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Category: Features

  • An interview with divorce lawyer Jeremy Levison about his office art collection

    Christopher Jackson meets divorce lawyer Jeremy Levison, the co-founder of Levison Meltzer Pigott, and finds the art collector on top form

    If I were starting out my legal career again, I’d be a divorce lawyer. But I wouldn’t be doing it specifically for the pay, or for the ringside seat on marital breakdown. I’d be doing it with a more specific intention: I’d be aiming to work in the offices of Levison Meltzer Pigott.

    There again, I’d have a particular reason in mind, other than the quality of the firm. This, incidentally, is beyond question. Jeremy Levison and Simon Pigott (and later Alison Hayes) have been a regular fixture among lists of top family lawyers since founding the firm – their partner Clare Meltzer sadly died in 2003. Even so, I’d be going there for the art.

    Many workplaces have fine art collections. One thinks particularly of Deutsche Bank (‘the art collection probably keeps the bank afloat for liquidity,’ says Levison), and I recall stumbling out of a meeting at UBS once to be standing in front of a sea of Lucian Freud sketches. But Levison’s collection is different.

    For one thing it’s personal. It’s also part of a smaller business and so feels more special. So does he paint himself? “At school, I had no artistic ability whatsoever,” Levison tells me. “A couple of years ago, I went on a two-day oil painting class in Sussex. I absolutely loved it. However, the experience convinced me not to give up the day job.”

    So when did he first start collecting? “It started in the 1970s. I met a chap who was doing prints; he had created a print and I liked it so I bought it. The next major purchase was in 1979. I had a broken heart at the time and there was this beautiful painting of a woman by an artist called ‘Molinari’ in a very ordinary shop window in Rome. That day my worldly wealth was 32 pounds, and this cost me 29 pounds then. I couldn’t resist it, and I still love the work to this day.”

    Over time, art collecting became an aspect of travel. His full success as a solicitor was in the future, and at that time he couldn’t have begun to realise how his collection – which now stands at around 500 pieces – would expand. “Whenever I went away anywhere I would buy a piece of art as the souvenir from that trip,” he recalls. “It just sort of went on from there. I was very fortunate, in that I became friends with someone who came into the office from off the street. He wanted to change his name from Christopher Holloway to Christopher Bledowski. He was not able to pay me, but he gave me a drawing. He was very influential in introducing me to various artists and the infinite creativity of the art world.”

    Bledowski is an intriguing figure in his own right and deserves more attention. Bledowski would kill himself in Switzerland some time later, and Levison maintains that the quality of the work, which he has come to appreciate ever more over the years, might well have led to world fame.

    Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Case

    But Levison’s art collection is a legacy of sorts for Bledowski. In time, Levison joined the firm Collyer Bristow and his art collecting continued. “We had all these bare walls,” Levison recalls, “and we had lots of artistic clients.  I thought to myself, “Well, why don’t we give the clients an art exhibition on our walls. We did and it was great fun.”’

    The idea of a more formal art gallery at Collyer Bristow was born. This was based on a belief that there is far more talent in existence than the art market – always caught up in the almost random anointing of the ‘next big thing’ – has time to recognise. In fact, Levison regrets the notion of the art market, preferring to talk instead about the art world. “The art world has morphed into the art market,” he explains. “I have a lot of time for the art world, but I don’t worry about the art market.”

    J. Bratby, Still Life

    It’s this essentially generous estimate of the talents of those who aren’t famous – or in some cases, aren’t famous yet – which informs Levison’s approach to buying art. “I love living with art, so it’s never worried me if a piece becomes valuable or not. If it does, that’s an added bonus, but if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter in the slightest because of the joy of living with it.”

    There is always generosity at work in Levison’s collecting. “At Collyer Bristow, I thought, ‘Well, we’ve got an acre of wall space here, and within 100 miles of London you’ve got probably 5,000 artists of real talent. Let’s do something to put them together.” The resulting space was a great place to work, and it began to alter the lives of clients and employees. “From an initial sort of quixotic curiosity among the members of staff, suddenly they all became more involved and began to look forward to the various shows. For instance, we had this young secretary and she began to take an interest. There came a time when she found herself needing to make a choice between whether to go on holiday for two weeks in southern Spain or whether to buy this little sculpture. She chose the sculpture. That sculpture over the years will have given her so much more joy than those two weeks of Sangria-fuelled sunshine would have done.”

    For Levison, art continues to be a no-brainer. “At some restaurants in London you can go out to dinner with four of you and it’ll easily cost you £1,000 and we all know how that ends up the next day. Or you can go to any number of artists, and buy any number of works for up to £1,000, and enjoy them forever.”

    So has the pandemic altered his approach to collecting? “Well, the one thing I did do was to buy a much larger house in order to have more wall space. The problem with my collection is that as it’s grown so has my ability to display it, so I lend a lot of it out.”

    I mention that my first stop in New York is always the Frick Collection, just as my first stop in Cambridge is always Kettle’s Yard. Would he ever consider a Levison Collection somewhere in the UK? “I mean my collection is very modest compared to those. But I own this building down in Bermondsey and I wonder whether at some point that might become a home for the collection.  I think my collection is an example that quite a lot can be achieved by someone who doesn’t have a great deal of money.”

    It certainly does. I recall my own training at Stevens and Bolton LLP in Guildford – a perfectly decent firm but notable mainly for its blank walls. To some trainees, especially if you’re not sure if you want to be a lawyer, life at a law firm can seem like the end of the world. I say I hope the staff realise how lucky they are. Levison replies: “I think they do. And the clients love it as well. It gets constantly talked about, and a lot of clients ask for tours around the gallery.” Levison also concedes that it can be ‘quite a useful PR exercise because we can do evenings where outside organisations come in, and I can talk about how the collection came about.”

    A. Eyton, The Grotto, Lourdes

    And of course, when you’re getting divorced it must be something to see such a collection on the walls – to know, in effect, that there are other narratives beyond your own, especially if the divorce is contentious.

    Levison laughs. “Yes, I think coming to see your divorce lawyer is ten times worse than going to the dentist. It’s the moment when you’re admitting that your marriage is definitely over. I often think of myself as being, to a certain extent, a doctor. Some just can’t think about anything other than their predicament. But for others, the art collection is a relief – it’s something else to talk about.”

