Présentation de Jeffrey Althouse, Economiste à l’Université Sorbonne Paris Nord :
A tale of two R/risks: Financial stability for or against nature?
Authors: Audrey Irvine-Broque, Jessica Dempsey, Jeffrey Althouse
Abstract: For over a decade, international initiatives have explored how biodiversity loss and climate change pose material risks to businesses, financial systems and the global economy. The result has been a wave of new corporate- and state-led efforts to measure and mitigate these « nature-related” risks – mainly by providing investors with more information about how environmental change and policy impact their portfolios. Such initiatives are primarily intended to protect financial actors against future losses, but are also promoted as tools to incentivize the redirection of investment away from ecologically harmful activities. As a result, this approach has been embraced as a dominant environmental policy solution across industry, government and civil society. In this paper, we contrast the nature-risk thesis with a related, but inverse, argument: that managing the risks to financial stability, under the current international financial architecture, acts as a key driver of ecological instability. That is, pressures to maintain investability and earn foreign exchange often hasten ecosystem degradation, particularly in economies that are in a less advantageous position in the international financial and monetary system. Our central research question is whether the nature-risk model challenges or reinforces these structural dynamics. In evaluating this relationship, we suggest three channels through which attempts to reduce exposure to nature risk may perversely expose vulnerable geographies to increased volatility, destabilizing both financial and ecological systems. These channels are: (1) capital reallocation, (2) transition risk discipline, and (3) financial penalization. These dynamics illustrate the feedback loops between the formal, institutional project of nature risk management (R/isk) and the everyday, ongoing erosion of ecological stability to mitigate financial risk (r/isk), provoking key questions about how to more effectively govern the relationship between finance and the biosphere.