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Whole Earth Finance: Beyond Bretton Woods Solutions for the 21st Century

April 2025

DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.24850.77760

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Jonathan T. Isham

Middlebury College

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How can systemic changes in the international financial architecture accelerate the world's transition to clean energy and address the urgent challenges of the polycrisis? Building on extensive conversations within the Beyond Bretton Woods network, we present a series of causal relationships to diagnose the impairment if not hijacking of modern capitalism. Based on recent discourse about planetary boundaries and on sound applications of economics, we then detail six high-impact recommendations whose time has come: placing ecocentrism at the center of international finance reform; implementing an instantaneous global carbon price; establishing a new debt restructuring mechanism; incorporating the polycrisis into monetary policy; designing a novel nature-based currency; and creating new global governance entities. We conclude with a brief discussion of the means by which civil society can be rallied in support of these systemic changes.

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Whole Earth Finance:

Beyond Bretton Woods Solutions for the 21st Century

Jonathan Isham

Frank Van Gansbeke

Vinod Thomas

April 16, 2025

Faculty on the Road

Middlebury in DC

1400 K St NW

Washington, DC

How can systemic changes in the international financial architecture accelerate the world’s

transition to clean energy and address the urgent challenges of the polycrisis? Building on

extensive conversations within the Beyond Bretton Woods network, we present a series of

causal relationships to diagnose the impairment if not hijacking of modern capitalism. Based on

recent discourse about planetary boundaries and on sound applications of economics, we then

detail six high-impact recommendations whose time has come: placing ecocentrism at the

center of international finance reform; implementing an instantaneous global carbon price;

establishing a new debt restructuring mechanism; incorporating the polycrisis into monetary

policy; designing a novel nature-based currency; and creating new global governance entities.

We conclude with a brief discussion of the means by which civil society can be rallied in support

of these systemic changes.

Keywords: polycrisis, multilateral organizations, financial reform

JEL codes. F02, F33, F53

Acknowledgements

Beyond Bretton Woods (BBW) was co-founded by James Vaccaro and Frank Van Gansbeke on

the occasion of COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, building on conversations at the 75th Bretton

Woods anniversary organized by the Bancor Foundation at the original treaty venue. In July

2022, Van Gansbeke participated in the foundational meeting of the Bridgetown Initiative in

Barbados at the invitation of Prime Minister Mia Mottley.

We acknowledge the leadership of the members of BBW and express our gratitude for their

thoughtful advice on ideas in this paper, recognizing that all errors are ours. We particularly

thank co-founder James Vacarro as well as Ralph Chami, Hubert Danso, Swayamprabha Das,

Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Chris Hopkins, William Hynes, Joseph Ingram, Rajiv Joshi, Juan

Jardon-Pina, Fadhel Kaboub, Hunter Lovins, Stuart Mackintosh, Sara Murawski, Darius Nassiry,

Delilah Rothenberg, Mick Sheldrick, Franklin Steves, and Steve Waygood. We are grateful for

the good counsel of global leaders, including Nancy Birdsall, Sir Mark Malloch-Brown, Bill

McKibben, Prime Minister Mia Mottley, and Gus Speth. We thank Middlebury students who have

assisted our research, including Lillian Caldwell, Ken Deng, Amaan Habibulla, Angela Izi Nkusi,

Lomus Pudasiani, Dylan Taylor, and Maya Teiman.

I. Introduction

The international financial architecture is in full conflict with the laws of physics and chemistry

(Kintisch 2009) . The prioritization of suboptimal investments in physical, human, natural, and

social capital has led to the breaching of six out of nine planetary boundaries (Richardson et al.

2023) . Public and private bankers look away from the most urgent concerns of hundreds of

millions of people, particularly in the Global South.

For example, banks of all kinds–which have provided $7 trillion to the oil and gas industry since

the 2015 Paris Agreement (Cunningham 2024) –provide less than $1.5 trillion per year for the

most urgent challenge of our time: transitioning to clean energy sources in the Global South that

can save lives, save money, and save the planet. Experts agree that this is nowhere near

enough (Fong 2024) . The world’s poor, who yearn for more income, better schooling and

healthcare, and the dignity of being able to choose how they want to live, suffer the most (World

Bank 2024a) .

And this yearning is particularly acute right now. The climate crisis has magnified the poor’s

vulnerability; the debt crisis has stalled pro-poor investments; citizens trust their institutions and

leaders less, all against the backdrop of geopolitical tensions. In short, it’s a polycrisis, “a global

crisis [that] arises when one or more fast-moving trigger events combines with slow-moving

stresses to push a global system out of its established equilibrium and into a volatile and

harmful state of disequilibrium” (Lawrence et al. 2024) (Figure 1).

The Beyond Bretton Woods (BBW) initiative includes global academics, former World Bank and

International Monetary (IMF) executives, scientists, and students, who represent the next

generation. Since late 2021, BBW has been developing recommendations for a more equitable

and sustainable international financial architecture. In July 2022, Prime Minister Mia Mottley

convened a small group of academics and policymakers, including BBW leadership, in

Barbados. Their focus was the failure of the global financial system, launched in 1944 at the

Bretton Woods Conference, to address the polycrisis.

That gathering produced the Bridgetown Initiative, a call to reform the global financial system so

the world can better respond to current and future crises (Persaud 2023) . In May 2024, this

work continued at Middlebury College, where over 170 participants (including 60 students)

gathered for three days at the “Beyond Bretton Woods Conference” to examine the current

global financial system through the lens of the polycrisis and to ask how the world can do better.

The good news? It’s not hard to identify and implement one or two effective levers that can

address selected parts of our current polycrisis. Scholars and policy makers have been doing

this for a long time. A century ago the economist Arthur Pigou made the case for taxing

economic transactions that directly harm others (Pigou 1920) . Since the start of the

environmental movement in the 1960s, governments of all kinds have regulated pollution

through taxation and related means: cap-and-trade systems now cover 24% of global emissions

(World Bank 2024b) .