    Conrad Romyn, The Last Supper

    I’ve done the tour many times with Jeremy, but I am always ready to do it again. I happen to know that some of the best works – the Rose Wylies, a Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and a truly wonderful Ollie Epp are now at his new house. But the disappointment of that can easily be met by the fact that what’s here is still remarkable. There’s an Andrew Marr over a photocopier (“I’m not sure how good he really is, but I like it”), a wonderful picture by Anthony Eyton called “Our Lady’s Grotto at Lourdes”, a superb Still Life by John Bratby, various Eileen Coopers, a host of Stanley Spencer drawings, a Last Supper by Conrad Romyn and many, many others.

    With the possible exception of Spencer, Bratby and Cooper, who feature in most surveys of 21st century art, all the artists here deserve more recognition – but each has also met with a superb champion in Levison. As always I return out into the street, not exactly regretting my decision to leave the law, but thinking that things might have turned out differently had I had the good luck to train at Levison Meltzer Pigott.

  • Enness Global founder Islay Robinson on his remarkable career in the UHNW mortgages space

    By Finito World

    The first thing to learn before you talk to Islay Robinson – the brilliant founder of Enness Global, a finance and mortgage brokerage firm with a rarefied client base – is how to pronounce his name. “It’s Isle-a,” he says, generously waving away my faulty pronunciation. “Don’t worry, it happens about a thousand times a day.”

    If Robinson has had any headwinds from his difficult-to-pronounce first name then he hasn’t let them affect him. Enness Global is a remarkably successful business which handles only the very high-end mortgages, for an international client base. I say that I thought the very wealthy mightn’t need mortgages. Robinson smiles: “A lot of people think that, but it’s a misconception. The thing which really drives us is fixing problems for our clients. Often, with the kind of people who come to us, it’s not that they so much want the financial instrument that comes with the house, it’s that the mortgage enables them to do something.”

    So what might that be? Robinson continues: “They might wish to buy a house, start a business, or make some investments, and the mortgage is the thing which allows them to do that.”

    So how did Robinson find his way into the field? He had, he says, an unpromising education. He grew up at first in Islay in the west Hebrides – where he gets his name from – but when his parents separated when Robinson was eight, he was suddenly presented with the reality of a state school education in London. “It was quite a culture shock; I think our school was the first in London to have a metal detector,” he recalls.

    It’s a testament to his resilience and his character that he found a way forward, attending a college in Kingston to do his A-Levels. “University wasn’t a concept which was ever discussed at home.” He subsequently attended Sheffield Hallam (“it was just a general business course which didn’t really have a purpose to it”), and then studied law at the University of London.

    But crucially, although he was doing well, he took a job in Foxtons in Chiswick at the same time. Speaking in the aftermath of not only the Osborne tax hikes during the David Cameron administration, but the hits to London property which have attended both Brexit and Covid, you have to squint to remember what an exciting time it was for the industry. “In those days if you wanted a mortgage you just had to ask for one,” Robinson recalls.

    There was little regulation, and the market was booming. Robinson had happened on his vocation. “I had the option of being a good lawyer in a good firm – or maybe something a bit less exciting like a conveyancer – or this industry which was already exciting and earning me an income.”

    He chose the latter, though the law has been helpful to him since. “The law is hidden to a lot of people, but the law underpinning contract and the relations between people – that’s the framework everything sits on,” he explains.

    To begin with Robinson accrued experience at Foxtons and Alexander Hall in the middle of the market. “It was bankers and professional people getting their first houses in Putney for £600,000.” But over time, Robinson and his business partner Hugh Wade-Jones decided the high end might prove interesting.

    They had their timing right. London was beginning to attract exactly the kind of clients who would require Robinson’s services. “You had complex people coming in – Chinese, Americans, Russians.” These clients needed a different kind of service; Robinson and Wade-Jones saw their opportunity, founding Enness Global on the day Northern Rock went bust.

    Today Enness Global remains an excellent port of call for graduates wanting an interesting experience involving client relations. “Some of our commercial brokers come in as graduates without any experience. We’ve had huge success in hiring people and giving them opportunity.” Robinson understands what young people need in their careers: not the 2am misery of photocopying which often characterises entry-level work at the PwCs and Clifford Chances of this world, but real training, and real interaction with clients.

    So what does he see as the future of the property market? Robinson is betting on London. “Since the borders have reopened after Covid, it’s clear that international people want to buy and live and invest in London, and I can’t see any evidence of that changing,” he explains. “There’s ten buyers for every property,” he adds.

    Christopher Jackson is the News Director at Finito World

  • Exclusive with legendary photographer Paul Joyce: ‘We all have feet of clay in the end”

    By Paul Joyce

    When people ask me as a photographer what my tip is, I say, “Follow and chase the light.” It’s a thing my old friend David Hockney told me: when the day is beginning to close and the sun is on the last buildings – go to those buildings. That’s what Van Gogh did. If you look at his early Dutch paintings, they’re dark interiors, and everything’s grim and brown. Then you get the wonderful Yellow Period, and it all changes.

    My subjects vary, but I’ve come to learn that celebrity has its dangers. I remember Elijah Moshinsky, who was a very fine theatre director, and who died of Covid recently, saying of Placido Domingo that he’s totally isolated from the world. Everything was done for him – he’s cut off. He never talked to ordinary people, or mixed with them.

    I’ve always photographed my subjects out of an artistic need. The only commissioned portrait I did was for Condé Nast and was of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the writer of Heat and Dust – a wonderful Indian lady. I took one of the worst portraits I ever took in my life and Condé Nast and I agreed it shouldn’t be published. Why was that? It was because I didn’t choose her. Even though I admired her, I couldn’t do anything with that face. You have to have the admiration for the work, and also a sense that the face is going to tell some kind of story.

    So I could never be David Bailey. I have a story of David Hockney being photographed by Bailey. Hockney was told to go to the studio and was waved in and shown his way to a white background. And David Hockney said: “Where do you want me?’ Bailey says: “Against the background.” David stands there. Bailey gives him a scarf and he says, “Make like a bat!’ And Hockney says, “What?” Bailey repeats: “Make like a bat!” And David waved his arms. Click, thank you – and that was it.

    Samuel Beckett was wonderful. I’d tried various careers including banking and estate agency, and not got anywhere. This was before film schools. They were trying to establish a National Film School. Also there was a rogue organisation called the London School of Film Technique which occupied a building in Charlotte Street which subsequently was occupied by Channel Four. The Greater London Council began to give grants, and they’d send you some money to help make films. I sold my MG, my golf clubs, banked the cheque and made a film.

