal feeds and a fertilizers and so on. So that's just on agricultural subsidies itself. And then of course we've got fossil fuel subsidies. And I think some of the calculations are that by 2030 if we're on the current projection trajectory. We've got something like 1.3 trillion US dollars of money in subsidies being dedicated to environmentally harmful or climate damaging activities. Now I don't want to necessarily say that all of those are necessarily bad from a poverty alleviation perspective, but come on this balance here is really the wrong balance. And so I think one of the hidden handbrakes that we really do have to reveal is the fundamental nature on which those subsidies are being protected and supported. And to look at the political leadership and the lobbying groups and the vested interests as others have said in the chat that protects that type of system. Now if you're an agricultural entrepreneur or you run a big agricultural, you know, conglomerate, then that subsidy regime is incredibly beneficial, and you're not going to be voting easily to change that. And so I think James what I'll do is I'll just very quickly touch on the other the other component. So at IID we do a lot of work looking at sovereign debt. And so this is the, this is the amount of money essentially owed by countries to creditors who have lent the money or loaned the money in the past, and now they need to pay back. And again to put that in comparison. If you look at the 22 most indebted small island developing states, they're paying back 18 times as much in debt repayments as they're actually receiving in climate change finance, eight every year. And if you look at all developing countries where data is available, and you look at the total balance you're still seeing that much more money is going back in debt repayments than receiving in climate finance. And so though for those countries if you're sat there as a minister of finance, thinking about each year how do you spend and construct your budget. Some countries the first thing you need to do is put together put aside half of your potential expenditure that is going back to the creditors and just to give you a sense these creditors can be JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, multilateral development banks, Chinese owned banks and so on and that is the flow of money so rather necessarily of thinking about climate finance payments. So if you're Olaf Schultz, sat in Berlin thinking about climate finance and scaling that up. It's much more efficient if you just walk down the street or come to London or something with a bag of money and hand that straight over to JP Morgan. That's essentially what we're seeing we're seeing a recycling of that money, and in such a way where actually many of those countries now and this was really the focus of the Paris summit last week are very bitter about the situation. And actually, it's a problem not of their causing. They've been deeply indebted partly because of an extractive global system and of colonization and so on. And they're now in a situation where they simply cannot spend enough money to make the basic services to help the people in those countries, and in order to be able to do something to tackle climate change or protect themselves against the impacts. That's the really tough situation that we're in now. And so what's the root out of that the root out of that is that we need to radically restructure that debt component to give countries more space, more fiscal space more spending power to be able to tackle these things. And at the moment we're not really seeing an incentive around that because that's fundamentally where some of our pension funds are invested. So if I had a magic wand of anybody on this call of what they could do today to make a difference, it would be to go and double check where your money is in which bank account, what's that achieving. Where's your pension, what's that achieving in terms of where the pension fund is putting your money, and any other financial assets that you may have, let's make sure that we're not perpetuating a situation fundamentally, where we are putting the small amount of money that least developed countries and small island states have to tackle climate change, that that is not fundamentally supporting that system. So we've got a financial system globally that is really at the moment embedded as one that is, that is not allowing us to support climate change at the speed and scale we need because what do you do do you choose basic service provision for your people mitigation actions resilience actions. No your first choice has to be to pay your creditors. And in some countries this is well over 50% of the budget. So I'm just highlighting a set of hidden handbrakes here but and I'm not necessarily just wanting to paint the gloomiest of pictures, but it just shows you the depth of cooperation we now need to to try and tackle some of these things and I still don't think that there are wide enough discussions around this so they're on those particular ones I think the discussion is growing. The question is what momentum can it build and what can we start to, what can we start to see unwinding as a result. Thanks James. Thanks Tom. Really interesting and it's great to get the sort of the facts and the figures as well for just the sort of scale of the, of the challenges that the, the countries that have done the least to cause climate change are suffering. Megan I can see you want to come in. I'm just picking up on what Tom said about fossil fuel subsidies and this whole issue of a just transition, because I think one of the hidden handbrakes that you've identified is something called the unjust transition where policies that are basically, you know, supposed to be pushing forward with the green transition, end up penalizing certain groups of people who are often the least able to, to deal with, with the, with the disadvantages or they can be marginalized people who don't have a voice or. So, you know, when France tried to raise taxes on diesel during is during the Poland climate change talks and then that led to the gilet jaune movement and the yellow vest and you know whole indignation around or you're trying to push the burden on to ordinary people. And, you know, that's basically proved everybody that it's the way that you handle dealing with some of the hidden handbrakes, such as removing fossil fuel subsidies which is super important and you have to get that policy right if you don't get that policy right. So basically opening yourself up also to a very dangerous narrative which is being pushed in the UK, which is at the net zero transition is unaffordable, and that will penalize poor people and ordinary people allowing which, you know, to get away with everything and