But our current polycrisis cannot be solved by a single lever or two (Meadows 1999) . In 1972,

as the environmental movement took off, the scientist Donella Meadows formally introduced

systems thinking. In Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) , she and her colleagues illustrated

how systems–”set[s] of things … interconnected in such a way that they produce their own

patterns of behavior over time” (Meadows 2008) –can be transformed to improve lives and the

world we love. In doing so, Meadows and her colleagues asked how we can imagine a better

kind of economic growth, an entirely different way to track human progress on our planet.

Another early 1970’s classic, The Whole Earth Catalog (Brand 1971) , made headway in

changing the world’s Zeitgeist about ecology, the scientific perspective that mobilized the

environmental movement worldwide. That book’s essence? That collectively, citizens can learn

from each other to create place-based pragmatic solutions and then scale them up to effect

social change worldwide (Kirk 2007) .

Neither Limits to Growth nor The Whole Earth Catalog achieved what their authors envisioned:

over the last 50 years, economic growth (for better or worse) has remained the benchmark for

social progress; citizen-led change has often faltered where it is most needed. But these books

are notable touchstones. We believe that systems thinking can help us to make sense of the

current polycrisis; we have faith that citizen-based connectivity is the key to social change.

Above all, we know that the zeitgeist around global finance–what people everywhere should

demand of banks of all kinds–needs to change.

To get there, we make a case for a new paradigm aligned with planetary boundaries, human

health imperatives, and a new moral code (Chandler 2024) . Our analytical work has been

inspired by Bill Sharpe’s “Three Horizons” framework, where the first horizon represents

“business as usual;” the third horizon emerges as the long term successor to business as usual;

and the second horizon is a pattern of transition activities and innovations in which citizens test

ideas in response to socioeconomic and cultural change (B. Sharpe 2013) . Following this

model, BBW has been designing the contours of a new financial architecture while at the same

taking a deeper analytical look at the current system and articulating disruptive features as

building blocks for the future.

In this paper, a preview of a forthcoming book with the same title, we first offer a brief review of

the 80 years of international financial architecture since the Bretton Woods Conference. We

then present a chain of causality that begins with six global trends and culminates with nine

current global pain points. We then call for a new kind of international financial architecture

based on six recommendations. We conclude with preliminary observations on how to harness

civil society to effect these changes in the years ahead.

II. Eighty years of international financial architecture

In the early 1800s, most people around the world were poor, serving others as slaves or serfs

just like their ancestors did (Hochschild 2005) . From the mid-1800s into the early 1900s,

economies everywhere became more integrated with each other as a result of industrialization:

the widespread adoption of the steam engine and electricity, the invention of the telegraph, the

growth of railroads and global shipping, the birth of the modern corporation, and dramatic waves

of migration. As a result, lives began to improve in many parts of the world (DeLong 2022) , even

as colonialism and unfair trade practices continued to tilt the scales in favor of the Global North.

And then from 1914 to 1944, everything changed. The 30 years prior to the Bretton Woods

Conference were calamitous, and calamities were for the first time truly global. The Great War

and influenza decimated populations everywhere. It also heralded the end of Great Britain as

the principal global power. Capital flows among the war’s winners and losers tied the fortunes of

populations across borders and oceans. The largest collapse of stock markets in history

sparked a global depression. And finally, a second, even more destructive world war led to

colossal loss of life, human misery, and bombed-out industrial regions.

With the end of World War II in sight, the leaders who assembled in July 1944 in rural New

Hampshire had it in their power to shape the contours of a new financial world order. The 1944

Bretton Woods Conference, unlike any that had come before, will be remembered as enacting

the global and financial shift of power from a waning British empire towards an emerging

American superpower. Even as battles still raged in Europe and the Pacific, this gathering of

over 730 elected officials, policy makers, and academics from 44 countries (including Russia

and China) laid the groundwork for the international financial architecture of our time (Kenen

2008) , the system to this day through which capital flows from private and public sources, based

mostly in the Global North. What are the elements of that system, and how important are they

today for the world’s current global financial system?

The Bretton Woods Conference delivered three principal outcomes (Carter 2020) . Backed by

the United States’ leading creditor status, the United States Dollar (USD)–with permanent gold

convertibility at a fixed exchange rate–was accepted as the global reserve currency, (John

Maynard Keynes had offered an alternative supranational currency, the Bancor, a multilateral

construct that the US delegation swiftly swiped the off the negotiating table.)

Second, the World Bank was established–with grants and low interest loans from its member

countries–to help rebuild postwar Europe and to address structural capital needs of developing

countries. By the mid-1960s, that mission had expanded to a broad mandate for poverty

alleviation; in the following decades, the World Bank became the “single most important external

source of ideas and advice to developing-country policymakers” (Gavin and Rodrik 1995) .

Third, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was created as a clearinghouse to monitor and

smooth capital flows triggered by trade account imbalances between different member

countries. In time, the IMF’s mandate has expanded to being a lender of last resort for countries,

primarily in the Global South, who are facing currency and debt crises. To fulfill its mission, the

IMF manages special drawing rights (SDRs), which are international reserve assets composed

of USDs, euros, British pounds, Japanese yen, and (since 2016) the Chinese yuan. SDRs act

as a unit of account; they cannot be used for payments by governments or individuals.

The Bretton Woods Conference’s main takeaway was a rule-based, multilateral financial order

in the principal interest of World War II’s winners. By providing economic assistance to post-war

Europe, the Economic Recovery Act of 1948, known as the Marshall Plan, further solidified the

post-war order (DeLong and Eichengreen 1991) . In 1961, the Organization for Economic

Cooperation and Development (OECD) replaced the Marshall Plan’s Organization for European

Economic Cooperation; since then, OECD membership has expanded to include 37 upper- or

upper-middle-income countries, representing 62.2 percent of the world’s total GDP (Runde,

Askey, and McKeown 2020) .