    I’d seen the Royal Shakespeare Company used to do readings rather than full scale productions on a Sunday, and one was by Beckett called Act Without Words II, which was about 15-20 minutes long. I thought it was great, and I set my version on a rubbish dump. I didn’t have the rights to the film. I finished the film and didn’t know what to do. I showed it to Harold Pinter and Pat McGee, one of the great Beckett actors. The word got out to Sam I’d done this, and to John Calder, who was his publisher. They summoned me to Calder’s house.

    I set up a screen and a projector, and I went to Beckett’s Harley Street apartment. I went up, and there in the corner was this figure with a Guinness: Sam. “Oh Sam, this is Mr. Joyce,” said Calder. I set up. Beckett pulls his chair up and sits about two feet from the screen meaning all you could see was his shadow. I started the film, and I was nervously waiting by the projector. I noticed that his shadow was shaking. I thought: “Oh God, he’s seething.” But I went closer and he was laughing – shaking with laughter.

    At the end, he said: “What do you want to do with it?” Calder interjected: “You own it, Sam! This is where you negotiate.” Beckett said: “Well, Mr Joyce, what would you say to 50p?” I said: “Yes”. He said: “Would you like some Guinness?”

    As a frustrated drama director, I turned to photography as a way of surviving. You’re treated suspiciously if you wear different hats. I miss theatre directing – I’d love to do Chekhov now.

    I think back on the people I’ve photographed and it does seem unreal. Jane Fonda was wonderful. I was a callow youth on secondment to Paramount to do a documentary. I remember the Rolling Stones arrived, and looked like ruffians – that was an eye-opener.

    Henry Moore was a pretty tough, short Yorkshireman. He didn’t suffer fools. He also told me something I never knew: you can’t do decent sculptures in wood if the wood is from a tree that’s died. You have to have fresh, green wood and when I was there, there were huge lorries of wood delivered just for him.  I don’t understand sculpture really. Either it’s realist or it’s not but I suppose you could say the same about painting.

    Quentin Tarantino – we don’t keep in touch now, but I knew him earlier in his career, and he owns one of my paintings. I saw Reservoir Dogs before anyone else. He’s pretty sparky and very opinionated. Years ago, before Groundhog Day became a classic we agreed it was a classic. I think we disagree a bit about the value of such as Bollywood and horror!

    As you get older you realise, we all have feet of clay. There was only one saint I met and that was Cesar Chavez. He represented Mexicans workers who were exploited in gathering the grape harvest. He campaigned long and hard. I met him through Kris Kristofferson who did concerts for Chavez’s cause. He was in danger constantly of assassination. He was disrupting this system of relying on cheap labour.

    We have a need to deify and the need to imbue someone with the power of celebrity. It’s as if we will it on them so we can help them in some way. If they’re not powerful, what’s their use? With artists, they have a vision to transmit which is beyond what we have. It’s not saintliness, it’s not goodness, or grace or anything like that– it’s a vision, a way of looking at the world which changes our own way of looking at the world. Let that be enough.

    I met Johnny Cash through Kris Kristofferson. I never met Dylan. I think he’s one of the great authentic geniuses. I had my doubts about the poetry – but the lyrics are finally amazing poetry.

    Spike Milligan I got to know – he was lovely, difficult and mad – as you can see in this photograph. He’d come to dinner and tell us stories about how during the Second World War, they’d paint on the bombs: “Good luck boys, up yours!”

    Jane Fonda
    Henry Moore
    John Piper
    Jane Fonda
    Jason Robards
    Jonathan Miller
    Robert Redford: “At the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, I asked Robert Redford, its director, to sit for a portrait. I jammed my camera up to his face to get a sense of his middle aged visage. He wanted approval before I released the picture, but he never got it!”
    Dennis Hopper
    David Hockney

  • Founder’s Diary

    Ronel Lehmann‘s sharp wit wonders if we have the wrong attitude to swearing, whether we have the whole notion of winners and losers wrong, and worries that the BBC may have offended the Queen

    Leaks

    Our Thames Water bill arrived. It says that we could save on our wastewater fixed charge if all the rainwater from the property drains into a soakaway, stream or river instead of its sewer. Try telling that to residents of properties whose basements flooded recently.

    By Royal Command

    The news that the BBC is reviewing whether to downplay the wall to wall coverage of future deaths in the Royal Family couldn’t come at a worse moment for HM The Queen. The one Head of State who when her time comes deserves the most respectful tribute, should think about withholding her licence fee.

    Sorry! Language Timothy

    I don’t normally read The Guardian. A book review entitled “The Right to Sex” caught my eye. It was littered with the word fuckability. I wondered why it is alright to print repeatedly when on terrestrial television, such use is abhorred. Then I read About F-ing time: bloody loses place as Britain’s top swear word.

    Feeling Blue

    I just had to renew my Passport. Snappy Snaps took the photographs and then lo and behold, I look like a serial killer. When the documents arrived, the graining of my picture behind the bio-metric lessened the impact. I am not so vain, clearly.

    Diversity

    For years, Labour has been championing diversity, inclusion and more women in politics. Finally, UNITE trade union elects a female Sharon Graham to the top job. Maybe instead of being Sir Kier Starmer’s critic, the new General Secretary will seek to topple the incumbent Leader and replace with the Labour Party’s first Leader of the Opposition. Conservatives 2: Labour 0.

    Global milking

    Today I read that in a few years, we will not be drinking cow’s milk anymore. As a child, I can still remember the gold, red and silver top bottles left on our doorstep by the milkman. Now, I will have to look forward to plant- based milk with my porridge. No one has mentioned what will happen for special treats of cream in my festive coffee.

    Hic

    No one likes change. The news that if you want a Gin and Tonic aboard a British Airways flight you are required to pre-order your drinks using an App has caused much offence to long standing passengers. The days of frequent flyer programmes to build loyalty appear to be over. Heaven help if the choice of gin doesn’t include Hendricks with a slice of cucumber.

    Loser

    Throughout our education, we are conditioned that there are winners and losers. You never want to be a loser. Well this is not always true. We were proud of our football team coming second. When at preparatory school, everyone wins a prize, so as not to disadvantage a contemporary, we’re prepared for the idea that winning is everything. Even when attending a birthday party, we now have the the business of giving going away presents ensures that everyone can celebrate, not just for the birthday. The winner doesn’t always take it all – in fact, perhaps they never do.

  • Interview: Advocate James Cameron on Chernobyl, COP 26, and how we solve the climate crisis

    Matt Thomas interviews the barrister and climate change advocate on COP 26 about his extraordinary career on the front lines of the great fight of our times

    MT: I saw that you first trained as a barrister, how did you end up in the environmental world?

    I went to the University of Western Australia, and I did law there. And then I came back to the UK, really only because my mother was terminally ill and I went to University College London to do my undergraduate law degree.

    And for all sorts of reasons – only part of it was to do with the course or the university – I didn’t connect with undergraduate law at all and I struggled to perform having been used to doing well in the art subjects, particularly in English literature and other subjects, I found English law really pretty dark.

    I just didn’t connect with it so I had a period of time, right at the end of my degree, which was very intense and rather sad, and with the help of friends and then a girlfriend, I somehow managed to get a decent grade. That was largely because in my last year I focused on international law and jurisprudence legal philosophy.

    Suddenly I found a way I could understand – partly perhaps because I had grown up in Lebanon and Singapore and Australia. International law seemed to fit more my understanding. I was interested in the cases of international negotiations and the things that international law seemed to be based upon, and I was attracted to the more obvious moral and political case for law that you see in the legal system that’s still forming itself.

    And it just seemed to work. I got my first proper job I suppose at the Research Centre for International Law, I became director Studies in Law at one of the colleges and the Chernobyl incident had inspired intense academic conversations about the question of what you do when environmental harm so obviously crosses borders.

    The Soviet Union did not inform its neighbours about Chernobyl. They kept it secret, and the world really found out about it because of a private satellite who saw it and followed the clues on the radionuclide cloud. Governments did not bring actions directly against each other in the international court. It seemed to us at the time this was just an example of the legal system not working.

    MT: So, the Chernobyl disaster was the ‘lightbulb moment’ I guess in terms your first link to the environment?

    Yeah, that was it. It was a graphic example of a trans-boundary environmental harm. And the way the law worked – or didn’t – reveal inadequacies of the international legal system. It needed a fresh approach. And then after that, the climate change issue emerged and had similar more substantial problems to resolve. But the obvious place to be is international law because the problem could not be resolved by individual nation states.

    Q: As a ‘friend of COP’ what has been your involvement in the conference?

    It’s a day to day, topical question. All the governments who have this role of president form groups of advisors, and they vary. I’ve done a few, they vary in type, but they’re meant to help the president’s function which is to shepherd everybody towards agreement.

    Equally, all presidencies have some kind of thematic approach to the climate problem, as well as their principal obligation which is to get agreement on whatever the agenda items are for the year.

    The UK Government which obviously has a very substantial and competent civil service doesn’t really need the kind of advisors that other governments have needed. I’ve been a senior advisor to Morocco and to Fiji, where I was really hands on.

    Outside of government, I think it is useful to have another circle of advisors who are independent and can say straightforwardly what they think and are worried about the consequences. Even so, it can be frustrating sometimes when you aren’t adequately listened to and anyway. But we have regular calls, as a group, directing into Alok Sharma who is the president of the process. We also have calls with his senior officials on particular topics. And, you know, there are several themes, and each of those themes have subsets of the group and often I happen to be involved, particularly with the nature theme at the moment because that’s part of a project I’m working on. But I also get involved in the finance and because I’d be an experienced negotiator, I’ll talk to the chief negotiator as well about how they’re running the process.

    Where you’re going to arrive in terms of negotiations is always contingent on things that have nothing to do with climate change or some other geopolitical issue. Some other pressing immediate concern, something that has to do with a relationship that is central to power in the world.

    Success or failure usually turns on the US and China. There are really only 20 other countries that have to come to agreement to make a difference, even though the whole process works by consensus here.

    But if you don’t have India, China, US, the EU aligned or capable of coming to agreement then your event fails.

    MT: I was going to ask later on about what sort of challenges there are but from what you have mentioned it seems topics like geopolitics seem to actually come before addressing climate change?

    They can’t be separated. Every now and again, you see the potential for climate change. As an existential issue, it has the capacity to bind, and it can actually bring people together; it can make people desire cooperation. That remains a hope that I have that at a very elemental level. There is common ground between these big forces in the world who have other reasons for disagreeing. But that might be the idealist in me speaking.’’

    MT: On your website you say that, when addressing issues centred on tackling climate change, you are ‘interested in the space between law, policy, finance and technology’. Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?

    I’ve decided that’s probably my function. So, for example, if you want to deploy capital to solve the climate change problem you want your money either to have very specific obligations to deal with climate, or,  that there is an opportunity for you to compete with incumbent businesses and technologies that may actually be causing the problem but have been there for a while.

    So if you want a marketplace for money and technology and other resources, you have to change the rules. So changing the rules means changing the law or changing the application of the law, or changing the public policy interpretation of the law.

    Clearly, there’s politics and power politics involved with that but there’s also permanent civil servants who have mandates that are already set. They, on the whole, either make or implement policy depending on where they are in the world. Frequently, the language spoken by all parties is so different, they don’t quite understand each other. And they certainly don’t trust. And then, the world of finance has his own ecosystem, all sorts of different types of finance, they have become quite distinct tribes with their own return expectations. They have their own sense of themselves. Believe me, they really do have their own sense of who’s best.

    And sometimes that doesn’t connect with people who create enterprises, entrepreneurs, innovators, people starting out, have no experience of any of these phenomena. They need to be helped, but they also need to have an environment in which they can actually compete where they can thrive.

    I like to keep on top of what’s coming through in the world of innovation I want. I have got some experience to offer but I don’t know the answer, so I’m interested in being something of a carrier of ideas, and a connector of people.

    MT: It seems to me that there is a strong focus on climate change but the interrelated issue of biodiversity loss gets far less attention. Climate change is just one of the factors behind the destruction of habitats and the degradation of the natural world. How can companies, consumers and policy makers elevate understanding of the impact of biodiversity loss on human societies?

    ‘Yeah, and they are completely interrelated, which makes it evermore complex to solve. I spent most of the last year, more focused on nature.

    I’ve worked a lot on wildlife. I did the International Whaling Convention, the Convention of Endangered Species, illegal trafficking with wild birds and other species.

    It’s quite dangerous work too. I work with people who risked their lives trying to reveal what was going on. So this has been there all along but it’s been a relatively minor issue for big politics. It’s an issue for people who care. It’s an issue for people who’ve got a particular concern about a species, and it’s widely felt. People do feel a connection with nature.

    Clearly something happened to us psychologically during COVID, where people started to appreciate nature wherever they lived – maybe, particularly if they lived in a city.

