Moving to a sustainable world is a multi-decadal process and must be resilient to inevitable geopolitical shocks and cycles in the global economy. Since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 the world has seen three globally significant financial crises, a global pandemic, two major oil price spikes and two global food crises. These global shocks have been complemented by multiple regional crises and conflicts.

Each of these crises has seen politcal attention shift away from managing long-term climate and environmental issues; driven by understandable issue overload and opportunistic lobbying by fossil interests and the ideological opponents of green policies.

Nick Mabey has been deeply engaged in arguing the security and macroeconomic case for continued investment in climate& envrinmental action as a way through crisis. Starting in the 2000s this work gained real momentum in the 2008/9 financial crisis where E3G worked with others to green the the G20 and EU stimulus response.

The G20 Leaders’ rhetoric of green recovery was only partially fulfilled. This was often due to structural limitations in scaling up green investment fast enough. E3G worked to ramp-up green delivery institutions including through campaigns to create the UK Green Investment Bank, reform the European Investment Bank and ensure good governance of the EU-wide stimulus. Given the preponderance of centre right governments in Europe, and their focus on “austerity”, it was also key to design green stimulus packages which had a positive long-term productivity impact (for example energy efficiency & grid investment) avoiding accusations of pure “Keynesianism”.

Europe did avoid the worst “brown” investments and channelled a reasonable proportion of stimulus funds into green infrastructure. Unfortunately most of this investment was concentrated in the existing climate-leaders in Western Europe; leaving poorer communities in Eastern Europe relatively untouched by the benefits of the clean economy. The crisis did open the door to deeper private sector financial reforms in Europe through the Capital Markets Union, but macroeconomic and public financial management was more resistant to “green QE” and other innovations.

The hard-won lessons of the global financial crisis informed E3G’s work in response to the COVID pandemic, with a focus which combined net zero aligned investments - to “build back better” - with a much stronger emphasis on structural economic reform through the IMF and national governments. The aim being to ensure economic inclusion and resilience were fully integrated into macroeconomic management responses. Integration of resilience to economic, climate, health and other shocks is vital to ensure wise investment in preparedness & resilience is seen as a macroeconomic benefit and not just a cost.

Progress has been made but the jury is still out on far reforms will go as geopolitical tensions rise and attention shifts to the impacts of the war in Ukraine on inflation, growth and trade. “Never letting a good crisis go to waste” is a good idea but in practice is held back by intellectual inertia in institutions and the natural desire for people to return to “normality” after a major shock. As countries adjust to a future of endemic geo-political and geo-economic volatility it will be increasingly vital to ensure the urgencies of the short term do not crowd out the importance of long term sustainability.