https://ntur.org/tags/stories/ Stories en-gb Everyone Everyone © 2026 Everyone Sat, 06 Jun 2026 14:20:20 +0100 https://ntur.org/four-days/ Sat, 06 Jun 2026 14:20:20 +0100 https://ntur.org/four-days/ Structural changes in our global economy will soon provide an opportunity to reimagine how we spend each day. More leisure time is a red herring. Posts Stories <blockquote>
<p>“Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.” (Keynes, 1930)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Almost one hundred years since this quote, Maynard Keynes could have been right about the 15hr week. But let’s not think of the remainder as leisure time.</p>
<p>Last week, <a href="https://inequalitylab.world">The Inequality Lab</a> - a collaboration between the Paris School of Economics and the University of Berkeley - released ‘The Global Justice Report’ (<a href="https://globaljusticeproject.wid.world/">report</a>) which presents us a blueprint for a sustainable and equitable 21st century. It outlines a transition path from 2026 to 2100 to reconcile human development and equality within our planet’s limits. Almost beyond the content, I felt overwhelmingly positive towards the idea of a vision of 2100: the act of thinking about the next 80 years is a vote for the future. I imagined my children in the late stages of their lives living in this possibility. It was a powerful thought and there is much to debate and analyse in the report.</p>
<p>One of the concepts in the report - sufficiency - connected to Keynes’ idea of leisure time and it got me thinking about daily life in an equitable, sustainable future world. The concept of sufficiency is designed to help keep our natural systems in balance and move away from over-consumption. To do this according to the authors, the collective planet wouldn’t need to work (in the traditional employment sense) for no more than about 2 or 3 days a week. That would represent an average drop from 2,100 hours per year to about 1,000…which is not far from the 15 hours mentioned above. The implication for traditional economic measures, like productivity and growth, is thought-provoking and I get the sense the debate is really starting to gather momentum in academic circles. What I want to explore here is what happens with the time we <em>wouldn’t</em> be ’earning a living’.</p>
<p>The current state of work is well documented: global employee engagement has dropped to 20% (<a href="https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx">Gallup</a>), more and more people are wanting to transition to more flexible working arrangements. For the sake of debate, let us think beyond days of the week and let go of the current contractual and artificial separation between work activities and non-work activities we currently have. In this new paradigm, what would you do with 4 days in an average week if you didn’t need to ‘make a living’? To help you picture this possibility, I’d encourage you to think about how you might frame the answer. You might consider using the time for personal improvement, or for leisure. What about community? Or nature?</p>
<p>I’ve started to think of this in 3 overlapping areas. Firstly, resurrecting the idea that each of us is responsible for the strength of our society. We have tried to pass the problem over to other people to solve using our taxes and this has led to much decay in our relationship with governing institutions, other people, and our immediate environment. Civic duties could encompass our collective responsibility for national defence against both natural and and international threats. It could also encompass the investments we need to make in education, across all age groups, to help raise the standards of critical thinking and debate as well as key skills for a changing and volatile future.</p>
<p>Secondly, building the bridges to the people that live nearest to us. Increasingly isolated in digitally-focused existences, we have been ignoring the needs we all have to be connected and rooted to our neighbours and our neighbourhoods. Community means investing the time to be individually responsible for how we interact with, support and invest in our immediate surroundings and ecosystems (in the broad sense of the word, being and not being).</p>
<p>Lastly, taking care of ourselves is critical to help build emotional, mental and physical strength. And from that strength we draw creativity for our problem solving, empathy and tolerance to work together, and the fortitude and clarity to work with purpose towards ambitious goals. This is not only the time to exercise, read, socialise, but to also cultivate and prepare nutritious wholefood diets at home that would entirely revise the damaged relationship we have with food.</p>
<p>An approach to daily life such as this could be transformative in every way. Not just in how we spend a typical 24 hours, but by helping each of us to understand our connections to everything and everyone else around us. Trust me when I say it’s hard to ignore the consequences of your actions once you’ve woken up to the interconnectedness of everything around us.</p>
<p>For me, in my stage of life and with my interest in food and education, I would try and structure my ‘4 day’ time around:</p>
<ul>
<li>growing fruit and vegetables in community farming schemes</li>
<li>cooking and preparing meals</li>
<li>supporting local rewilding projects</li>
<li>civic and defence training to be useful in times of emergency, such as Britain had after WW2 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Defence_Corps">Civic Defence Corps</a>)</li>
<li>helping to support all levels of education in basic skills to support raising families and being a homeowner</li>
<li>volunteering on neighbourhood improvement projects</li>
<li>helping to organise regular community festivals to bring the neighbourhood together</li>
</ul>
<p>It would be easy to dodge this idea on the grounds that I’m working at ‘making a living’ for most of the week. I wonder whether it is not a lack of time, but rather a lack of priority and a lack of knowing where to start. Which brings us to how to get us started on this path.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.4dayweek.co.uk/">The momentum</a> behind the 3-day weekend has faced stiff resistance from the corporate sector and the governments unwilling to play experiments with growth and tax revenue. Events might easily overcome this resistance in the not too distant future as most societies face increasing automation and unemployment from traditional ’earning a living’ roles. Regardless of where you stand ideologically on the role of enterprise and commerce in society, I suggest we can no longer think of our daily lives as a simple 5 days ’earning a living’ with a 2 day ‘free weekend’ for everything else. Our communities and governments can play a proactive role in making the transition to a civic activity framework that is entirely more productive, sustainable and desirable for everyone. Let’s start the debate by <em>not</em> framing it as a 4-day leisurely weekend: we have work to do that’s more important than ’earning a living’.</p>
