Nurturing a sustainable future with the flow of finance

In my more poetic moments, I see the finance system as a river. Finance flows to various activities and places. A large volume of water finds its way with little resistance to unsustainable activities (destructive farming practices, deforestation, overfishing, fossil fuel energy generation).

By contrast, there is a relatively thin trickle to places that will determine our quality of life in the future (renewable technologies, conservation of biodiversity, investment in communities), and these remain parched. If they are starved of river water much longer, it may be difficult for any amount of future flows to revive them.

Along my river, there are large whirlpools where an enormous volume of water goes round in spectacular circles. This is the area of the greatest activity but it has little impact on what people do along the riverbanks. The people on this part of the river (who you will recognise as the speculators in the finance system) drive fast boats as they busy themselves with churning up the water. The wash from this activity occasionally reaches the riverbanks, destroying the activities taking place on them.

OK – so it’s not a perfect metaphor. But it helps me to think through what we are trying to do with the finance system. Forum for the Future’s strategy has three elements.

Firstly, it’s about incentivising the longer-term thinking which will help people distinguish between unsustainable activities and those which build real value for businesses and society (working out why the river flows as it does, helping to re-route it where necessary, and trying to prevent unmanageable shocks).

Secondly, it’s about innovating new financial models which encourage investment to flow to those sustainable activities (creating and widening promising new channels).

And thirdly, it’s about injecting fresh thinking from outside the traditional finance sector, ideas like time banks, complementary currencies, mobile banking or peer-to peer lending which shake up established practices (building bridges that can connect up places independently of the river flow).

We need to work at two levels to create this change. We need to do a lot of detailed practical work with a lot of different people in and around the finance system (digging and damming and building). We also need to have an overview of how our practical projects are affecting the system as a whole (taking a helicopter ride occasionally to see from above how the river is running).

In five years’ time, I want to look down from my helicopter and see that Forum has helped reshape the landscape so that the river of finance nurtures a sustainable future.