King hailed as nature ‘leader' at event to drive private money into biodiversity
Ministers, indigenous leaders and businesses and investors representing £12.2 trillion in finance gathered at the conference convened by the UK Government at Lancaster House in London to discuss how to drive private money into restoring and conserving nature and natural services.
Charles has long been an advocate for investing in nature, with leading environmentalist and head of Natural England Tony Juniper describing him as 'being right about these issues 20 years' before anyone else.
At a reception after the meeting the King watched a performance by public art and climate initiative The Herds featuring life-sized puppets of African animals including a zebra, lioness and a gorilla, which Charles shook hands with.
He also discussed the urgency of saving the forests with Brazilian environment and climate minister Marina Silva, who showed him a picture of a tree he had planted 35 years ago, which is now a towering specimen, as he remarked 'I have green fingers'.
Charles was presented with gifts by Mona Ainu'u, minister of natural resources of the Pacific island of Niue, including honey and a certificate showing he had been made a 'care-holder' of one square kilometre of the island's Moana Mahu marine protected area, as a gift from the country.
The scheme is part of an innovative financing mechanism called 'ocean conservation commitments' in which donors can sponsor the conservation of one square kilometre of the reserve, a vast area half the size of the UK and home to coral reefs, undersea mountains, sharks, whales, dolphins and rays.
The payments of around £110 aim to protect each piece of the marine protected area for a period of 20 years, with the proceeds used to fund conservation, resilience and sustainable development.
Mr Juniper said the King had been making the case for 'natural capital' – valuing and investing in the world's natural resources such as forests, fish and water to benefit humans – for decades, adding 'I think he might even have invented the idea quite a long time ago'.
He said: 'He has a particular credibility as a leader in this subject, and hopefully him being here today will really send a signal to everybody that this is a serious proposition, this idea that we need to invest in nature to be able to get returns.'
Mr Juniper added: 'He's always been right about these issues, 20 years before everyone really understood it was a serious thing that we were dealing with, and so him being here today, hopefully, sends a signal that there's something real going on here that people need to attend to.'
Mr Juniper warned there was a 'huge job' ahead in recovering nature globally but also in England and it would require private finance.
'With England being one of the most nature depleted countries on Earth, you know, the job is particularly acute and urgent,' he said.
'We have some positive government policy that's come through during recent years, but we're going to need to augment that with private investment to be able to get to where we need to go.'
Mr Juniper pointed to nascent markets in 'biodiversity net gain', where developers have to pay to boost nature when carrying out housing or other projects.
And he said there was a need to drive private finance into areas such as fresh water and flood water, where utilities or insurance companies fund nature restoration, or nature-based solutions to reduce the cost of cleaning up water or paying for flood damage.
Speaking at the event, Environment Secretary Steve Reed said: 'Nature underpins everything. Without it there is no economy, no food, no health and ultimately no society.
'With this Government, Britain stands ready to lead on climate and nature.
'The UK is playing our part to protect nature at home and abroad. We will work with other nations around the world who commit to do the same.'
The event was attended by environment ministers and representatives of businesses, banks and investors such as GSK, Aviva, Lloyds, BlackRock and State Street, as well as conservation and ecology experts and indigenous and community representatives.
Those taking part in roundtable discussions described how regenerative agriculture and agroforestry was already investable, but the financial sector needed to understand the importance of the oceans, the need for integrity and regulation of markets and working with indigenous people.
Speaking after the event, UK Government Special Representative for Nature Ruth Davis said it was 'full of investors and businesses for whom the penny has dropped that if they don't look after nature, natural capital, soils, water, biodiversity, they are literally going to lose the basis upon which their existing businesses are founded'.
She said the meeting would help scale up action to drive investment in natural capital.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
UK could save £5bn if Bailey changes course on debt sales
Taxpayers would save up to £5bn next year if Andrew Bailey overhauls the Bank of England's controversial programme of bond sales, analysts have calculated. Deutsche Bank has said Rachel Reeves would be spared from transferring billions of pounds to Threadneedle Street if it stopped selling long-term debt amid a dramatic drop in bond prices. The Bank is currently unwinding the stockpile of gilts it amassed during the financial crisis and lockdown, when it created almost £900bn to boost the economy. When interest rates were at record lows of 0.1pc during the pandemic, the Bank earned far more on its returns from government bonds than it had to pay in interest to commercial banks. However, this reversed dramatically once interest rates started to rise. The Bank is now also actively selling gilts back to the market as part of so-called quantitative tightening (QT), crystallising billions of pounds of losses for the taxpayer.
Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Meet Charles Emond, the Canadian backing Sizewell C with £1.7bn
'There's always risk in a transaction,' says Charles Emond. The chief executive of La Caisse is keen to stress that he and the other equity investors named last week in the financing of the Sizewell C nuclear power station project are not getting a completely free ride from British taxpayers and electricity billpayers. Billpayers will have £1 a month added to their electricity bills from this autumn to help finance the gigantic project. UK taxpayers will stand ready to foot the bill if the construction costs rise above a certain point. But the equity investors putting in £8.5 billion aren't entirely free of exposure if things go wrong, he says. Even so, analysts believe that La Caisse and other investors, which include the British Gas owner Centrica and the French energy group EDF, have got a bit of a steal as a result of the way the deal has been structured. Even Emond admits the terms have been 'de-risked to an acceptable level'. La Caisse may be a new name to British readers, but it is a gigantic institution, one of the biggest pension fund groups in Canada with $473 billion to invest. It has just changed its name from Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, an institution responsible for paying pensions to six million Canadians. When Rachel Reeves visited North America last autumn to bang the drum for the UK, Emond was one of the people she went to see. La Caisse for years was a shareholder in Heathrow, while it has also bought into the London Array, the forest of 175 wind turbines in the outer Thames Estuary. La Caisse, which has not invested in nuclear power before, has committed £1.7 billion to Sizewell C in return for a 20 per cent stake. It will be the biggest single equity investor in the project, which when built will produce enough reliable electricity to power the equivalent of six million homes. Emond, a former banker with Scotiabank, likes the way the financing of the Suffolk-based project has been structured, which means investors are more protected than they were in the case of its sister station, Hinkley Point C, which has already gone hugely over budget. Sizewell, he says, is 'trailblazing' because 'it institutionalises nuclear from an investor perspective'. That will make it much easier for other future nuclear projects to raise private-sector cash. • Why a Canadian pension fund has put wind in my sails The structuring of the deal has 'shed a different light on nuclear' as well as chiming with La Caisse's push towards net zero. It puts nuclear into 'the zipcode of reasons it is attractive to capital providers like me'. Big, long-running infrastructure projects such as Sizewell C are perfect for pension funds which have to invest to produce income to meet defined benefit pension promises stretching decades into the future. If all goes well, Sizewell will produce inflation-protected returns for 60 years. It also fits in well with La Caisse's plan to make the UK 'our biggest overseas investment destination outside North America,' says Emond. He's a big fan of the UK, saying 'it checks all the boxes,' especially in an era of high geopolitical risk. La Caisse already has £17.8 billion of UK assets. Emond aims to lift that by £8 billion over five years, which means that after Sizewell C, he has another £6.3 billion of net investments to make. He gives a long list of Britain's attributes, naming rule of law, a business-friendly government and a big local financial centre as some of the factors important for foreign investors. 'There are all these things that, even before you look at a transaction, you say we like that sandbox.' • Welcome to Britain's biggest building site. There's a 'fish disco' Wasn't he put off at all by Britain's sluggish economy, low productivity growth and shaky public finances? No. 'It's not the growth in the economy that's the only criterion [for investing],' he says. The government's emphasis on infrastructure has made Britain especially attractive. La Caisse is by one measure the second biggest infrastructure investor in the world with $64 billion allocated to the asset class. La Caisse opened an office in London in 2016, from which it manages all its European operations. Emond recently hired Dame Sharon White, the former chairwoman of John Lewis Partnership, as head of Europe, to spearhead the investment drive. 'She's been great, providing exceptional leadership,' he says, adding that her experience of running a regulator, Ofcom, was helpful because of the many regulated industries La Caisse tends to invest in. Which sectors in the UK is La Caisse now looking at? He mentions information technology, telecoms, renewable energy, transportation, insurance, private credit and real estate. 'For us there's a pretty good set of opportunities. Our London office has teams for all asset classes.' Insurance and real estate have been rich seams already. La Caisse has been a long-time backer of Howden Group, the privately owned insurance broker recently valued at well over £10 billion, and is a backer of Inigo Insurance. Property ventures include PLP and Greystar, and, on the debt side, a £525 million credit line to Blackstone-owned St Modwen. • Centrica really can't lose at Sizewell It is also a big investor in renewable energy through last year, buying a 25 per cent stake in First Hydro, the group that operates two pumped storage projects in Snowdonia, as well as the 25 per cent holding in the London Array. Other investments include a 19.3 per cent stake in Eurostar, the cross-channel train operator. Another is FNZ, a private company that provides software to wealth managers and was valued in a past fundraising at $20 billion. It hasn't been plain sailing for Emond in his first five years. In Montreal, the company has come under heavy criticism for delays and overruns on a mass transit project Réseau express métropolitain or REM. 