 https://ntur.org/financial-markets/ Wed, 19 Nov 2025 14:27:25 +0100 https://ntur.org/financial-markets/ Do Financial Markets help or hinder Nature? Posts Stories <p>In January of 2021, the Guardian ran a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/28/how-much-is-an-elephant-worth-meet-the-ecologists-doing-the-sums-aoe">story</a> entitled ‘How much is an elephant worth?’. In it, they described an attempt by ecologists and economists to come up with a working model to value nature. To many, this was either morally wrong, or absolutely critical in our attempt to properly price the dependencies and impacts we have on nature into the everyday things we trade.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The services of forest elephants are worth $1.75m for each animal, the International Monetary Fund’s Ralph Chami has estimated; more than the $40,000 a poacher might get for shooting the mammal for ivory. Whales are worth slightly more at over $2m, he also estimates, due to their “startling” carbon capture potential, and therefore deserve better protection. It is a highly controversial way of thinking about nature and Naeem, a professor of ecology at Columbia University, often relies on humour to explain it. It doesn’t mean that fungi are about to unionise and charge humans for decomposition services, he assures me. Although, if they did, it would get expensive. We would be in even bigger trouble if the trees started to charge us for oxygen.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Reading this at the time, I found the concept quite interesting. Today it seems we are betting the planet on it. Let’s start by unpicking the broader relationship between nature and the financial markets.</p>
<h2 id="the-market">The Market</h2>
<p>We have traded naturally-grown products on financial markets for centuries. Tulips were one of the earliest examples of an exchange-traded futures contract in 17th century Netherlands. On Friday 7th November, a random week day, the Chicago Board of Trade (one of the biggest commodity exchanges in the world) traded over US$650 million in futures contracts for wheat.</p>
<p>The relationship between agriculture and finance is well accepted today but our ‘extract and exploit’ mindset has led us down a very dark road and ultimately to the planet-wide mess we are in. The first step on this road was to standardize - i.e. to ‘commoditise’ - the thing being traded such that the price of the thing was consistently measured and transparent. It made trade easier.</p>
<p>Our entire global economy is based on a simple measure of what commercial value we can extract from the ground. For example, the price for a bushel of wheat just focuses on the business of farming and distribution. There is currently nothing in the price of the commodity to account for how the wheat was grown, what else was extracted from the field, what pollution was created in the process, nor the opportunity cost of something else existing on that patch of land.</p>
<p>Today, we recognise how important our connection to nature is. A field is not just a medium in which to grow some food. That field provides so much more ‘value’ than the price for a square metre of topsoil. For example, the value of the vital ecosystem it supports, its role in the carbon cycle, or the defense it provides to flooding.</p>
<h2 id="set-the-right-price">Set the Right Price</h2>
<p>Economists argue that the traditional model of supply and demand can work just fine to accommodate this broader definition of value: we just need to include the impact on nature and make it transparent in the price. In other words, make sure the price of the loaf of bread includes the cost of its impact on nature, across the supply chain from wheat field to high-street bakery.</p>
<p>What follows makes logical sense. The cost of today’s loaf of bread would now be exorbitantly high due to the use of fossil fuel-based fertilisers, poor land stewardship, monocropping, etc. Assuming we’re all rational consumers, the high prices would encourage us to seek out something that was beneficial to - or at least had a low impact on - nature, and would therefore be available at a lower cost and price. The market would work to channel investment and profit into the best nature-positive farms and distribution chains. The end result would be that the ‘pricing signal’ created an opportunity and moved the market towards more nature-positive solutions.</p>
<p>If we agree (and I hope we do) that this is a good outcome, why hasn’t this happened already? The first issue is how the real cost should be calculated: how does the market value the impact our loaf of bread has on nature? How does the supply chain of farmers, manufacturers and retailers value the dependencies they all have on natural systems (like water and land use) and resources (like fossil fuels for electricity and transport) to get our loaf of bread to the table?</p>
<p>I’m not just talking about wheat and bread. This theory is now playing out across every natural resource. For example, what is the true cost to nature of extracting a gallon of spring water by a drinks company, or digging up a forest to build a data centre, or bulldozing a jungle to grow a crop of soybean for animal feed. We are getting very busy figuring out the ‘right price’ to properly ‘value’ the impact of the extraction and pollution of all our planetary resources.</p>
<h2 id="do-the-right-thing">Do the Right Thing</h2>
<p>Much academic work has gone into quantifying the impacts and dependencies our commercial activity has on our environment. This work is expensive and time consuming but it is gradually standardising and working its way into the financial reporting and decision making at the company level, following the path already set by climate change. Note my distinction here between impact on nature versus impact on the climate.</p>
<p>The transparency created by financial reporting is seen as a critical first step for companies and industries to understand their starting position. From which, organisations can set <a href="https://sciencebasedtargetsnetwork.org/">science-based targets</a> and implement the projects needed to address the changes they need to make. Reporting standards are being upgraded, led by organisations like the <a href="https://tnfd.global/">TNFD</a> (Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures) and <a href="https://www.globalreporting.org/">GRI</a> (Global Reporting Initiative). Voluntary adoption of these reporting standards is <a href="https://tnfd.global/publication/tnfd-2025-status-report/">growing</a>, driven by policy change in the EU, UK, Japan and others.</p>
<p>Most organisations, however, are getting stuck when considering all the inputs from their entire supply chain. It is not just the retailer in the final step of the chain that is responsible for doing all the work to set the ‘right price’. Consider this simple example of a chair: a furniture brand wants to build and sell a new chair and ensure that the price of the chair captures the real price. They want to factor into the final price of the chair all the impacts and dependencies the making and selling of the chair will have on nature.</p>
<p>The manufacturer needs to work across their supply chain to understand every step, from sourcing timber and water, to the production and distribution process. The retailer needs to work out their impacts from marketing and distribution activities. Each organisation involved needs to assess and measure their impact on nature (through extraction, pollution of resources, change in land use) as well as climate (through emissions). From the work at every step in the production and sale of the chair, the brand can finally calculate the right price to charge for the chair.</p>
<p>How each player in this process does that is well researched and there are many frameworks to choose from. One popular framework is <a href="https://vimeo.com/1000403479">‘LEAP’ from the TNFD</a>:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Locate</strong> all your interfaces with nature across sector, value chain and geography, paying specific attention to natural systems or locations that are highly sensitive (for example, areas known to suffer from water stress).</li>
<li><strong>Evaluate</strong> your dependencies and impacts on nature by measuring the scale and scope of the effects your business activities have on nature (for example, extraction of resources, pollution, land use change, freshwater/ocean usage).</li>
<li><strong>Assess</strong> your nature-related risks by connecting the impacts and dependencies prioritised in the previous step to the physical risks (e.g. loss of a species), transition risks (e.g. misalignment between business operations and legal requirements) and systemic risks (e.g. the breakdown of an entire system and the financial instability this might cause). The assessment stage also suggests including the positive opportunities that may be available as you manage your risks.</li>
<li><strong>Prepare</strong> to respond to the nature-based risks and opportunities identified before, setting targets and metrics, and then disclosing the issues, projects and targets in your annual reporting in a structured, consistent way.</li>
</ul>
<p>It is a long, complicated process that comes at a cost. The availability of data from the supply chain is often missing or expensive to measure. Meanwhile, a competitor who operates in a different legal jurisdiction, or doesn’t see the moral duty to do this, will be able to offer a competing product at a lower price. Having done all this work, the brand in our example is now facing a dilemma: do the right thing and risk the financial viability of the business, or ignore the cost to nature just to compete in the market.</p>
<p>Can we reasonably expect all organisations - globally - to self-regulate such that they are bound to behave and price their products on a level playing field? If this concept of price transparency is a viable approach to restoring nature, why isn’t it having an impact already?</p>
<p>We are embarking upon massive investments in measuring, verifying and reporting our impact on nature to serve this traditional economic model. Is this process of commoditisation and transparent pricing even the right approach?</p>
<h2 id="change">Change</h2>
<p>Organic framing in the UK hit the mainstream with the creation of the Soil Association in 1946. Eighty years later, only ~3% of UK farmland is organic (<a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/organic-farming-statistics-2024/organic-farming-statistics-2024-united-kingdom">DEFRA</a>). The costs for the upfront investments, more labor for weed control, more land to offset lower yields, cost of certification and compliance - all add to a higher price in the supermarket. It has failed to achieve any economies of scale that might bring the prices down. The consumer won’t (or in many cases, can’t) pay for organic produce even though it is healthier and tastier. I believe we have the same problem with the price for nature. Consumers will simply not see the value of paying a higher price for something even if it is the right thing to do to live sustainably.</p>
<p>Companies have no real incentive to change if their market doesn’t want it. There is a popular theme in many sustainability circles about reframing the cost as an opportunity. In other words, consumers will seek you out and pay a higher price for your products if you use your ‘nature-positive’ credentials as a differentiation. It’s a nice idea, but it will only appeal to a minority of the market and this strategy will eventually flatline.</p>
<p>Who is left that can act as the catalyst for change? In order for this system to work, we need entire, global supply chains to properly measure our impact and remove or reduce our impact on nature where needed. We are currently pinning our hopes on governments and investors.</p>
<p>Governments are now increasingly aware that a significant share of GDP depends on resources that are highly dependent on nature (<a href="https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-04-29-nature-degradation-could-cause-12-loss-uk-gdp">Oxford</a>). Governments want to avert climate-induced crises and biodiversity collapse. They can see the risks, the urgency and the scale of the changes needed, but they are largely unwilling to implement the necessary - potentially anti-competitive - policy and tax changes required. Reluctant to intervene, they appear to be playing a game of matched funding: we’ll pay some of the bill, but only if corporate and private investors pay more.</p>
<p>Investors (I’m not making a distinction here between asset managers, pension funds, private investors, philanthropic foundations) are similarly waking up to the huge risks they are running against their own investments (<a href="https://makemymoneymatter.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/MMMM-Climate-Action-Report-2025.pdf">UK Pensions</a>). With no changes, they can expect significant volatility on their portfolios of investments. They too see the risk to their own balance sheets of extreme weather events compounding with biodiversity collapse.</p>
<p>How much would each of these players pay to reduce the risk of an unstable food supply chain, lost revenue or poor investment returns due to some catastrophic nature event?</p>
<p>The gap in financing required to protect resources and reduce our global impact is very large. The ‘<a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/cop30-what-does-the-baku-to-belem-roadmap-mean-for-climate-finance/">Baku to Belem Roadmap</a>’ puts the required global funding target at $1.3 trillion, annually, to support the climate finance needed by 2035 (of which nature projects are seen as a subset).</p>