Today, the influence of these two Bretton Woods organizations is, paradoxically, both outsized

and limited. For many countries in the Global South, loans from the World Bank remain

essential for the provision of public goods, and support from the IMF is critical for the resolution

of macroeconomic imbalances. And to be in good standing with these organizations is a

necessary signal for the flow of private capital: risk-averse investors look to the Bretton Woods

institutions for assurances about the potential of new and growing markets (Bomprezzi,

Marchesi, and Turk 2022) .

At the same time, they control a relatively small share of the world’s capital markets. As of 2025,

about $500 trillion of liquid capital is controlled by private and public entities (Robins et al.

2024) . The Bank’s portfolio is $325 billion, with lending of $62 billion in 2024 (Nelson 2025) ; the

Fund is currently able to lend up to $1 trillion to its member countries; in 2024, disbursement to

member countries was $30 billion (International Monetary Fund 2025) . Meanwhile, private

climate-related investments from the Global North to the Global South are about $1 trillion. In

recent years, the share of investments in clean energy have grown, but nowhere near enough

(Fong 2024) .

Global resources are allocated suboptimally; insufficient capital flows to the world’s poor. Why?

As we detail in the next section, the interlocked sources of global capital are tangled up in an

80-year gordian knot. The World Bank and the IMF, Wall Street, central banks, and many

bilateral aid organizations are often in league with entrenched leaders of the Global North and

South. This global system works for them and their foot-soldiers–some people call them the

elite–but it falls short for too many who need it most. It has for a long time.

III. Causal relationships: six trends

So what has happened to the ambitions of the Bretton Woods Conference and the world it

helped create over the last 80 years? The emergence of six related global trends–the free

market doctrine, the absence of a nature-centric paradigm, dollarization of the international

market, globalization, the health and quality of life paradox, and polarization–have laid the

groundwork for the polycrisis.

The stage for these trends was set on an August evening in 1971 with President Nixon’s

announcement of the demise of gold standard convertibility in the face of the escalating Vietnam

war burden. That declaration laid the path for fossil-fuel-based economic growth worldwide,

enabled by commercial banks’ money-creation duopoly with central banks, unfettered by

sufficient monetary or regulatory constraints. The trends that followed have eroded the

foundational premises of the Bretton Woods Conference.

A. The Chicago School and neoliberalism

The University of Chicago’s free-market paradigm took hold in the early 1970s in response to

heavy-handed government intervention worldwide, including the fiscal overreach of the Johnson

administration and bungled socialization efforts in the Global South (J. Friedman 2022) . By the

early 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher championed neoliberal principles with the

broad support of voters. In the US, think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato

Institute provided further intellectual backing and policy leverage (MacLean 2017) ; many of

these fiscal and monetary policies continued when the executive and legislative branches were

under Democratic rule (Stiglitz 2024) . At the same time, the World Bank and the IMF

championed the Washington Consensus around markets, openness, and export orientation

(Birdsall, De La Torre, and Caicedo 2011) .

The eventual embrace of market forces since the 1980s has been associated with sustained

poverty alleviation. Since 1990, rapid economic growth—especially in China and India—has

liberated more than 1 billion people from extreme poverty (World Bank 2024a) . At the same

time, elements of this paradigm planted the seeds for the current polycrisis. In the Global North,

this includes privatization of core government services; scaled-down welfare plans; weakened

trade unions; infrastructure investments and unwarranted subsidies for oil and gas; tax cuts for

the wealthy; aggressive military campaigns (Gulf Wars I and II led by the US; the Falklands

skirmish led by the UK); and the militarization of police forces. Neoliberalism has concentrated

power with capital at the expense of labor; with fossil-fuel interests at the expense of alternative

energy sources; and with the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

The neoliberal model also called for accommodating monetary policies: central banks worldwide

were advised by World Bank and IMF economists to target a neutral monetary policy, backed by

the joint goals of long-term economic growth and moderate money-supply expansion. But the

abstraction under the neoliberal model of unfettered money creation by commercial banks has

had long-term consequences. Since the demise of the gold standard in 1971, unbridled

leverage accelerated the number and frequency of financial crises: the early 1980s savings and

loans debacle in the US; the 1982 Mexican debt crisis; the Black Monday stock market crash in

1987; the Japanese asset bubble in the late 80s; the 1997 Asian and 1998 Russia crises; and

the 1998 collapse of Long Term Capital Management. The Chicago School’s legacy for capital

markets includes the myopic focus of investors, exemplified by the venerated quarterly reporting

cycle; short-term capital account flows and high-frequency trading; and the obfuscation of

intergenerational consequences created by ever more frequent boom and bust cycles.

The free-market paradigm has been further characterized by profound industrial and financial

deregulation, starting in the late 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s. Thanks to weakened

antitrust provisions and practices, the food, banking, fossil fuel, tech, and semiconductor

industries have reached unprecedented concentration levels (Mauboussin and Callahan 2024) ,

to the detriment of competitive pricing, resilient supply chains, and robust data privacy (in the

name of the allure of free applications). Financial deregulation reached its apogee with the

repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act by the Clinton administration in 1999: the

Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act allowed commercial banks to merge with investment banks. As a

result, banks’ money creation capability had free rein to fuse with complex risk-taking activities

related to capital markets, derivatives, and securitization. Wall Street’s singular profit

focus–coupled with accommodating monetary policy and managerial bungling of complex risk at

the highest level (Sorkin 2009) –led to the 2008 financial crisis. And notably, the financial market

collapse set off unruly undercurrents, including the Occupy Wall Street movement and the

prominence of the research of Thomas Piketty and his colleagues (Piketty 2014) , bringing social

inequality to the forefront with the coining of “the one-percenters.” With this crisis, the Zeitgeist

around finance and its discontents began, at least in some quarters, to shift.

