Reimagining a financial ecosystem in service of life
August 12, 2024
If you are prone to deep re-imaginings of how we invest on these hot summer days, I highly recommend this hugely inspiring piece of work by Samantha Power of The BioFi Project and Finance for Gaia and Leon Seefeld of the Dark Matter Labs
Bioregional Financing Facilities (BFF) | Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet
“Bioregional Financing Facilities can drive the decentralization of financial resource governance, the design of project portfolios for systemic change, and the transition to a regenerative economy. They have the potential to become the connective tissue between financial resources and on-the-ground regenerators.”
What if our society and economics were predicated upon the wrong taxonomies? What if we could reinvent the financing of our economic activity mapped out as a web of interconnected living systems?
Just as we have identified that the biodiversity of our soils and guts matter, we could consider reimagining the soil and guts of the investment portfolios that sustain our society.
What if investors - SSAs, pension funds, insurance and retail - were to lean on reference indices not constructed around artificially siloed regions of the world, industry sectors of our economy, not even around the social constructs of thematics, but instead were seeking to reproduce the living systems that keep nature's processes so abundantly generous?
How can we create a new, regenerative investing paradigm sufficiently relatable and attractive to institutional and retail investors for capital to flow where it can reignite life?
By resourcing investment research teams with biologists and bioengineers (cf. Biomimicry by Janine Benyus), we could begin to understand the linkages between issuers, sectors and regions from an entirely novel lens.
By constructing investment benchmarks and portfolios mimicking nature, we could harness the benefits of optimising energy use, cutting waste in the process, respecting life and traditional wisdom.
By co-creating a collaborative, multidisciplinary terrain for investments (cf. Edge Effect Abundance as one of the 8 Regenerative Principles of John Fullerton's Capital Institute) to truly reflect these interlinkages and processes, perhaps we could organically bring capital - and ourselves - back in flow and balance with our true nature and, dare I say, with our divinity.
#biomimicry #regenerativeinvesting #truenature
I am Constance de Wavrin, Founder of In|Flow, and these are my personal views.