<p>With so much to play for, it’s surprising how slow the conversations are going. Governments are moving too slowly because poll-watching politicians are trying to address both the political and the market forces at the same time without resorting to unpopular regulation.</p>
<h2 id="money-is-not-the-problem">Money is not the problem</h2>
<p>Investors are also moving too slowly, but unlike governments, the cause is not a lack of money. Their current view is that there are some key things in the investment landscape that are missing for them to really engage:</p>
<ol>
<li>A lack of supply of investable nature projects in which to invest,</li>
<li>A lack of legal protection for their investments,</li>
<li>A lack of transparency in the investments that would allow them to be properly priced and traded.</li>
</ol>
<p>The 50,000+ delegates at COP30 in Brazil are currently working hard to find solutions to each of these points. But I wonder if there is something else more fundamental at play here?</p>
<p>The investor mindset wants the best reward for the lowest risk. In other words, in the context of this discussion on nature, they need to control the risk and reward of their investment in their slice of nature. In response, the level of financial innovation in the investment market is starting to pick up to help make the market more attractive to investors. Here are a few examples:</p>
<ul>
<li>Bio diversity credits that work the same way as a carbon credit: an organisation buys a tradeable asset (the credit) to offset their own impact and claim nature neutrality. The tradeable asset is tied to a certified restoration or stewardship project somewhere else in the world.</li>
<li>Debt swaps to allow financial organisations to buy up existing loans so that the lenders in a country can offer new loans to support nature restoration projects.</li>
<li>Grants that governments can use to create ‘blended finance’ for lenders to offer loans at lower interest rates so that restoration or stewardship projects can be made more financially viable.</li>
</ul>
<p>With our current economic model and the increasing investment opportunities - can we expect the change we need, within the time frame we need it?</p>
<h2 id="bad-assumption">Bad Assumption</h2>
<p>To recap, the goal is as follows: as a consumer, the price I pay for a loaf of bread, or a new chair, should reflect the impact it had on nature. The expectation is that investors and governments will help fund the changes we need in our global supply chains. The market will reward those companies that make the necessary investments to reduce or eliminate their impacts and dependencies. Once that happens, nature-positive commercial activity becomes the norm. All we need to do is make it easier and cheaper for companies to start reducing and removing their dependencies and impacts on nature.</p>
<p>At the heart of this goal is a need to commoditise each ‘piece’ of nature so that it neatly fits into the economic model. Each unit of nature is transparent, easily priced and easily traded. Sounds simple, and that’s the problem: there is no such thing as a unit of nature.</p>
<p>The global <em>climate</em> crisis demands that we reduce atmospheric carbon and we have responded with a market to trade a literal ‘ton of carbon’. Whether you extracted that ton of carbon by establishing a forest in Australia, or from some new direct capture technology in Brazil - it doesn’t matter. One less ton of carbon in the atmosphere is a good thing for the planet as a whole. The ‘commodity’ approach makes sense.</p>
<p>But <em>nature</em> doesn’t work that way. A collapse in biodiversity in England can’t be offset by a rewilding project in Poland. Huge water stress in South Africa can’t be offset by water management projects in China.</p>
<p>There is no commodity called ‘nature’.</p>
<h2 id="global-stewardship">Global Stewardship</h2>
<p>Global trade and the financial market have - and will continue to - fail us. Even if we believe that the idea of transparent prices could work, there are no ‘players in the market’ with enough incentive to make the changes we need right now.</p>
<p>The idea of commoditisation surfaced recently in a <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paul-clements-hunt-b317a115_riodejaneiro-thailand-brazilianjujitsu-activity-7392076445495283713-8C_E?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAABb32oBrTq2go126xcyxuZpBh5tUtEtkOY">great debate on Linkedin</a> between <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-smith-green/">Jessica Smith</a> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-clements-hunt-b317a115">Paul Clements-Hunt</a>. Jessica is the Head of Nature at United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (<a href="https://www.unepfi.org/">UNEP FI</a>). She made a compelling argument against the commoditisation of nature. I’d like to paraphrase her key points below.</p>
<ul>
<li>The vast majority of the world’s remaining biodiversity - concentrated in tropical forests in the Amazon, Congo Basin and Southeast Asia - has been defended primarily by indigenous people and local communities. These communities, through traditional agricultural and conservation practices, and social or spiritual beliefs, have demonstrated higher effectiveness at preventing biodiversity loss than state-led or market-based approaches; not by conventional conservation and not by the markets.</li>
<li>Privatisation and conventional markets fundamentally don’t work well for managing natural resources. Commodification disembodies nature from place and community, assigning untethered exchange values that can alienate the very stewards who have protected it. Why put the fate of nature into the hands of traders, instead of the stewards who have a track record of success?</li>
<li>But that doesn’t mean we can’t use economic valuation as a policy tool to help us target incentives and prioritise conservation. But we can do this without treating ecosystems as privately owned commodities. Securing land rights for indigenous peoples is therefore the single most important action we can take for biodiversity. Incentive schemes can provide income to stewards - often those same local communities mentioned above - for maintaining or enhancing ecosystem functions, without privatising those ecosystems. We must incentivise the act of stewardship and the flow of services, not create property rights over nature itself. We can put a value on the services - clean water provision, carbon sequestration, or flood protection - and pay to maintain the forests and wetlands that provide these services. A forest guardian should be wealthy given her or his planetary contribution.</li>
<li>We don’t need to commodify the forest or river into a tradeable asset. It makes more sense to treat natural capital as infrastructure rather than as commodity. Just as most countries maintain roads, water systems, and energy grids as essential public infrastructure that underpins all economic activity, ecosystems continuously provide vital services upon which everything else depends. Infrastructure thinking emphasises long-term stewardship and sustained investment for public benefit rather than short-term extraction.</li>