The common thread of financial crises over the last four decades has been the need for

government intervention and taxpayer money to bail out failing incumbents. The 2008 aftermath

saw the introduction of Quantitative Easing (QE), an unorthodox policy availed by a line of credit

from the Department of Treasury that allows a central bank to increase the money supply; the

proceeds allow for the purchase of government bonds and other financial assets in the open

market. QE was also an essential complement to the newly introduced Dodd-Frank regulation,

which drastically curtailed the banks’ money creation capacity by imposing formidable liquidity

and solvency frameworks.

In 2020, QE policy was taken off the shelf again to absorb the shocks of the global COVID-19

pandemic. As a direct outcome, the four largest central banks–the Federal Reserve, the

European Central Bank, the People’ Bank of China, and the Bank of Japan–became

market-makers and price setters in a combined $30 trillion market comprised mainly of

government securities, mortgage-backed securities, and to a lesser extent Corporate Bonds

(Dunn 2024) .

All of this turned the neoliberal approach on its head, as government central parties are

controlling and setting market prices. Furthermore, it substituted one of the concrete pillars of

the Bretton Woods gathering into a clay one, as solid solvency (gold standard) was traded for

excessive fiat currency leverage. Eighty years on, the solid financial footing sought by the

Bretton Woods delegates is hard to find. A significant fissure in the Bretton Woods edifice is the

total leverage amount outstanding, close to $500 trillion as of 2024. The most dominant

investors (49%) are non-regulated financial intermediaries (Financial Stability Board 2024) :

hedge funds, private equity entities and sovereign wealth funds, which have surpassed central

banks, private banks and public financial institutions in market share .

B. Absence of a nature-centric paradigm

The other side of the neoliberal coin has been the absence of a nature-centric approach in

policymaking and in finance. As Milton Friedman’s public influence grew (M. Friedman 1970) ,

Limits to Growth was released. The report fundamentally questioned the emerging model of

unlimited material growth, the incessant depletion of natural resources, and ensuing runaway

consumerism; despite its analytical flaws (Kahn 2022) , it has remained iconic for its introduction

of systems thinking (and its brazen title).

Limits to Growth was preceded by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Carson 1962) . An ecologist,

Carson reported in the early 1960s how US bird populations were dying because of widespread

use of the synthetic pesticide DDT. Her findings sparked the global environmental movement,

including the rallying of approximately 20 million Americans for Earth Day 1970 (Rome 2003) .

This movement opened a new policy window, leading to bipartisan support in the US for the

creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (1970) and the passage of the Clean Air Act

(1970) and the Clean Water Act (1972). Environmental policies worldwide have a record that

often passes the benefit-cost test (Wang et al. 2024) : notable (if in the long-run fragile)

successes persist alongside failures. For example, many major pollutants that are harmful to

human health and can also damage ecosystems–local public bads such as sulphur dioxide,

nitrogen oxides, and black and organic carbon–have likely peaked (Ritchie 2025) . Yet in many

cities and other densely populated regions, air pollutants remain well above levels

recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines, as exemplified by recent

public health emergencies in Lahore. Globally, deaths from fine particulate and ozone air

pollution are estimated at 8.34 million (Lelieveld et al. 2023) .

For global public bads, with the exception of the implementation of the 1987 Montreal Protocol

to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals (Gonzalez, Taddonio, and Sherman 2015) , the story

has been different. The full gamut of UN-sponsored Conference of Parties (COPs) since 1992,

backed by increasingly-alarming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports,

have not made a significant dent in the annual flow of global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions

or the stock of CO2 in the atmosphere (Figure 2).

And one might ask: how could it be otherwise in the face of staunch deregulation, the powerful

oil and gas lobby, and an international banking system that is incapable of pricing for

carbon-based externalities? The Capital Asset Pricing Model (W. F. Sharpe 1964) widely used

to calibrate the cost of equity for a firm–and still widely taught in MBA investment courses–not

only has a poor empirical record (Fama and French 2004) ; it is fully agnostic about a firm’s

carbon footprint. On Wall Street and in The City today, capital allocation by banks, equity

investment by asset managers, and underwriting activity by investment banks make no

adjustments for a corporation’s carbon-footprint contribution to climate risk .

The environment was never evoked during Bretton Woods. Today, macroeconomic models used

by governments and multilateral lenders underestimate or ignore climate effects in forecasting

economic growth (Thomas 2024) . The world now releases 60 Gigatons of CO2eq annually; the

CO2 atmospheric reading stands at 426 CO2 ppm, compared to 300 CO2 ppm in the early

1950s. UN Secretary-General Gutierrez calls the latest IPCC Climate Report “Code Red for

Humanity” on the back of “irrefutable” evidence of human influence on the warming of the planet

(McGrath 2021) . Whilst the 1944 conference heralded the global power shift from the British

Empire to the nascent American Empire, a new international financial architecture must herald

the transition from the oil-and-gas driven monetary-aggregate system to a nature-centric

framework that takes account of the world’s finite carbon reserve (McGlade and Ekins 2015) .

C. Dollarization

In 1959, economist Robert Triffin observed that the Bretton Woods global reserve currency

would be compelled to run large trade deficits to provide the global market with the required

number of USDs (Maes 2013) . Ten years later, the IMF introduced SDRs. An expansion of

Keynes’ Bretton Woods proposal of the Bancor, this policy was an effort to diversify trade

patterns away from the United States and lessen the importance of the USD as the reserve

currency.

The United States responded by using its currency as part of a “weaponization strategy,” which

in its simplest form is why the oil trade is still expressed in USDs. To illustrate: with the

introduction of the euro in 1999, European central bankers tried to negotiate oil trades in their

new currency. Their Middle Eastern counterparts responded with a wry rhetorical question–

“What will you offer in return?”–as they pointed out to the US 5th Fleet stationed in Bahrain

(personal communication 2005). Reserve currency status is, in essence, maintained and

endorsed by military power. In its more complex form, the weaponization strategy implies the

use of sanctions to exclude Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and other non-complying nations from

access to the US financial system, its assets, and its markets.