not co-opting the narrative, which I think is something that is this co-opting of the narrative is another potential handbrake. And is, is, is something that climate change denies a very firmly gotten bear radar as a way to slow down climate action. It's not just the hidden handbrakes, it's how you deal with the hidden handbrakes and how you develop a narrative around that which is super important as well, I think, and the media as part of that. Thank you, Megan. I'm going to quickly pick up on some of the, sorry, Lorenzo, go ahead. James, maybe just to pick up on some of the points also that are coming up in the discussion. It's great to see in the chat, lots of contributions from the participants, including examples of hidden handbrakes and I think there's a truly rich agenda really that is shaping up even so early on in the initiative. Also really important points being made also in the chat, for example, there was one point I saw earlier about the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to addressing these issues to take that systemic approach that Tom was talking about earlier. And, and I was also going to sort of pick up on some of the thoughts that Megan shared around the role of public pressure and public public mobilization really ultimately and the role that media complain facilitating that as a way to address, ultimately what complex political arenas with vested interests, power and balances, etc. And so in the example I was speaking about earlier on was certainly seen a shift in public discourse over the past few years, at least in connection with some treaties in the energy charter treaty, where you have a number of major capital exporting countries such as Germany, France, among others in Europe and several other countries also that announced their intention to withdraw from from the energy charter treaty and now an ongoing process within the EU to work out exactly how that can be addressed. And I think that this current situation would have been unthinkable a few years ago had it not been because of the extent to which this issue that seemed to be removed and technical and, and, and really hard to understand actually made its way in the public discourse and people really appropriated it and, and, and really campaigned and that's what really drove the change and I think if we are to see continued movement in that area. It's important to have both the technical analysis the technical understanding of what a possible way forward look like, but also an approach that allows politics to be addressed and that really involves against this notion of alliances and really people getting engaged with the topics. There was also one comment in the, in the chat earlier on about the challenges of multilateralism and it's too slow and should we look at bilateral initiatives or smaller groups and I very much, you know, the, the concern about the pace of progress in multilateral talks very much resonates with me as somebody who's involved or has been following some of those talks. I suppose again the, the, the topic I was illustrating just now shows the value at the same time of multilateralism because what we're looking at is a, is a, is a, is a, is a is a universe of 2,600 treaties and bilaterally renegotiating each of those is going to take forever and it's going to be very politically very difficult politically etc and so we think that there needs to be some form of multilateral solution or multilateral response that that in a coordinated way addresses the problem in a systemic in a systemic in systemic terms so acknowledging the challenges and frustrations with multilaterals but also seeing that really as an important way to address what is what is ultimately a systemic problem. Yeah. Thank you Lorenzo that's terrific and yes thank you panel for all of your all of your great examples. There's a couple of really interesting questions just to highlight them so the all too frequent lack of making the connections is shocking we have serious fires in the northern hemisphere with photos of smoke in cities but where is the linkage to fossil fuel accountability. We have a lot of GDP is a main success metric is a big handbrake. Good that the D growth movement is getting more traction now though. Really interesting one I think there needs to be a fundamental change in the human resources and recruitment process there's still too much emphasis on specialization cookie cutter experience and solid approaches in order to bring innovation and disruptive we need a more interdisciplinary mindset and collaborative approaches so that we can connect the dots and create partnerships to work together and there's a specific example about an indigenous leader being required to sign a non disclosure agreement limiting collaboration with other Canadian indigenous leaders on the issues being discussed in direct contravention of a of a UN DRIP guideline. So, as, as you have said as a panel and as the audience are highlighting there are all sorts of different ways that these hidden handbrakes play out. And the purpose of the platform is to have a shared place for all of us and your partners and your collaborators to contribute to those. And look at other contributions as well so we're planning on launching the platform. We commencing I think it's 17th of July. If you can sign up at the link that was shared in the chat earlier perfect thank you Juliet perfect timing. So you get notice as soon as that platform goes live and it's a very simple web based form shouldn't take more than sort of five or 10 minutes to complete where you are asked to distill your hidden handbrake concept into a sentence of a couple of 100 words or less describe whether it's an environmental challenge a social challenge or an economic challenge. So look at which of the protected characteristics that particularly burdens, if it's a social one, whether it's climate or nature, it's an environmental one and so on so there's a way of filtering these hidden handbrakes to enable ease of use for Yes, I sort of looking to mega I really like to encourage the investigative journalist community to use that resource to spark conversations, create ideas for stories, you know, enable you and your industry to follow up with those attacks to get quotes and dig deeper into the stories behind the headline in order that we're able to expose some of these these hidden handbrakes to the to the light. Thank you so yes please do please do sign up at that link that Juliet has shared in the chat. The final section of this event is an open discussion. So I kind of invite the panel to get ready to pipe up. I'm not sure that there's any questions in the chat that haven't been tackled yet but if there's any in there that anyone in the panel wanted to come back on. I do otherwise