    The climate issue has highlighted aspects of the decline and threat to nature, but not all of them. It has a tendency to deal with climate as a priority that has sometimes led to people thinking too little about the complexity of natural systems. Planting trees is not a solution a guaranteed solution as planting trees means monoculture, and actually, biodiversity loss, which can happen. And as has happened.

    Recently some good research came out of Oxford, on how many 50 degree days there are in a year now. The more you have those a year, the more you suffer economically, but there are things that can be done and relatively quickly to change that and a lot of it is to do with planting trees or creating green surfaces. But we also need to manage rainfall, because we’re getting more intense rainfall which our hard surfaces can’t handle.

    Q: Do you expect these conversations around biodiversity to become more mainstream in upcoming years?

    I do. And I think that language is important. Biodiversity doesn’t reach people. Nature does. So choosing the right language to communicate, choosing the right messengers, obviously we’ve had the legendary David Attenborough to do a lot of the messaging, and he has made the connection between climate and biodiversity pretty clear. But if you want to do something about it in your own place, you probably need to organise at a community level. And that’s really hard to do, but necessary.’

    Q: We touched on it briefly earlier but what do you see as the main barriers to tackling climate change?

    I think one of the main barriers is psychological. It’s a problem that feels too big for me as an individual. If I don’t think I’ve got any levers of power to pull, then I want someone else to do it.

    And meanwhile, I’ve got something that’s immediately pressing on my concerns that I’ve got to feed children or I’ve got to find shelter, I’ve got something that right now I have that I have to care about. This issue looks literally beyond me – beyond my levers – and has a temporal dimension that encourages you to postpone action.

    The other psychological fact is that we all experience is that we all have a kind of status quo bias. I don’t mean that in a political sense I mean, we’d rather not be disruptive.

    And, and also, there’s a generational problem here that the generation that benefited from the tremendous growth in the 20th century that was driven by widespread use of fossil fuels, miraculous, use of fossil fuels, the innovation that went into fossil fuels the number of products, God knows. Look around you. Now, how many things in my room right now have a petroleum base or hydrocarbon base. Yeah, staggering.

    It’s very hard for that generation, to feel like there was anything wrong, you know, good things came from that place, wealth, and security, and material benefit.

    On top of all that, there are cultural connections that are very, very deep. You can see that most clearly in in the kind of mining and mineral cultures of Australia and Canada and the US.

    So, you know someone from the soft city comes along and says, all that, all those minerals and oils are there bad thing, they get dismissed because they come from the soft city and they don’t know how hard it is to win this stuff from the earth and create wealth. Those things are hugely important.

    But in the last few years that the things have shifted quite markedly. Because there has been some government intervention the barriers are different now. They’re to do with how quickly you can make the transition, and how fairly you can make the transition.

    There are several set piece battles, I don’t like to use war language, but what the hell. One of them is that renewables have to beat coal in Asia. And yeah, then you got to ask, “Where’s the money going to come from?” Well, there’s lots of domestic capital in China. Actually, in the end I’m not that worried about China.

    There’s a very confused picture, because they’re the largest renewable energy market in the world but they’re also still doing a lot of coal. But Indonesia is crazy. Why on earth are they building more coal plants?

    MT: How would you rate progress in the UK in comparison to other mature economies around the world?

    ‘Very good in parts. Very good in creating the legal frameworks and very good in concentrating expertise in many disciplines, less good on implementation.

    Unfortunately, we’ve had some quite mediocre government where people who are more interested in politics as played out in the media.

    And that’s not a party political point because it works across the spectrum. It just is the case that too much politics is based on how you appear on a screen and how you are interpreted by the media and not enough with how you govern your department.

    Unfortunately, climate change is one of those issues that you need good government. A nice soundbite doesn’t actually solve the problem.’’

    Who would you say are the best at implementing right now?

    As a structural point, I think it is much easier to implement in smaller states, where there’s a high level of trust in the community. Denmark would be an example of an effective response/

    Periodically, the other Scandinavian countries do well and you see elements of progress in Germany and the Netherlands. I mean elements because it’s not perfect by any stretch. And then you see it also in the highly educated and technocratic cultures like Singapore and Korea. So those places have done well.

    But nobody has all the answers, and nobody can solve the problem on their own. So, unless you get something like 20 to 25 of the major economies of the world, all doing something broadly similar in terms of effort, then nobody, nobody can protect themselves from all consequences.

    People will move. Of course, they will move.  You would, I would. If I’m living in a place where I’ve got no water I am going to go somewhere where there’s water. If I’m living in a place where there are 20 days above 50 degrees in a year, I’m taking my family out of there. I want them to survive.’

    MT: Are there any specific goals that you and your ecosystem have for the next couple years?

    I’m working at the moment on natural capital. I’ve got goals associated with that. And, and they’re largely to do with lining up a big general principle, like, we should value natural capital, and then taking it, drawing that down into the institutions, where they have the power to apply that in practice, and then showing examples of how the principles applied through investment in a real transaction.

    These are the kinds of things that are both short and long term because I think we’ve got some momentum on the topic. But then there are others that are just the same as they always were, really: they’re about trying to get agreement to keep as far as humanly possible under or not too far past the 1.5 degree threshold.

    I’m constantly scanning for enterprises that I think have a solution that could scale. Now I want to find an institutional capacity to do that routinely so it’s not left to a few individuals around the world, whereby we actually have good well-structured, well-motivated, incentivized institutions, to find the solutions that can be accelerated and deployed, because we’re in a race. Alot of these great ideas will emerge organically over time but we actually need to speed the whole process up.’’

    Matthew Thomas. Photographer: Sam Pearce
  • COP 26: Entrepreneur Zak Johnson on his green fashion business

    COP 26: Entrepreneur Zak Johnson on his green fashion business

    Interview by Alice Wright

    When people ask Zak Johnson why he got into the fashion business, he always tells them that he didn’t. He instead replies: “I got into fixing plastic. I found a problem that I wanted to solve, so I don’t look at what we do as fashion, I look at it as problem solving.”  

    Johnson, founder and CEO of luxury clothing brand Naeco, is a passionate surfer. Six years ago, whilst working on a contract in Bournemouth, Johnson had ample opportunity to kite surf. Each time he would clear his section of the beach of plastic, putting it in the recycling bin. However, he began to realise that “it felt like I was picking up the same plastic on a weekly basis, I thought at one point, ‘is someone chucking the plastic back in?’, I couldn’t work it out.” 