The United States has also effectively used its reserve currency for crisis management. During

the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve Bank availed extensive currency swap facilities in

USD to the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank. Similar lines were satisfied at

the time to Brazil, Mexico, Korea, and Singapore (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve

System 2008) . In the case of the swap facility provided to the ECB, it entailed the Federal

Reserve providing USDs in exchange for an equivalent amount in euro. These USDs allowed

the European Central Bank to inject USD liquidity in the local European market, alleviating

liquidity squeezes at local financial institutions that were facing funding stress in USDs.

As a result of the deployment of the USDs as part of a weaponization strategy and a crisis

management tool, the USD remains the dominant status as a payment currency, with 49.1%

share of global trade (Rolfe 2024) . Dollarization has sidelined the IMF to the periphery of

interventionist policymaking: the IMF now mostly sorts out issues with nations whose crisis

magnitude would not impact US interests, another weakness of the current international

financial architecture.

D. Globalization

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 seemed to not only vindicate neoliberalism, thereby “ending

history” (Fukuyama 1992) : it enabled worldwide access to cheap labor, new markets, and

production facilities. The acceleration of globalization dates back to the last institution

emanating from the original Bretton Woods Agreement: the World Trade Organization (WTO),

which in 1995 morphed out of the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). From 1948

to 1994, the GATT provided the provisional rules framework for world trade and oversaw an era

with unprecedented growth in international commerce. The subsequent establishment of the

WTO in Geneva was a game changer: it expanded GATT’s trade-in-goods mandate to cover

services, intellectual property, and dispute-settlement procedures.

In the 1990s, large corporations began to outsource domestic production capacity to foreign

territories. The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) created a free trade zone

for Mexico, Canada, and the United States, which allowed large corporations to sue for

compensation if ensuing regulation would harm their franchise. The deal has led to large and

persistent employment losses in US counties whose 1990 employment depended on industries

vulnerable to NAFTA (Choi et al. 2024) and has been associated with groundwater depletion

and poorly remediated water pollution in Mexico (Gladstone et al. 2021) .

As China joined the WTO in 2001, the trade organization governed a truly globalized process

that allowed Cupertino’s Apple, for example, to outsource its assembly processes to a

Taiwanese company, Foxconn, which was in turn located in China’s Shenzhen (Chan, Pun, and

Selden 2013) . The underlying assumption: fostering international trade–absent impediments

and tariffs and within a reliable international legal framework–would in the long run improve

welfare for all. But as is often the case, unintended consequences were more difficult to oversee

and abate (Stiglitz 2002) , including unchecked labor conditions in mainland China and

delocalization of US production capacity. The combined effect of importing outsourced

production capacity and cheaper substitution goods led to substantial trade imbalances between

the US and China. And notably, it contributed to the decline of societal and wealth status of the

US blue-collar workforce (Case and Deaton 2020) .

Against the rules of the WTO, China–via its State Administration of Foreign Exchange

fund–initially recycled the USDs gathered from their exports into the US Treasury Market (now

less than $1 trillion). WTO regulations required them to convert these USD into Yuan in the

foreign exchange market. By circumventing the rules, China kept its exchange rate artificially

low to protect its export base. Over the last decade, China has redeployed USDs generated

from the export trade into developing and expanding their Belt and Road initiative, the Chinese

equivalent of the Marshall plan (Liu et al. 2025) .

The globalization trend, bolstered by the advent of globally-integrated supply chains and

empire-building initiatives, has minimized the global-investment role of the World Bank. While

the citizens of China, India, and other emerging nations have benefitted materially from this

transition, it also exposed them to the harsh side of free-market economics. Land degradation,

environmental pollution, excessive debts, and widening economic inequalities have been some

of the new burdens of contention.

E. Health and quality-of-life paradox

The global economy stands at a total of about $100 trillion; the US contribution is more than $20

trillion. Alongside immense growth in material assets since the Bretton Woods Conference,

health indicators have dramatically improved in the Global North and South alike. Over the last

80 years, longevity has increased dramatically, maternal mortality has declined, and public

health innovations have transformed lives on all continents (Ortiz-Ospina and Roser 2024) .

Concurrently, society has faced, overcome, and processed numerous fears and risk: the nuclear

war threat in the 1970s and 80s; the war on terror after the 2001 Twin Towers attack; the

financial insecurity and loss of employment in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis,

climate-change related dystopian risk projections, and pandemic health risk led by the

COVID-19 pandemic. These fear and risk patterns have become more exacerbated with the

introduction of the iPhone in 2008 and the ensuing rise to the dominance of social media

platforms. The Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) concern has been expertly exploited by trolls and

“attention” algorithms launched by the platforms (Zhang et al. 2023) .

This incessant fear pattern has taken its toll on the quality of life in the form of a silent emotional

health pandemic. In the US, from 2003 to 2023, the age-adjusted rate of drug overdose deaths

increased from 8.9 deaths to 31.3 per 100,000, with a total of 105,007 drug overdose deaths in

2023 (Garnett and Miniño 2024) . From 2002 to 2023, the number of U.S. adults who received

mental health treatment or counseling over the previous year more than doubled, from 27.2

million to 59.2 million (Vankar 2024) . Numbers in Europe are trending in the same direction

(Burns 2022) .

What is the good of wealth, to which people in the Global North and South aspire, if these

trends exist and grow? The mandates of domestic health institutions and the WHO, difficult even

to imagine at the time of Bretton Woods, have been outpaced by recent public health

developments and quality of life concerns. Where, at what price, and through which modified

mandate should public health and quality of life be addressed in the priorities and value

hierarchy?