'We took a lot of flak,' Emond admits, but says it was funding the project at much lower cost per kilometre of track than other projects. 'Every time they [Quebecers] take the train, it helps fill their pension,' he adds. Another potential blow is the charging by the US Justice Department of executives from La Caisse and other companies with conspiring to pay $265 million in bribes to Indian state government officials to secure solar power contracts. The Securities and Exchange Commission is also pressing civil charges in connection with the same alleged scheme. La Caisse has said it is co-operating with the US authorities. As one of the so-called Maple Eight big Canadian pension funds, La Caisse is a role model for policymakers in the UK trying to encourage consolidation of UK funds to build scale and in-house investment expertise that is then confident about putting money into private equity and infrastructure. Reeves is introducing measures to encourage smaller schemes to merge. Emond says that is the right direction of travel, but cautions that it took decades for La Caisse to build scale and expert teams. 'It doesn't get done over a long weekend,' he says.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Hundreds of DfT civil servants to be moved to state-owned rail operator
Hundreds of civil servants are being transferred from the Department for Transport to the state-owned rail operator as the government looks to cut Whitehall posts and overhaul the railways. Ministers have been pushing to find savings from across the civil service, but a government spokesperson denied there would be immediate redundancies in what bosses told staff was a 'critical phase' of the creation of Great British Railways (GBR). However, industry sources believe jobs will go, as employees consider their future outside the civil service, and the government attempts to cut costs and reduce duplication in a nationalised railway. A message to staff from two rail director generals, Richard Goodman and Alex Hynes, said the DfT was 'entering an exciting and critical phase of rail reform' and had 'updated colleagues involved in the moves about what this approach' would mean for them. A formal consultation process is beginning that could lead to 300 employees being moved out over the course of this year, with many heading to offices in London Waterloo, as the state holding company DfT Operator Limited (DfTO) takes more train operators under its control. The Essex commuter service C2C was brought into public hands a week ago. This followed the first planned nationalisation, of South Western services, in May. Under government plans, the country's remaining passengerservices will be renationalised and the railway will be run by GBR that will also incorporate the functions of Network Rail to integrate track and trains. A DfT spokesperson said: 'There will be no redundancies as a result of these moves into DfTO. The 200-300 DfT staff involved will transfer to DfTO, bringing their work, skills and expertise closer to the frontline of a publicly owned railway. This will bring us a step closer to ending the fragmented railway we see today, towards a railway run as a business by industry professionals.' The DfTO chief executive, Robin Gisby, will not see through the transition to GBR, after it was announced that he would be stepping down in December. Gisby had run state-owned train operations for seven years, and had said two weeks earlier that he would continue to work through the transition. However, sources indicated that GBR would now probably not be up and running until 2028. The DfT spokesperson added: 'DfTO is about to enter a pivotal phase and will be appointing a successor to lead the publicly owned operators through this change, bringing the network together under one mission.' The chief executive of Network Rail, Sir Andrew Haines, is also retiring in the autumn. His successor was last week named as Jeremy Westlake, currently chief financial officer. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion Haines and Gisby are leaving at a time of the biggest operational upheaval in Britain's railways for many years, the December 2025 timetable change. The new timetable is intended to allow for the benefits of billions of pounds spent upgrading the east coast mainline, to include faster trains to Edinburgh and more services to stations along the route. Previously expected last December, it was postponed amid fears of a repeat of the chaos that followed a switch in May 2018. Sources said the new timetable would still be 'challenging' but the industry was under pressure to demonstrate the worth of the investment. Passengers on the line faced disruptions on Sunday when overrunning engineering works and a power failure in north London meant no trains could run out of Kings Cross until the afternoon.