    Johnson developed a bugbear and started to look into where plastics go after use. “Six years ago when you started to delve into plastics you’re seen as a little bit strange. It wasn’t as mainstream as it might be now” he explains. In his research Johnson found that 91% of all plastic is incinerated or sent to landfill, and that only 9% is recycled. He was shocked to find that even the plastic that goes into the recycling bin isn’t 100% recycled, it often ends up going into incineration for energy programmes. 

    Johnson’s decided to come up with a solution that would take waste plastic and reuse it as something in plastic again, “single use is only single use if you use it once” he states. This is where Naeco was born. The name itself, is ocean spelt backwards and represents the sense of reversing the issue. 

    “I looked at plastic as a commodity, people that are throwing plastic away are looking at it as trash.” says Johnson. The plastic was once manufactured for profit, and bought for a price yet once used is considered to have lost its value. So Johnson went about trying to educate the consumer, that waste plastic still had worth: “it started by looking at it as £10 notes in the ocean rather than looking at it as rubbish.” 

    Johnson set upon manufacturing sportswear after looking into the process of extrusion, which takes plastic, heats it up and turns it into liquid. From the liquid it can be turned into a pellet, and that’s what virgin plastic looks like. These pellets can then be spun into fibre and yarn, which is where we get polyester. This led Johnson to think “what if I could make a pellet from recycled plastic, and then turn that into fabric?” 

    In keeping with his new self-confessed, plastics-obsessed eccentric image Johnson set about building an extrusion machine in his spare bedroom. “In the beginning I made tonnes of mistakes because there wasn’t as much research, or at least it wasn’t accessible to the layman at home googling,” but after discovering the need for single waste streams to avoid mixing plastics, the project took off. 

    Naeco now has industrial machinery that can process 500 kilos of plastic per hour. Once the plastic is recycled into pellets they are sent off to a textile mill and spun into yarn and from there Naeco receives its fabrics. 

    Making swim shorts was an obvious leap for a fashion business founded in Bournemouth. Johnson envisaged selling them to his friends, who would keep them for around five years, “that then gives a longer lifetime on that plastic and they would value it.” Johnson also recalls how he believed making swimwear would be easy, but not puts this down to naivety. It took 18 months to make fabric, and another year to get to the point of finally making a garment. 

    Naeco is holistically conscious of its environmental impact, and always seeks to be sustainable in all its practices. Another reason for choosing to design swimwear – and soon outerwear too – was to reduce the microplastics that would return to the ocean through washing. Swimwear and outerwear are among the garments that the consumer will wash the least. Johnson also recommends using a Guppyfriend microfiber bag, to capture micro plastics in the wash. The company also uses natural dyes that are ethical and eco.  

    “It’s about minimising the washing, and then anything that’s high wash so our jumpers, hoodies, and t-shirts are made from organic cotton or bamboo and they don’t create microplastics.” Naeco takes organic cotton from the cutting room floor of manufacturers who use sustainable fabrics, but Johnson seems most passionate about Bamboo. “It grows super fast, it uses less water, it’s just an efficient powerhouse of a product,” he says “ our t-shirts are so unbelievably soft, nothing feels like bamboo. When you wear a bamboo t-shirt for the first time you don’t want to go back to anything else.”  

    Naeco started off as a solo venture but now has fourteen employees in the UK, as well as satellite offices in Morocco, the US and Poland with around twenty employees overall. “We’re pretty overworked, which is great” adds Johnson with a laugh, “we’ve definitely grown a lot this year, it’s probably been our biggest growth year.” 

    This is largely down to Reborn the sustainable corporate workwear arm that Johnson launched two years ago. Reborn creates sustainable workwear for the Jockey Club, Moët Hennessy, Arsenal, Magners and other such brands in that space. The resources for Reborn differ in that “we take plastic from existing waste streams before it enters the ocean” Johnson explains. For example, at the Cheltenham Gold Cup the Jockey Club used a million plastic cups over four days, it was six tonnes of plastic and we converted that plastic back into 30,000 metres of fabric, which created 12,000 garments which actually clothed every single member of staff at Cheltenham Gold Cup. 

    “That side of our business has exploded this year. I think consumers have become very aware about their sustainability issues.” Johnson puts this down to the lived reality of the current situation: “we’ve seen that what we do to our planet has an impact on our personal lives now. A pandemic like this is just a taster of what we’re in for globally, if we don’t start fixing some of these sustainable areas and tread lightly on the earth.” 

    This shift in attitude from individuals and corporations has put Naeco in a perfect position for growth. “We don’t add sustainability on to what we do, we truly are sustainable and have been from day one” Johnson explains. Indeed Johnson is now looking to go even further, with the company attempting water recirculation in their factories. Johnson is building new technology to recirculate the water for the manufacturing process, and to reuse the heat from the shredders dissipating it back as energy to reuse in the battery packs. Naeco is its own micro circular economy. 

    Looking forward, Johnson wants to focus on building more recycling centres. Naeco will have the UK recycling Centre in Buckinghamshire but wants to build one up north and one in the middle of the country. Abroad, the company has an opportunity to expand in Morocco where there are a great deal of textile mills as well as a huge plastic problem. 

    Johnson is also keen for more collaborations with local authorities and governments. “We’ve seen some states in the US be very receptive to what we’re doing. We’re looking to build recycling centres in the US, where we’re able to take plastic and repurpose 100% of it.” 

    Despite the relentlessness of plastic production and contamination, Johnson is optimistic about turning the tide. Optimistic is “who we are as a business, if we weren’t I don’t think we’d get out of bed.”I would love us to be in a position where plastic is never, never produced anymore, but ultimately we’re probably going to live in a world for the next 100 years that continues to make plastic. What we need to do is reduce that amount of plastic. 

    He ends our conversation with a particularly positive prediction “I think in the future all businesses will be sustainable. They won’t just have sustainable principles, they will be entirely sustainable. In 100 years people will say ‘I can’t believe people set up companies that weren’t sustainable from the beginning.’ I think business will evolve and change.” 

  • Cop 26: Former Green Party Leader Natalie Bennett on a new kind of thinking

    Natalie Bennett

    What’s happened with Covid is that people now realise that the world can change very, very fast. The Green Party has been saying that we need to get to net zero by 2030 and people would always reply that the world doesn’t change that fast and you just have to be patient, and it takes time for business models to turn around and so forth.

    But coronavirus changed the world overnight – and changed the world of work too. We now know that speed of change can be a matter of weeks, and also that as a society we have this secret resilience we didn’t know we had.