<li>When we commodify, nature’s value is consistently underestimated or ignored until it’s too late - leading to depletion and ecosystem collapse. On top of that, the real risk is that ’the market may never give back a commoditised planet’ - exactly why we must get this right from the start. Once nature is fully commodified into tradeable assets, those with capital can accumulate ownership over our shared life-support systems. But when we recognise nature’s infrastructure role, we can integrate it effectively into policy, planning, and … finance. There is a positive role for finance for nature, but we need to be precise about the mechanism. We make money by serving healthy ecosystems and rewarding their stewards, not by owning and trading nature itself.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="my-conclusion">My conclusion</h2>
<p>In a perfect world, the consumer would pay the right price for goods and services. The money would be efficiently split across the supply chain and a healthy slice attributed - and paid - to the communities that look after our natural resources. For the reasons we have discussed here, there are too many obstacles to make this a reality in the current economic model and in the needed time frame.</p>
<p>Given the urgency and with this ‘nature as infrastructure’ view, we need to actively intervene in the market. In just the same way that we maintain and improve our existing <em>national</em> infrastructure, we need to allocate funds to protect and grow our <em>natural</em> infrastructure.</p>
<p>My conclusion is to reject the idea that nature can be commoditised, traded and ‘owned’. Valuing the impact and dependencies of nature on our commercial activity is an important tool in the reporting and prioritisation of nature remediation and restoration projects. But we should not allow financial markets to use this data to create and trade financial instruments that necessarily require a commodity/ investor mindset. We need our governing institutions to see this potential land grab for what it is and guard against the wholesale takeover of our natural infrastructure by the financial markets.</p>
<p>We therefore need to do a lot more to support governments to enact and enforce the needed regulation and tax regimes to get commerce and industry to start adapting to the new reality before the financial markets become the last remaining option.</p>
<p>Practically, this means:</p>
<ul>
<li>we <em>must</em> continue to push for legislated transparency in financial reporting across global supply chains.</li>
<li>we <em>should</em> change the basis of how taxes are collected to ensure any step in the supply chain that is extractive, polluting or impacting on the environment is taxed appropriately.</li>
<li>we <em>should</em> change the allocation of tax revenue away from polluting and extractive industries, to natural infrastructure projects. For example, to end and reallocate the current £18bn in explicit tax breaks and indirect subsidies to the oil and gas industry (<a href="https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/FINAL-Who-Pays-Who-Profits-May.pdf">Tax Justice</a>).</li>
<li>we <em>could</em> demand a percentage of everyone’s pension funds (the financial expression of providing for our future) are allocated to nature restoration. In the UK, just reallocating 1% of our collective pension assets could raise ~£30billion to fund local and global programs.</li>
</ul>
<p>The sooner we stop putting our hopes in discretionary private investment to restore natural systems under a failing economic model, the faster we can act to prevent collapse. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but swallow it we must. And while this change starts to take effect, we must - as consumers and voters - start acting more consciously about what we consume, what we are willing to pay for things and who we vote for in our elections.</p>
 https://ntur.org/rate-of-deforestation/ Sun, 19 Oct 2025 14:29:48 +0100 https://ntur.org/rate-of-deforestation/ We extract wood to fuel our agricultural and industrial complex without any regard for the broader cost to the natural balance and earth systems we rely on. Posts Stories <p>I love trees. I can stare at trees like other people can stare at sunsets. Seen from afar, they are like punctuation marks on the horizon. Up close, I love to marvel at their trunks: the curls, nooks and bridges anchoring everything to the ground. They reveal their history from every ridge and bump. Everything was a decision, accumulated over time into the majestic force of nature that stands before you. Every disease fought and won. Every harsh winter survived.</p>
<p>There’s an old idiom in English: “to miss the wood for the trees”, meaning to get lost in the detail you can no longer see the bigger picture. When I was younger, this confused me as I thought the logic of the idiom seemed reversed. I thought the ‘wood’ referred to the substance (i.e. the cellulose fibers and lignin). But, as I now know, ‘wood’ can also mean small forest (old English term ‘wudu’). That makes more sense now!</p>
<h2 id="cut-down">Cut down</h2>
<p>Today, I feel we are definitely missing the wood for the trees. We have completely lost perspective in our narrow focus to support our rapacious appetite for things. We only see trees as commodities, not forest ecosystems. We extract wood to fuel our agricultural and industrial complex without any regard for the broader cost to the natural balance and earth systems we rely on. At the turn of the last ice age, 80% of Europe was covered in a temperate forest. It is now down to 1%.</p>
<p>1%.</p>
<h2 id="value-of-a-tree">Value of a tree</h2>
<p>A tree’s offering to the ecosystem around it - from a scientific point of view - has been well established:</p>
<ul>
<li>Supporting flora and fauna in and around the tree;</li>
<li>Building strong mycorrhizal networks beneath the soil;</li>
<li>Stabilising the landscape against erosion and flooding;</li>
<li>Regulating the local climate;</li>
<li>Sequestering carbon and breathing oxygen back into the air.</li>
</ul>
<p>We know we need to reduce carbon in the atmosphere and a tree is one of the most efficient, natural ways to do this. All you need to do is not disturb a sapling and that oak tree will absorb 25kg of CO2e per year over its lifetime (4 tons over ~200 years). To put that in perspective, a return flight from London to New York costs about 1 ton of CO2e.</p>
<p>You would think that this knowledge would make keeping a tree in the ground a truly valuable thing. There are many programs at the local and government level to encourage everyone to plant more trees. Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) and Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) attempt to properly value the worth of a tree so that we can make better decisions before cutting them down. You would think that has slowed the rate of extraction down. It hasn’t.</p>