F. Polarization

When the Bretton Woods Conference convened, the two main power blocks were demarcated

by what Winston Churchill later identified in 1946 as “an Iron Curtain [that] has descended

across the Continent.” Western and Soviet Union blocks respectively, through NATO and the

Warsaw Pact, had allied members in tow: Bretton Woods allowed for a rule-based financial

order, with the USD as the anchor currency imposed on a bipolar global power base.

The world has since become intensively more polarized. A rule-based approach is making way

to the law of power. On the international scene, this has included the open trade war between

the US and China, the shock of Brexit, the emerging questioning of the US’s unconditional

support of NATO, as well as the concurrent withdrawal intent from international intervention and

the buffetstyle approach to the Paris 2015 climate treaty commitments. On domestic fronts,

there is the Gilets Jaunes group in France, the quickly acquiring broad groundswell Extinction

Rebellion movement in the UK, and the use of global brutal police force against minorities and

environmental protesters.

As we complete this paper draft, EU leaders are reeling from the February 2025 “Danger from

Within” speech of Vice President Vance and the chummy summit between Secretary of State

Rubio and Foreign Secretary Lavrov. Polarization, in old and new forms, is on the rise.

IV. Nine current pain points

After 30 calamitous years, the Bretton Woods delegates laid the groundwork for stable

economic development in industrialized and emerging nations. Additionally, they strived for

improved welfare, expanded public health support, and free trade expansion, all embedded in a

dependable international financial system. Today the polycrisis, triggered by a public health

pandemic, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, loss of trust in institutions, and

international-trade and financial-market instability, looms large over the structural foundations of

Bretton Woods.

The time has come for system change, a shift in economic thinking guided by a new moral

compass. In collaboration with our BBW partners, we believe that new thinking must center

around the design of a new economic paradigm–summarized in this paper as Whole Earth

Finance–that targets nine pain points in the existing international financial architecture, as

follows.

Inefficient capital flows from the Global North to the Global South have led to:

1. Substantial gaps for mitigation, adaptation, and loss & damage financing, estimated at

between $2 to $4 trillion per year;

2. Markets that insufficiently price in externalities, in particular long-term climate damages;

3. Accounting mechanisms for natural-capital value that are rudimentary and inadequate.

Those accounting mechanisms are in turn part of a broader, outdated value paradigm in which:

4. Existing institutions are incapable of valuing and overseeing climate finance;

5. Monetary policy excludes climate and inequality considerations from the

decision-making process;

6. GDP and growth reporting obscure wellness-based and nature-centric metrics.

And global power structures have locked in rules that benefit them at the expense of the poor

and of future generations:

7. Oil and gas industry has outsized financial support, in the form of subsidies and loans,

and outsized power in the overall financial and political system;

8. The shadow banking sector–comprised mostly of private equity, hedge funds, and

sovereign wealth funds–is unregulated and thus susceptible to moral hazard;

9. The Global South is overburdened with debt and underrepresented in multinational

institutions.

To address these pain points, our recommendations are built around the four pillars. First,

markets and all related human activity are embedded in the biosphere: ecocentricity should be a

guiding design principle for financial architecture. Second, prices should reflect real value, now

and in the future: this includes placing a value on natural capital assets in firms’ and countries’

balance sheets. Third, the rules of the game–more formally, institutions–that shape financial

flows need to be recalibrated toward the Global South and future generations. Fourth,

governance of this complex system must not just ensure fairness: it must acknowledge and be

built around the urgency of survival over these next few decades, as leaders and citizens alike

take on the polycrisis.

V. Recommendations: the call for a new international financial architecture

Markets and all related human activity are embedded in the biosphere (Daly 2005) : ecocentricity

should therefore be a guiding design principle for financial architecture. Accordingly, our first

recommendation for moving forward, the foundation for those that follow in this section, is that

international finance reform should evolve towards an ecocentric stock and flow approach for

sovereign nations.

We admit that at first glance this is almost an insurmountably tall order, entailing a major change

in the priorities and day-to-day decision-making of public and private banks worldwide that

control trillions of dollars of assets. Could this transformation–from anthropocentric to ecocentric

finance–happen in time to avert the worst effects of the polycrisis? In the paper’s final section

we briefly share our vision for how this and the subsequent five recommendations could actually

be implemented in the decade ahead.

Before we offer those concluding ideas–let’s call them stepping stones for a social

movement–we detail in this section each of our six recommendations. And as a reminder, each

of them flows from the systemic forces that have brought us to the polycrisis: the dominance of

the neoliberal paradigm and related trends; and the nine current pain points in the existing

international financial architecture.

A. Make the International Finance Reform Ecocentric

Since the global community’s first attempts to address climate change in the 1990s, large-scale

efforts to mitigate climate change have encountered two substantial challenges: finding proven

and cost-effective ways to scale down the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere; and allocating

sufficient capital for these newer (and often perceived as riskier) technologies. Over the last

decade, there’s been good news: the cost of renewables have come down dramatically; in much

of the world, solar, wind, and storage now combine to outcompete coal, oil, and gas (Imelda,

Fripp, and Roberts 2024) . “Electrify Everything!”, once a wistful call by climate activists, is now a

reasonable economic and business proposition (Jacobson 2023) .

Given the potential profits for investors, not to mention the urgency of the moment, why haven’t

capital markets stepped in? Distorted price signals, as we detail below, continue to be a major

obstacle: fossil-fuel subsidies persist, and a universal carbon-price has not yet gained traction.

Underlying this misalignment is the major hole in modern capitalism: the global economy,

financial markets, and society at large have failed to attribute value to natural capital assets,

without which there can be no individual, system-wide, or planetary wellbeing.

