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What is Planetary Solvency?

Planetary Solvency is born from the simple but urgent insight that our society and economy depend completely on a stable Earth system: yet most financial and economic decisions still treat climate, nature and systemic risk as peripheral.

This is a precarious assumption, as climate and nature breakdown are no longer isolated environmental issues: they are systemic risks to food, energy, financial markets and security which cascade across borders and asset classes.

To help navigate the looming challenges, Planetary Solvency assesses the ongoing ability of the Earth system to support our human society and economy. For this, we strongly believe that a systems approach is needed.

So we operate as a nexus organisation, weaving a web of unusual connections between risk professionals, scientists, financial institutions, regulators, corporates, policymakers and NGOs, taking a shared, science-informed approach to systemic risk. By blending actuarial rigour with scientific understanding, we work to surface the realistic level of planetary systems risk to financial, economic and policy actors.

While we recognise that unprecedented, irreversible and catastrophic risk events are plausible unless our global trajectory is altered, we also believe that the world has the agency and ability to change course.

So our aim is not simply to warn about risk. It is to give the institutions that allocate capital and shape policy the confidence, evidence and tools to act: enabling resilience, supporting prosperity, and evolving the economy to live in balance with nature.

Our Approach: What We Do

We help senior leaders across finance, government and business visualise and act on rapidly escalating, interconnected climate and nature-driven systemic risks.

We do this through a range of Planetary Solvency-derived initiatives that take well established financial services risk and solvency management techniques and apply them to the Earth system.

We have a number of initiatives in development, all of which are focussed on:

• Educating — building the evidence base and risk literacy through rigorous, scientifically validated research
• Equipping — developing practical tools, scenario workshops and training
• Empowering — building coalitions, accrediting organisations, and giving institutions permission and cover to act
• Encouraging — sparking collaboration by convening scientists, risk professionals, financial institutions, businesses and policymakers within a single working network

We work with existing power, not around it. We’re not looking to build a new financial system; rather equip those within it - boards, governments, pension trustees - to see and manage systemic risk, as clearly as they see credit or market risk.

Through our work, we want to help capital reallocate at scale to activities that restore Earth-system stability, rather than subsidising systemic risk.

Team

Planetary Solvency brings together people with experience across Earth-system science, actuarial risk management, finance, policy, business and public engagement: