A climate emergency is unfolding in real time—and those of us in the business community are largely to blame.
As we deplete earth’s resources, we have hit the point of diminishing returns. In the U.S. alone, there were over $100 billion in economic losses in 2023 due to severe weather events, droughts and global heating. Businesses bear most of the responsibility for the climate crisis, but so far have faced none of the real consequences. Business leaders have privatized the benefits our planet provides and socialized the costs of its destruction, impacting communities that now face biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, extreme weather, and the loss of healthy topsoil.
We have built a degenerative economy. Nearly every product, service, and technology we consume seems to destroy the systems upon which our wealth and prosperity have been built. Ultimately, this degenerative economy propels us toward degrowth. Every day that we continue on this path, the planet heats up. And every day the planet heats up, our economies cool down. A 1°C rise in global temperature is forecast to incinerate 12% of global GDP, worth roughly $13 trillion.
Our current economic model is running out of runway. Regenerative technologies offer investors a path forward to improve our planet and our bottom lines.
There’s no middle ground here. If our economic activities don’t contribute to the renewal and regeneration of our natural systems, they contribute to its decline. The choice is between a regenerative and renewable economy that fosters long-term, compounding growth, and a degenerative one that self-destructs. Leaders face a choice between regrowth and prosperity, and degrowth and destruction. We must relentlessly seek out and scale regenerative technologies. These technologies not only avoid escalating costs and the inevitable decline in marginal productivity but are also designed to create more than they consume and deliver superior returns on investment.
Regenerative technologies don’t merely patch up existing problems. As they demonstrate their ecological and economic benefits, they attract more investment, accelerating their development. This virtuous cycle, in which economic and environmental benefits mutually reinforce each other, ensures that every dollar invested multiplies exponentially. This prosperity can then feed back to communities catalyzing further growth and reducing costs. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop that traditional sustainable technologies, focused solely on incremental efficiency gains, simply can’t replicate.
Investing in regenerative technologies is both an imperative and an opportunity. Regenerative tech creates the conditions necessary for infinite prosperity on a finite planet. For instance, some of the organizations we partner with, such as Aigen and Circe, build regenerative food systems. And companies like Banyu, Ulysses, and Rhizocore develop regenerative products that remove carbon. We can have our cake and eat it too. We can enrich our lives and our bottom lines.
Perhaps surprisingly, many of the technologies needed to move us toward a regenerative future already exist. However, many governments still subsidize the harmful status quo and actively stifle innovation. Every dollar not actively invested in regenerative technologies is a dollar spent perpetuating depletion, accelerating environmental collapse, and deepening our reliance on dwindling resources. The business community faces a choice between funding a future of abundance and fueling a legacy of loss. The time to make this choice is now.