    Of course, on top of that we’re seeing with horrifying weather events all over the world that the climate emergency is here, and that we can’t put our heads in the sand. That’s because we can’t ignore that the way in which we treat the planet is tied to any notions we might have of prosperity: there are no jobs on a dead planet. We’re turning our oceans into a plastic soup, destroying our biodiversity and disrupting the systems which give us life.

    There’s talk in the climate community about how the virus has helped focus our minds. That’s true to an extent. Not travelling frees up time and we save money by not going into the office. All this has benefits for our well-being and we know that cutting down on travel time makes the air smell less of diesel fumes. We’re coming to realise that going green is a win-win policy.

    But we’ve also got to realise that people tend to find change threatening, and we still have got to address the emotions that the climate question raises. People have been through a difficult time, but those who do react to the climate problem, and seize the initiative are the ones who will be successful, and will lead and be adapted to the new circumstances. In any situation like this, you have the early adopters: society never changes with 100 per cent of society suddenly seeing what we need to do.

    Some people still take the approach of what I call ‘business as usual but with added efficiencies’. It’s the idea that we’ll carry on doing things as we did them before, but with a bit more renewable in the mix, and some energy efficiency measures, and some conferences like COP 26.

    But the Green Party is talking about wholesale transformation of our society. Take landfill as an example. If you’re producing huge amounts of disposable material then that’s not a sustainable business model; what we want to see instead is a circular economy without that waste pyramid. It stands to reason that you need to reduce the amount of physical material. It’s another reminder that we can’t change just 10 or 20 per cent; we have to change completely.

    I think that has to begin with education. I’ve been asking this government questions about taking education outside into the natural world, and even about a GCSE in nature. We’ve been championing that kind of approach; we need education to be for life and not just preparation for exams. We need to look at gardening, and we need to look at cooking as being topics which might join the curriculum.

    In respect of the economy, I would regard the Green Party as the natural champion of small independent business. What we want is strong local economies built upon small cooperatives – and I can point to examples up and down the country where Green councillors have helped bring that back.

    What we don’t want is an economy dominated by a handful of giant multinationals or hedge funds who own a bit of all them. That means no competition. I’m a fan for instance of the People’s Supermarket in Camden where I used to be a volunteer. That’s a different model of local food supplies which we can all learn from.

    The other thing we could learn from is the Finnish education system. I remember once I was on a long distance train in Finland, which purely by chance had a children’s playground on it for up to six or seven year olds. It was this amazing thing, with little slides and so on and families were having a lovely time on their train journey. I tweeted the photo and I don’t think I’ve ever had such a big response. That’s the kind of community-led thinking we need. Let’s hope Covid has brought us round to that mindset.

  • Long Covid and the young: “There’s hope but it’s not over yet”

    By Emily Prescott

    “Apologies if I’m out of breath when I speak to you,” Lizzie says when I catch her over the phone as she walks to a university lecture. For most students, the act of getting out of bed and actually attending a lecture seems like a small triumph but for Lizzie this is a pretty gigantic triumph. Just a year ago she couldn’t walk anywhere and certainly wasn’t in any state to be concentrating on her geography lectures.

    Lizzie, 22, is thought to be one of more than 2 million adults in England to be impacted by long COVID. She caught the virus in July 2020 and wasn’t horrendously ill but as the weeks and months went on she found she wasn’t getting better. In fact, she was getting worse.

    Though she was on track to get a first class degree from the University of Bristol, and had been a successful long-distance runner, both those things had suffered. “I did the course online from home but I couldn’t sit there for an hour and concentrate. I just realised it was pointless doing a year,” she recalls. She took the stressful decision to defer a year. While her friends pressed on with the degrees she spent a lot of time asleep.

    There are an estimated 106,000 under-25s like Lizzie, whose education is suffering due to the long-term physical impact of the virus. People with long COVID, which is when symptoms persist for longer than 12 weeks, may have to endure extreme tiredness alongside problems with memory and concentration as well as insomnia. Such symptoms are hardly conducive to effective learning.

    Thankfully, Lizzie was surrounded by a family and supervisors who supported her decision to focus on getting well. “I know people going through the same thing, and it’s just very frustrating. The longer it goes on, you just think, ‘Surely I must be better now.’ But you’re not and now I have this lingering fear that I’ll have another year of doing nothing. It was such a bizarre experience. Someone at my brother’s university has dropped out, I know another friend of a friend who has had to defer. It’s just exhausting,” she sighs.

    Of course on top of the physical impact of long COVID, the pandemic has forced students out of classrooms and the impact of this alone has been stark. The Sutton Trust for example says that 5 per cent of teachers in state schools report that all their students have access to an adequate remote-learning device, compared to 54 per cent at private schools.

    Professor Russell Viner, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, recently told the Education Select Committee: “When we close schools, we close their lives.” Viner argues that the pandemic has caused a range of problems for students, from being isolated and lonely to suffering from sleep problems.

    Finito World spoke to the head of a department at a sixth form colleague about how they deal with students suffering from the long term impacts of COVID, either physical or emotional. “I encourage them to do their work when they feel at their best and rest when they are not up to it,” she explains. “All lesson PowerPoints and notes are made available on Teams for students to access. I have also added four extra drop-in support classes for students to access. This is intended to help those who missed classes due to COVID or didn’t cope well with online learning,” she explains.

    She says that although the situation is tough, students who fall behind will ultimately have the opportunity to get back on track. “We are also running catch-up sessions each week where first year material is being retaught to second year students. All students are welcomed to these sessions and we repeat them on three separate afternoons each week so that a student should be able to fit one in to their timetable.” The teacher, who wished to remain anonymous, says she wishes all schools and university had such catch-up measures in place. “We have about 140 second year students and about 20 are attending these,” she explains.

    The schools and universities might be open now but the pandemic is not over and many young people are still enduring the long-term impact of COVID. “No matter how young or healthy you are, it can very, very easily be you who gets affected by the virus. I know it’s always in the news so you forget that. It seems separate,” Lizzie says, urging her fellow students to stay safe and continue using measures to protect themselves from the virus.

    Although she started to feel a bit better in February she says she wants to raise awareness about long COVID clinics, which have helped her. “At the beginning GPs didn’t know what to do with me or where to put me but as long COVID clinics have started popping up we need to raise awareness of them. It’d be good if teachers and lecturers knew more about them so they can point pupils in the right direction, if necessary,” Lizzie explains.

    After a year out, Lizzie has made a good albeit not full recovery and she hopes that as the pandemic goes on more people will have access to the COVID recovery clinics.

