Climate Finance 101

Last week, we hosted a Climate Finance 101 webinar. Before we started we knew we had amazing speakers, a good variety of topics and over 200 people registered, but it went even better than we expected — so we posted it on youtube for everyone to see!

Patrick Derochie covered Shift Action‘s efforts to speed up the decarbonization of the largest Canadian pension funds (including CPP); Tim Nash, from Good Investing, showed the audience how they can plan your investments ‘do less evil’ with exclusionary screenings or to actively ‘do good’ with impact bonds and other methods; and Myrtle from Climate Pledge Collective talked banks. All three speakers were excellent, but I’ve done webinars with Tim and Patrick before (and I live with Myrtle), so their insights weren’t new to me — our Free and Informed Prior Consent panel, on the other hand, was a revelation. Our three speakers explored FPIC at a level of detail and complexity that you simply never encounter on social media or traditional news coverage.

We organized a panel on FPIC because it is a term that we often hear discussed in relation to fossil fuel projects, but as we got into the complexities — the question of who consents, the question of what is to be done when there are disagreements between or within Indigenous nations — it was clear that even before it is possible for Indigenous people to consent, the underlying land claims must be resolved and Indigenous nations must be given time and resources in order to rebuild their traditional systems of governance and decision-making.

So please, watch the video, which is divided into chapters in the time bar, but we also urge you to go further and read up on and support the excellent work that all three of our FPIC panelists are doing.

Kukpi7 Wilson is the Secretary Treasure of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs.

Kayah George is a divestment campaigner with Indigenous Climate Action.

Eugene Kung is a staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law.