Natural capital can be defined as the world’s stocks of natural assets–global public goods that

include the world’s oceans, fresh water, forests, and biodiversity, just for starters–from which

humans derive a wide range of ecosystem services (Barbier 2019) , including the abatement of

atmospheric CO2, worth trillions of dollars. Poorly managed natural capital has become an

ecological, social and economic liability. Working against nature by overexploiting natural capital

can be catastrophic not just in terms, say, of biodiversity; it has the potential to be catastrophic

for humans as ecosystem resilience decline and some regions become more prone to extreme

events such as floods and droughts, as we have seen this decade in Pakistan, North Carolina,

and most recently in Los Angeles, among other places. Ultimately, this makes it more difficult for

human communities to sustain themselves, particularly in already stressed ecosystems,

potentially leading to food scarcity, resource conflicts, and displacement of populations.

And yet global markets too often place no value on their flow–the destruction, say, of coral

reefs–nor the underlying stock–the value of the world’s mangroves. At the heart of modern

financial markets is an obvious yet destructive truth: when an asset is unpriced, it will be run

down.

So how to begin pricing natural capital assets? Here’s a telling example. A recent study for the

IMF reveals the startling carbon-capture potential of whales, who accumulate carbon in their

bodies during their long lives. When they die, each great whale sinks to the bottom of the ocean

and sequesters on average 33 tons of CO2, taking that carbon out of the atmosphere for

centuries. A tree, by contrast, absorbs on average only up to 48 pounds of CO2 a year (Chami

et al. 2019) . Using an estimate of $185 for the social cost of a ton of carbon, that’s a

sequestration value of over $6000.

The challenge is therefore to change the incentive structure in international finance, based on

such estimates: how can markets place value on whales and all of the other natural assets that

services make human life possible? It turns out that the Bretton Woods institutions have over a

decade’s worth of experience in systemically measuring, valuing, and reporting the world’s

natural capital assets. The UN’s System of Environmental Economic Accounting–adopted by the

UN Statistical Commission in 2021–“integrates economic and environmental data to provide a

more comprehensive and multipurpose view of the interrelationships between the economy and

the environment and the stocks and changes in stocks of environmental assets, as they bring

benefits to humanity” (United Nations, n.d.) . Likewise, Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of

Ecosystem Services (WAVES), a methodology launched at the World Bank in 2012, aims to

promote sustainable development by ensuring that natural resources are mainstreamed in

development planning and national economic accounts. WAVES is in turn part of the broader

World Bank umbrella initiative, the Global Program for Sustainability, which “helps countries

integrate these sustainability considerations into policies and decision making by providing high

quality data on stocks and flows of natural resources and ecosystem services, and analyzing

the corresponding risks and opportunities for the development process” (World Bank Group

2025) . At the same time, the NGO sector has developed related expertise: the Natural Capital

Protocol provides a standardized framework to help include natural capital in business and

private capital decision-making; and Economics for Nature (E4N), “a global partnership of

business, civil society and international policy institutions is working to make the value of natural

capital visible in economic and business decisions” (Green Economy Coalition 2025) . The

foundations exist for swift implementation.

We believe that leadership to scale up these initiatives can lie with a reinvigorated G20, whose

members “include the world’s major economies, representing 85% of global Gross Domestic

Product, over 75% of international trade, and about two-thirds of the world population” (G20

2024) . Specifically, with pressure from international NGOs, local organizations, and citizen

networks, the G20 should request that the World Bank, in cooperation with UN and NGO

partners, commit to developing a globally-accepted natural-capital-asset accounting standard,

including the development of a valuation methodology of ecosystem services for each sovereign

nation. Such innovative valuation undertakings would redirect public and blended capital, via

World Bank and IMF lending as well as emerging asset classes, to the Global South. This

capital reallocation has the potential to engender a less fossil-fuel dependent economy and a

more autonomous food system, thereby saving more hard currency on the trade balance and

creating more attractive terms of exchange and abundant employment opportunities within a

more sustainable economy.

B. Implement an uninterrupted and instantaneous global carbon price

Given what scientists, economists, politicians, and citizens began to understand in the late

1970s about the threat of global warming (Weart 2008) , the largest market failure of the

post-Bretton Woods system is the absence of a robust, transparent, and highly-integrity

price-discovery process for CO2 and its equivalent. Over the last four decades, the rapid

accumulation of atmospheric GHGs has had a direct impact on climate-change and by

extension the polycrisis. These emissions have led to systemic financial risk, triggered severe

health effects, exacerbated geopolitical threats, widened inequality, accelerated hard-to-control

inflation, and magnified price distortions due to subsidies and poorly understood value-chain

effects.

More specifically, when bankers and investors assess financing and/or investment proposals,

the absence of any meaningful price signal impedes the risk attribution and worsens the

intergenerational risk transmission process. This “risk abstraction” weakens the global capital

allocation dynamic. Combined with the undervaluation of natural capital assets, erroneous

assumptions and misaligned market-risk profiles lead to portfolio allocations that do not reflect

underlying value. In essence, this deficiency lulls public markets into embracing stock market

valuations and sovereign-debt pricing that are fully agnostic of the polycrisis risk spectrum.

At the same time, the market is designing divestment opportunities, executing short-selling

strategies, and turning down alternative investment propositions in a manner that could never

be justified if all risk variables were included in the pricing and allocation equation. As such,

ecological and financial crises are part of a system with an alarming undesirable feedback loop:

financial investments creating the ecological conditions that–if nothing changes–will yield more

of the same misguided investments in the future.

What is to be done? We call for public, private and NGO leaders to commit to the development

of a single, reliable, ubiquitous, and “24/7/365” market-price signal for polluting, adding, or

abating one ton of CO2. Axel van Trotsenburg, World Bank Senior Managing Director, succinctly

makes this case: “Carbon pricing can be one of the most powerful tools to help countries reduce

emissions. That’s why it is good to see these instruments expand to new sectors, become more

adaptable and complement other measures” (World Bank Group 2024) .

With the support of leadership from the World Bank, the IMF, and their partners, this could

unfold in several steps. A universal carbon price could be guided by the design features of the

ICE Carbon Futures Index as a weighted average of four ongoing cap-and-trade programs:

Europe (EU-ETS); the Western Climate Initiative of the American states of California and

Washington and the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and Québec; the UK ETS; and the

Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) in New England. Such a futures contract could be

expanded by the continued roll out of carbon compliance markets in each of the Paris Treaty

signatory countries.