<h2 id="green-to-grey">Green to Grey</h2>
<p>In the UK, from 2001 to 2024, we lost about 6,000 square kilometers of forest (<a href="https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/GBR/">Global Forest Watch</a>). That’s roughly equivalent to the size of the county of Devon.</p>
<p>The beautiful, wooded Carpathian area in Europe is home to large ancient beech temperate forests and 78,000 hectares are protected as a <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1133/">UNESCO world heritage site</a>. Yet over 7,350 square kilometers have been lost in 20 years (<a href="https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-poland-stateless/2024/03/8ee7c77b-carpathian-forest-under-attack-report.pdf">Greenpeace</a>).</p>
<p>While in the vital and vast Amazon, 550,000 square kilometers have been lost over the same period (<a href="https://infoamazonia.org/en/2023/03/21/deforestation-in-the-amazon-past-present-and-future/">InfoAmazonia</a>).</p>
<p>Since 2021, forest loss has increased globally despite pledges to protect our green spaces. An area roughly half the size of England was cut down (<a href="https://forestdeclaration.org/resources/forest-declaration-assessment-2025">Forest Declaration Assessment 2025</a>) driven by subsidies for agriculture and other extractive industries. The imbalance between finances devoted to extraction versus conservation continues to grow wider. But the cause is not only logging and deforestation to make way for agriculture…</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Europe is losing green space that once harboured wildlife, captured carbon and supplied food at the rate of 600 football pitches a day, an investigation by the Guardian and partners has revealed. Analysis of satellite imagery across the UK and mainland Europe over a five-year period shows the speed and scale with which green land is turning grey, consumed by tarmac for roads, bricks and mortar for luxury golf courses and housing developments.” - <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/01/revealed-europe-losing-600-football-pitches-of-nature-and-crop-land-a-day">Guardian</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Tesla plant in Germany had to remove half a million trees near Berlin to build their gigafactory. A well-known example of European governments granting permission to the commercial sector to profit from forests and destroy natural green belt whilst paying lip service to protecting nature and climate.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Private financial institutions are further tipping the balance. A separate report released by Global Witness found that banks have made $26bn from financing deforesting companies since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015 – averaging around $7m every day.” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/14/dismal-health-of-worlds-forests-is-threat-to-humanity-report-warns">Guardian</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>While the situation gets worse, governments show no vision or resolve. In September, the EU has again delayed their anti-deforestation law for the second year in a row due to concerns about being ‘anti-industry’ (<a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-deforestation-rules-delayed-again/">Politico</a>).</p>
<h2 id="building-hope">Building hope</h2>
<p>We are eagerly awaiting the launch of the The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) at COP30 next month. The proposal is to raise a fund of US$ 125 billion in public and private investments to distribute US$ 4 billion each year using performance-based payments at an initial fixed rate of US$4 per hectare of forest per year. But the actual requirement is closer to US$460 billion a year to protect, restore and enhance forests at a global scale (<a href="https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?14117466/A-breakthrough-for-forest-finance-how-the-TFFF-can-deliver-on-its-potential">WWF</a>). We are a long way off providing the investment this needs.</p>
<p>So, while national governments prevaricate, what can we do?</p>
<h2 id="actions">Actions</h2>
<p>Firstly, if you want to make a meaningful impact, change your diet. The deforestation is largely caused by the agricultural demand to grow animal feed. So, eat less meat.</p>
<p>Secondly, if you need to buy a thing, go to that extra effort to find something made from recycled materials.</p>
<p>Thirdly, if you’re in the UK, back the Climate and Nature Bill (support <a href="https://www.zerohour.uk/climate-and-nature-bill/">Zero Hour</a>) which legally requires the UK government to limit deforestation.</p>
<p>Fourthly, plant more trees.</p>
<p>The business of offsetting carbon through planting trees is now well-developed. I personally don’t subscribe to offsetting as a long term strategy: it doesn’t change behaviours. If you want to reduce your carbon footprint, consume and travel less. Paying your debt in trees seems only a short-term fix. It has also resulted in many scams chasing easy, well-intentioned money that does not result in new trees being planted.</p>
<p>Whatever your reason - do it: plant a tree. In your garden. Wherever you can. If you have the money and can sponsor tree planting around the world, here are some platforms that seem to be reputable although I can’t personally vouch for any of them (yet).</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>Rewilding in the Scottish Highlands: <a href="https://treesforlife.org.uk/support/plant-a-tree/">Trees for Life</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Extending broadleaf woodland across the UK: <a href="https://www.9trees.org/our-shop">9Trees</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Online platforms to support global projects:</p>
<ol>
<li><a href="https://onetreeplanted.org">One Tree Planted</a></li>
<li><a href="https://terrapass.com">Terrapass</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.ecosia.org/">Ecosia</a></li>
<li><a href="https://eden-plus.org/">Eden Plus</a></li>
<li><a href="https://tree-nation.com/">Tree Nation</a></li>
</ol>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Do you know of any others that we can add to the list? Do you have personal experience of any of these platforms directly?</p>
<p>One last recommendation: read ‘The Hidden Life of Trees’ by Peter Wohlleben (<a href="https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/96361617/the-hidden-life-of-trees/peter-wohlleben/">ebooks.com</a>). Discovering how little we know about trees blew my mind. It makes protecting these glorious, living beings that much more personal.</p>