I have a question which is around what else do you think we can be doing to release these and other hidden handbrakes to progress with direction environmental and social justice and the one that's come through to me particularly are legal representation. So is there a way of, of, of engaging the legal community and you know, I'm aware of a lot of great legal firms working on social justice campaigns. And earth great, great suggestion from Bob and politics and how we engage the political community to take notice and participate in releasing some of these hidden handbrakes. I don't know if any of the panel wants to add to those or discuss those grace. So just to add on the, I think the legal community point is such an important one, at least in the, you know, from the world that we deal with a lot on the investor side you know lawyers are can be key kind of allies in in driving change and also, you know, real blockages in the system sometimes and, and often it's not the law that's changed it's kind of the circumstances around it that that affects the way that that the legal community might might respond. There's a great work at like net zero lawyers association. There's Commonwealth climate law initiatives there. There's a whole bunch of kind of legal groups cropping up and then in response to some of the challenges that that people investors in particular facing the US when it comes to investing for impact there's, there's a huge range of initiatives cropping up to actually try to get lawyers trained up in areas that maybe they weren't involved in before so climate lawyers understanding and investment lawyers understanding social and climate issues and I think that sort of somebody else mentioned interdisciplinary approaches but I think that sort of, you know, breaking down silos making everyone a climate, you know responsible for climate and social issues, not just a particular one nominated person affects all of these industries so yeah that's what I wanted to add there. Thanks so a plea from me for any, any lawyers in the audience please do make yourselves known and we'd be delighted to get in touch with you to to collaborate on this campaign. Panel any other thoughts on what else we can be doing to release these hidden handbrakes to progress swifter action on environmental and social justice Megan. I do think you mentioned it yourself James that it'd be great if investigative journalists could use the hidden handbrakes platform as for a starting point jumping off point for story ideas. The, you know, investigative journalism is, you know, where you're holding people accountable for a lot of these hidden handbrakes whether it's companies governments, other institutions in society. But I think you know the trouble is that most newsrooms often don't have the funding and resources to kind of put into these types of investigations which you know and really now taking off in climate space to be sure the other thing is that a lot of the work is being done by smaller investigative journalism outfits that are then collaborating with, you know, people like the Guardian, or ourselves or whoever it might be that have wider distribution platforms and I think you know that's interesting to look at the dynamics of that in terms of if there are any kind of philanthropists listening into this this call. This webinar I do think that it's getting more money, more resources enabled to pay for investigative journalism is important at this stage of where we're at on climate action because that is what is going to really expose some of the hidden handbrakes that we have and getting that out to a wider audience like I say, another trend that we're seeing in media is these collaborations between different media organisations so that each part of the media is doing the thing that they can do best to to push forward on on climate change action. It's key at this point. Thank you Megan. Yeah, fully support the support of investigative journalism. And people can do that as individuals or as or as organizations. I'm sure many of you do already. Tom. James I realized we're running rapidly out of time so I'll be super quick but there's people in the chat talking about the kind of legal concept of ecocide and that the ability for for prosecutions and we've also got the International Court of Justice process that is just about to start which is the judgment on whether there is a basis on which there's going to legal legal recourse for climate damages at a much greater scale and so on. And so my point being is I think there is, in that sense, the new system emerging is creating new tools in order to be able to to weaken that old system. The bit of the hidden handbrake here is that London in particular given London climate week has got heaps of law firms and heaps of lawyers who are employed to provide the protections for those people. Hundreds of lawyers who are working for fossil fuel companies and for executives and for for in these in these legal forums in which actually they're about defending that situation. And so my senses is is a set is what are the incentive structures that are sitting around those particular law firms and I think the incentive structures are you've got to meet your targets and that the highest paying client is the one you support to a certain extent. But are there ways in which we can weaken the kind of, you know, depth of legal support to those who are essentially protecting and benefiting from that current system. I think there's a lot of good work that's being done to expose which are those law firms that are doing that and I've certainly seen the league tables and so on, but I'm not necessarily sure how widely discussed it is at the moment about about those lawyers being a fundamental part of the problem and a focus of protests and so on but that really is one of those concepts which I don't think we see discussed as much as possible but a really interesting evolving, evolving area and I think the more we can strengthen legal support for tackling some of these the better and I think Lorenzo's highlighted the value of that already. But yeah, let me stop there. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. I'm going to wrap this event here. Thank you so much to Grace, Megan Lorenzo and Tom, but especially all of the audience feel brilliant participation in the event. I'm delighted that so many of you have stayed for the whole thing. And just to leave on positive notes, you know, be mindful of the great examples of change that Grace has given and that Lorenzo has given. I was very encouraged to see the advertising standards authority doing their bit the other day to avoid greenwashing so another industry there that we can, we can bring into the into the campaign. And yes, thank you to everybody. Goodbye.