A Fast Warming Earth and an Even Faster Changing World

The world is warming faster than at any point in recorded history. The world as we know it is also changing really fast.

3 days ago I was part of a cohort of Nominee Directors of the Netherlands Development Finance Company (the FMO) from across the world at a training that covered Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) reporting, how banks measure the carbon emission of their capital allocation, climate risk allocation process, Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF) etc.?

This training was timely, coming on the heels of the pivotal 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) which took place in Glasgow from November?1-12, 2021.

Due to a project that I am currently involved in, (and after several subtle and not so subtle prodding from Mazi Justin Ijeh), it also happened that within the same period I started reading "Mastering Blockchain - a deep dive into distributed ledgers, consensus protocols, smart contracts, DApps, cryptocurrencies, Ethereum, and more" by Imran Bashir.

These two otherwise unrelated knowledge acquisition forays have thrown up a number of imperatives for me.

The first is that the urgency that is being communicated in this climate change matter by global leaders and our professional colleagues in Europe, North and Latin America, and even South Africa, is largely lost on us in developing countries.?

It is as if we live in totally different dimensions, despite the fact that the new pattern of more frequent and more intense weather events around the world, (occasioned by the warming of Earth's climate) is likely to affect developing countries more because of our limited resources and level of preparedness (take for instance the fact that in a world in which responsible corporates are racing towards Net-Zero, Nigerians still live in a country that is subsidizing fossil fuels. But I digress).

Add the revolutions in technology (with Blockchain as just a piece in the puzzle), bankers or professionals in financial services who have refused to up-skill will wake up one day and discover that what used to be a familiar terrain has become largely alien. The "several years of cognate experience" we often quote in our resumes will become useless and irrelevant. Even erstwhile "Chartered Accountants" that refuse to up-skill will wake up to a world in which they will be unable to understand the annual report of a PCAF and TCFD compliant company.

Those of us who are still holding on to "this is how we have always done it" are fast becoming dinosaurs. However, rather than this extinction level event occuring with the speed of an onrushing apocalyptic asteroid, what humanity is faced with today first crept up on us, and is now surging forward like an enraged bull. "It took over 200 years for the CO2 accumulating in the Earth's atmosphere to increase by 25%, but now just over 30 years later, levels are at a 50% increase."?

In a future where every company is likely to be a tech company and the world is battling a climate crisis, the most important additional skill to learn in that new world will be how to write code and the companies that will thrive and dominate will be those that are carbon neutral.

That day is upon us.

Are you prepared?

#Climatechange #Netzero #COP26 #PCAF #TCFD #Blockchain #FMO #NED #amindisaterriblethingtowaste?#ceonuggets