 https://ntur.org/surviving-the-change/ Wed, 15 Oct 2025 14:32:13 +0100 https://ntur.org/surviving-the-change/ Our civil, political, legal and technological landscape will change significantly over the next several years. How do we approach this positively? Posts Stories <p>Reading the Sunday news and I noticed another ‘what’s going on!?’ article in the editorial section. This week, it was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/12/france-crisis-political-faith-belief-democratic-world-vanishing">a piece by Simon Tisdall in the Guardian</a> relating the political stalemate in France to the general feeling that democracy is under threat. As Westerners, let’s not feel persecuted here: everyone is feeling threatened by global wealth inequality, political instability, nature and climate collapse, the development of AI. As I’ve written before - history has much to teach us about how society reacts to threats.</p>
<h2 id="the-history-lesson">The History Lesson</h2>
<p>I believe our entire civil, political, legal and technological landscape will change significantly over the next several years. This is not meant to be provocative nor doomed. I believe this because it has happened many times before, for the same reasons as today. The threats we feel will drive hate and intolerance into the open arms of nationalism and isolation. Greedy people will take advantage and authoritarianism will rise. Groups split by wealth, ideology, or resources will be quick to take up arms over their disagreements.</p>
<p>Whatever the specifics, societal change is inevitable and the disruption it is causing - and will cause - couldn’t be happening at a worse time. The Planet needs us focused on changing our behaviour to reduce extraction and over-consumption. Many of us in the ‘restore the Planet’ group feel angry and betrayed, adding more fuel to the hate and intolerance. How do we choose to move forward?</p>
<h2 id="my-responsibility">My Responsibility</h2>
<p>The consequences of losing hope will result in some pretty bad outcomes. I want to join with others who believe that reducing the pain and suffering of all living things over the next decade is our primary purpose now. There are many actions we must take, but 3 stand out to me as immediately necessary:</p>
<ol>
<li>Support leaders who want to help negotiate equitable change without bloodshed, recognise them as the ones who don’t talk about blame.</li>
<li>Get off social media entirely; regardless of the platform used, the misinformation drives us apart and ramps up intolerance. (Need more proof? Watch this excellent <a href="https://youtu.be/CYlon2tvywA">Veritasium video</a> (starting at 16:59min in if you’re pushed for time) explaining the impact social media has on our behaviour under the spotlight of game theory)</li>
<li>Find at least one reputable news source that provides high-quality, independent journalism. It’s an expensive business to provide properly fact-checked information written by professionals who care about the truth unencumbered by vested commercial interests. Pay for it directly, with real money. We will be in serious trouble if it dies.</li>
</ol>
<p><strong>Our children’s ability to lead in 10 years time with more respect of the natural balance, starts today.</strong> I believe a robust appreciation for the rule of law, journalism, education and community-level accountability is a great place to start. Our role is not to preserve a way of life or an ideology, but to help prepare the following generations to live in harmony with our environment. That’s why I want to stay focused, committed and positive.</p>
<h2 id="staying-positive">Staying Positive</h2>
<p>There are many ways to stay positive and the sensible ones start with accepting the reality of our situation1:</p>
<ul>
<li>changing our behaviour will take more time than we have,</li>
<li>technology can not save us,</li>
<li>we will not be able to avoid collapse of some key earth systems.</li>
</ul>
<p>Breathe. This is not defeatist. I can accept and move forward, with clarity. I would suggest that accepting reality is a healthy way to get inspired and motivated into action if you truly understand what is important and urgent.</p>
<p>I was looking for something action orientated to help lay this out. I borrowed an easy framework - SPIRE - from Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar’s work in the field of Positive Psychology. I think it can be useful in helping to frame daily life and remain invested in our future, however the events play out.</p>
<p>Here are some possible definitions for the SPIRE acronym:</p>
<ul>
<li>(S)piritual - cultivating a sense of alignment with a greater good</li>
<li>(P)hysical - ensuring the body supports the mind and spirit</li>
<li>(I)ntellectual - finding opportunities for mental growth and engagement</li>
<li>(R)elational - strengthening social support systems</li>
<li>(E)motional - accumulating positive experiences to sustain positive energy</li>
</ul>
<p>I then tried to make this actionable, like I was planning to run a marathon or learn something new. In other words, start small with deliberate, daily intentions. Since the health and beauty of nature is my focus, I crafted my own plan with that objective in mind. Your plan - if you give this a try - will obviously be different and more personal to you.</p>
<p>Here’s how: for each dimension in SPIRE, consider these 5 things:</p>
<ol>
<li>Objective: what do I want to achieve?</li>
<li>Exercise: how will I cultivate a daily habit?</li>
<li>Recovery: when and how do I need to reflect and consolidate?</li>
<li>Feedback: who can I approach for guidance, inspiration or to help solve issues?</li>
<li>Gratitude: who is supporting me and how can I support them?</li>
</ol>
<p>Mine looks like this, and - as you will see - it is still a work in progress. If you have ideas and feedback on this approach, I’d love to hear them.</p>
<table>
	<thead>
			<tr>
					<th>SPIRE</th>
					<th>Objective</th>
					<th>Exercise</th>
					<th>Recovery</th>
					<th>Feedback</th>
					<th>Gratitude</th>
			</tr>
	</thead>
	<tbody>
			<tr>
					<td><strong>Spiritual</strong></td>
					<td>Better understand my place in nature</td>
					<td>Meditate for 45 minutes each day</td>
					<td>Solo walk in my favourite wood once a week</td>
					<td>My collection of books that inspire me</td>
					<td>My son</td>
			</tr>
			<tr>
					<td><strong>Physical</strong></td>
					<td>Stay out of the hospital for the next 20 years</td>
					<td>Run (4x800m) and do at least 3 strength exercises each week day</td>
					<td>Eat 100g plant protein each day</td>
					<td>Not sure yet!</td>
					<td>My wife</td>
			</tr>
			<tr>
					<td><strong>Intellectual</strong></td>
					<td>Get nature risks and impacts into everyday decision making</td>
					<td>2 Hours of self-learning and daily study on EIAs, nature disclosures and project financing</td>
					<td>Seek out people and sources of inspiration from their work in nature</td>
					<td>Build a brain trust of nature leaders in the UK</td>
					<td>My mentors</td>
			</tr>
			<tr>
					<td><strong>Relational</strong></td>
					<td>Support my local community</td>