    Thankfully, the NHS has set up a specialist young people’s COVID clinic. “I just hope teachers and doctors know about it so they can point people even younger than me in the right direction,” Lizzie says.

    The 15 new hubs will draw together experts on common symptoms who can directly treat young people and advise people caring for them and refer them into other specialist services and clinics.

    “The boost to dedicated services for young people is part of a package of investment in a range of measures to help young people and adults with long COVID, including a major focus on specialist treatment and rehab services,” an NHS spokesperson explains.

    It is estimated that 340,000 people may need support for the condition including 68,000 who will need rehab or other specialist treatment. While the majority of children and young people are not severely affected by COVID, ONS data has shown that 7.4 per cent of children aged 2-11 and 8.2 per cent of those aged 12-16 report continued symptoms. Lizzie adds: “There’s hope. But it’s not over yet.”

  • COP 26: Emily Prescott on Bill Gates’ How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

    COP 26: Emily Prescott on Bill Gates’ How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

    How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates, Penguin, £20.00 

    A climate disaster is looming and although its impact is mostly invisible in our day-to-day lives, the damage humans have done to the planet already seems dauntingly irreversible. As Bill Gates points out, “fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year” and merely aiming to reduce emissions by 2030 is not an adequate target. He explains: “The climate is like a bathtub that’s slowly filling up with water. Even if we slow the flow of water to a trickle, the tub will eventually fill up and water will come spilling out onto the floor. That’s the disaster we have to prevent.” Simply put,“if nothing else changes, the world will keep producing greenhouse gases, climate change will keep getting worse, and the impact on humans will in all likelihood be catastrophic,” Gates says. But How to Avoid a Climate Disaster focuses on the  “if” as Gates considers the changes needed and sets out an optimistic road map of how we can divert a climate disaster.  

    By his own admission, the burger-loving billionaire founder of Microsoft is an unlikely poster boy for saving the environment. “I own big houses and fly in private planes – in fact, I took one to Paris for the climate conference,” he confesses. While Extinction Rebellion seemingly sees anti-capitalism as crucial to the cause of environmentalism with many of its followers protesting by causing disruption in London’s financial district, Bill Gates is proposing a way to reduce greenhouse gases which will be palatable to big businesses. In each chapter he considers the financial implications of his suggestions. He proposes that countries should implement what he calls “green premiums”. He explains: “Most of these zero-carbon solutions are more expensive than their fossil-fuel counterparts. In part, that’s because the prices of fossil fuels don’t reflect the environmental damage they inflict, so they seem cheaper than the alternative.These additional costs are what I call Green Premiums. During every conversation I have about climate change, Green Premiums are in the back of my mind.”

    Indeed, Gates is pragmatic in his approach and is constantly aware of the feasibility of his proposals. In the chapter about eating meat for instance, he says although animal consumption causes a lot of environmental damage, it is unrealistic to stop it entirely.  He looks at meat alternatives, such as Beyond Meat, a company which he has invested in. He reasons: “Artificial meats come with hefty Green Premiums, however. On average, a ground-beef substitute costs 86 percent more than the real thing. But as sales for these alternatives increase, and as more of them hit the market, I’m optimistic that they’ll eventually be cheaper than animal meat.” 

    Gate remains optimistic throughout the book and suggests the threat of a climate disaster provides mankind with an opportunity to be innovative. He is always looking for the silver linings. For instance, he says: “I never thought I’d find something to like about malaria. It kills 400,000 people a year, most of them children, and the Gates Foundation is part of a global push to eradicate it. So I was surprised when I learned there is actually one nice thing you can say about malaria: It helped give us air conditioning.” In the most compelling chapter, What each of us can Do, he suggests we should all be hopeful. He says: “It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of a problem as big as climate change. But you’re not powerless. And you don’t have to be a politician or a philanthropist to make a difference.” Of course, we hope he is right. Gates was a coronavirus Cassandra. In a 2015 Ted Talk he warned: “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war.” “We need preparedness,” he demanded. This time, hopefully people will listen.

    Photo credit: By Kuhlmann /MSC – https://securityconference.org/en/medialibrary/asset/bill-gates-1523-18-02-2017/, CC BY 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=100184908

  • COP 26: Mark Campanale on Covid, climate and pensions

    Mark Campanale

    The Covid-19 pandemic has upended the global economy and shaken public faith in the ability of governments to act decisively in the interests of citizens during a crisis.

    Yet the unprecedented, disruptive policy actions taken to lockdown economies and reduce Covid transmission have exposed the unwillingness of politicians to seriously intervene in another looming crisis, from which it is not possible for us to self-isolate. Climate change.

    In the absence of swift policy action by national governments to deliver on the promise of the 2015 Paris Agreement, many business leaders are now asking themselves what they can do to prepare their firms and staff for a future increasingly disrupted by climate change. 

    One of the most powerful levers we have at our disposal to fight global warming is finance. Where we invest today, shapes our future tomorrow – yet most of us currently have little visibility or control over where financial assets like our pension funds are invested. This needs to change. 

    Some 79% of people polled for Good Money Week 2019 agree that we are responsible as individuals to take action to combat climate change, yet 76.5% of us remain unaware that our pension has an impact on the environment at all.

    The disconnect between public attitudes on climate and financial sector investment practice, means consumer pressure is not being applied to decarbonise our pension funds. 

    An analysis by Telegraph Money of the 10 biggest pension providers’ default funds found that pension fund money had been sleepwalking into stocks that were negatively affecting the climate, with only one of the top-10 funds, Nest, having no fossil-fuel producing firms among its largest investments.

    This is one area where business managers can take an active leadership role, creating space for conversations on pension fund investment choices, and ensuring fossil fuel free alternative investment options are made available for staff.

    Where company pensions are invested is a top 10 issue workers would like to discuss with their boss – with Good money week polling finding 12.6% of workers wanted to discuss issues such as pension investments in arms, tobacco and fossil fuels and potential alternatives.

    Research by Royal London has found 40% of people want to be offered fossil free investments ‘as standard’, but with a strong age gradient – 54% of under 35s support this proposition compared with only 34% of over 55s.

    In July 2020, it was announced the Nest pension fund with 9 million UK members would begin divesting from fossil fuels to ensure alignment with the Government Net Zero strategy.

    Reducing fossil fuel investments is no longer viewed as an ethical or moral imperative alone. With the energy sector the worst performing sector over the past decade, money managers have a fiduciary duty to manage the investment risk posed by fossil fuel investment in a rapidly changing world, where energy transition continues apace, and future demand for oil, gas and coal is no longer assured.