					<td>Join 1 local ‘sustainability’ event per month</td>
					<td>Support local organic veg and fruit growers</td>
					<td>Develop stronger friendships from these groups</td>
					<td>My daughter</td>
			</tr>
			<tr>
					<td><strong>Emotional</strong></td>
					<td>Help others live with change in a more positive way</td>
					<td>Research and write about 1 positive emotion each week</td>
					<td>Not sure yet!</td>
					<td>My wife</td>
					<td>My daily mantra</td>
			</tr>
	</tbody>
</table>
<p>Now the hard part: sticking to it everyday! The lesson I’m learning in my middle years is that positive attitudes are the result of daily habits.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="a-personal-mantra-of-affirmation">A Personal ‘Mantra’ of Affirmation</h2>
<p>(Plagiarized over the years from many more impressive people than I)</p>
<p>As I breathe in, I feel alive.</p>
<p>I breathe out, I smile at this moment;</p>
<p>I am living healthily,</p>
<p>I am loved,</p>
<p>I love.</p>
<p>●</p>
<p>As I breath in, I feel present.</p>
<p>I breathe out, I smile at this moment;</p>
<p>I am living simply without waste and clutter,</p>
<p>prioritising what is important,</p>
<p>making time for myself.</p>
<p>●</p>
<p>As I breathe in, I feel connected.</p>
<p>I breathe out, I smile at this moment;</p>
<p>I am finding joy,</p>
<p>and compassion,</p>
<p>with all things.</p>
<hr>
<h3 id="footnotes">Footnotes</h3>
<ol>
<li>If you want to lean into this idea of acceptance, take a read of ‘Breaking Together: A Freedom-loving response to collapse’ by Jem Bendell (2023).</li>
</ol>
 https://ntur.org/future-cost/ Wed, 17 Sep 2025 14:36:45 +0100 https://ntur.org/future-cost/ How does the UK government prioritise major initiatives to do with AI? Posts Stories <blockquote>
<p>“Bain & Company, a global business consultancy, said on Monday that AI and datacentres could account for 2% of global emissions and 17% of industrial emissions by 2035, with the impact highest in countries where fossil fuels still dominate power generation.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/15/google-datacentre-kent-co2-thurrock-uk-ai">Google’s huge new Essex datacentre to emit 570,000 tonnes of CO2 a year</a> (15 Sep 2025)</p>
<p>How does the UK government prioritise major initiatives to do with AI?</p>
<h2 id="the-state-of-decision-making">The state of decision making</h2>
<p>I asked Google Gemini to run a research report for me on all the current AI and data centre investments and projects in the UK. Yes, I’m aware of the irony here (but it saved me 4-5 hours of research).</p>
<p>The actors:</p>
<ol>
<li>The UK government: trying to build and harness the UK’s AI capabilities to unlock economic growth, resilience and enhance UK national security;</li>
<li>Tech companies: mostly US-based, unaccountable behemoths who don’t pay their taxes and are rushing headlong into creating an uncertain future for us all, because of some notion of (a) acting rationally, (b) being first, (c) maximising shareholder value, (d) world domination at any cost;</li>
<li>Us, the general UK population: starting a decade of disruption and chaos at the very heart of daily life, the likes of which we have never seen as a society.</li>
</ol>
<p>The opening scene:</p>
<p>An island off the coast of Europe, once a great empire. Now the 6th largest economy in the world but sliding (falling tax receipts and economic activity) and with a major debt crisis looming (unable to support a ballooning social welfare bill). How will the political leadership of the UK government court investment from large tech to support its reform plans and stay relevant in the age of AGI? How will tech companies find enough land, power and resources to feed their hungry AI models?</p>
<h2 id="lack-of-transparency">Lack of transparency</h2>
<p>The answer - it seems - is to close your eyes and jump. Is the UK building its own future or merely hosting the infrastructure of a foreign power? My concern - along with many others - is the complete lack of transparency that goes into these decisions. What trade-offs have been made with respect to the long term costs of supporting these gigantic furnaces and for what good?</p>
<p>Quoting the Gemini research report:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In December 2024, the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-planning-policy-framework--2"><em>National Planning Policy Framework</em></a> (NPPF) was revised to explicitly support data centres and introduce a new “grey-belt” designation for previously developed land within the protected green belt, making it easier for infrastructure projects to gain approval. Furthermore, major data centre projects can now opt into the <a href="https://national-infrastructure-consenting.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/"><em>Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects</em></a> (NSIP) regime, which allows them to bypass local planning authorities and have their applications decided directly by the Secretary of State.*</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>This top-down approach has triggered significant local opposition and legal challenges. [ed: ex Deputy Prime Minister] Angela Rayner’s decision to overrule local council rejections and grant permission for the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c707k5wneygo"><em>Woodlands Park project in Buckinghamshire</em></a> is a case in point, citing “employment benefits and the lack of suitable alternative sites” as her rationale. This ministerial intervention has been met with a landmark legal challenge from the non-profit groups <a href="https://www.foxglove.org.uk/"><em>Foxglove</em></a> and <a href="https://www.globalactionplan.org.uk/"><em>Global Action Plan</em></a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Their lawsuit argues that the decision was made unlawfully by bypassing a legally required Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and by irrationally attributing climate benefits to a project that would use an immense amount of power. The outcome of this legal challenge will be a critical test case for the government’s new planning policies and will set a precedent for how future data centre projects are approved.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="take-action">Take action</h2>
<p>If you agree that we need…</p>
<ul>
<li>more transparency on the long term costs and benefits, and</li>
<li>to perform a comprehensive full environmental impact assessment (EIA) and minimum due diligence on the climate and nature impact,</li>
</ul>
<p>…then head over to Foxglove (<a href="https://www.foxglove.org.uk/campaigns/keir-starmer-no-more-tech-giveaways-to-trump/">sign their petition</a>) and Global Action Plan (<a href="https://www.globalactionplan.org.uk/news/global-action-plan-and-foxglove-launch-legal-challenge-against-government-decision-to-force-construction-of-a-hyperscale-data-centre">subscribe to their updates</a>).</p>