Next, as part of the same global partnership, central banks should support and integrate

essential price signals emanating from different markets around the globe. More specifically,

central banks have the capacity to monitor and steer the introduction of a unified and ubiquitous

24/7/365 carbon market, calibrated as either the reward for mitigating or the cost to pollute one

ton of CO2. This carbon market would be informed by compliance-market initiatives and efforts

globally.

After this initial construction, the carbon price would first be managed “in shadow” in order to

avoid market disruption and to give market practitioners and policy-makers time to adjust to this

ubiquitous market. After one year, the carbon price would be introduced globally: the guiding

principle would be that central banks would support a minimum carbon price, a function again of

the remaining carbon reserve. The voluntary carbon markets would in turn reference this unique

price on the term sheet of each transaction, per date and time specification.

This single step has the potential to jump start and reorient global markets. A central-bank

supported carbon price would inform the valuation of natural capital assets (tropical rainforests,

mangroves, blue whales, and regenerative agriculture) supported by satellite tracing capacity:

this would further develop the creation of natural capital asset balance sheets, as called for in

our first recommendation. This universal price would also upgrade venture-capital valuation of

climate tech, accelerating the ongoing trend toward renewables and guiding the realization of

the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) from COP 21’s Paris Agreement. And by

extension, it would also avoid price arbitration. For a similar distance, there should be clear and

distinct pricing preference for the transport mode with the lowest carbon footprint; for a similar

production process, there should be clear and distinct pricing preference for the production

mode with the lowest carbon footprint.

C. Establish a new Debt Restructuring Mechanism

Global financial institutions need to be recalibrated toward the Global South and future

generations: we believe that this begins with a new commitment to sovereign debt restructuring,

”an exchange of outstanding sovereign debt instruments, such as loans or bonds, for new debt

instruments or cash through a formal process” (Das, Papaioannou, and Trebesch 2014) .

The background for our recommendation for a new debt restructuring mechanism begins a

decade after the signing of the Bretton Woods Agreement, when The Club of Paris, an informal

data intelligence sharing platform run by the French treasury, negotiated the first sovereign debt

restructuring with Argentina in May 1956. Indonesia would follow a decade later (Callaghy

2010) .

By the late 1970s and 80s, the US banking industry had been seeking earnings diversification

by lending on a massive scale to Mexico: commercial debt restructuring came to the fore in

August 1982, when Mexico's finance minister notified the Federal Reserve chairman and the

IMF’s managing director that the country would have insufficient reserves to service outstanding

$80 billion debt to the US banking industry (Sims and Romero 2013) . The subsequent Latin

American Debt Crisis led to “Brady Bond” restructuring in 1989 through which US commercial

banks were able to swap their Mexico loans for a more liquid Brady Bond (named after US

Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady). These bonds, which in time were negotiated with other

debtor countries, were comprised of a collateralized zero-coupon US Treasury Bond and a

discounted net-loan exposure. The innovation? If the debtor state were to subsequently default

on the loan portion, the commercial lender could still capture at maturity the bond’s full principal

via the zero-coupon portion.

As debt levels increased worldwide, variations of sovereign debt restructuring have emerged. In

1996, the IMF and the World Bank introduced the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC)

Initiative to avoid unmanageable debt burdens for less developed countries. In 2020, in the face

of the global slowdown from COVID-19, the World Bank and the IMF partnered with the G20 to

set up the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI), which allowed countries to divert their

resources towards addressing the pandemic. From May 2020 to December 2021, the initiative

suspended $12.9 billion in debt-service payments for 48 out of the 73 eligible countries,

according to the World Bank’s latest estimates (World Bank Group 2022) , helping to safeguard

the fates of millions in the Global South.

Out of the DSSI emerged the Common Framework, a mechanism that, with broad creditors’

participation, was designed to provide developing countries with coordinated debt

restructurings. Introduced under Saudi Arabia’s G20 presidency in 2020, the Common

Framework is now administered by the Club of Paris, the World Bank, and the IMF . As of 2024,

only Chad, Zambia, Ethiopia and Ghana have applied to the Common Framework for a debt

treatment (Paris Club 2024) . However, as only middle income countries are eligible for this

restructuring opportunity, the Common Framework in its current form cannot be a structural

lifeline for the bulk of overleveraged V20 countries.

At the heart of the polycrisis is the severity of today’s debt crisis. The V20, representing 68

climate vulnerable economies, had $924 billion in debt outstanding as of 2024. During the

2022-30 period, the V20 countries are expected to pay $904 billion in debt service, funds

diverted from urgently-needed public investments and social-service support. And of the V20

subset, “only Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, the Philippines, and Viet Nam are estimated to be solid

enough to borrow from international capital markets on a sustainable basis, defined as

economic growth rates larger than borrowing costs” (Rishikesh and Marins 2024) .

Building on this decades-long history of creating novel approaches to debt restructuring, global

finance leaders have an opportunity to help the V20 to reduce debt levels and to focus on

ameliorating the most acute aspects of the polycrisis. In this spirit, we offer two related solutions

that specifically build on our three of our other recommendations: ecocentric financial reform, an

uninterrupted and instantaneous global carbon price, and (as detailed below) incorporating the

polycrisis into monetary policy.

First, the World Bank, the IMF and its partners should establish a third-party registrar and/or

custodian, to keep stock of V20 countries' issued public and private debt, including collateralized

debt tranches, under which creditors take a lien on natural resources or land as part of

extending a loan. To illustrate: in 2013, the UK-based Glencore offered cash-for-oil deals to

Chad (Reuters 2012) . Each V20 country would then have the capacity, in collaboration with the

common registrar, to set up an automatic DSSI provision across each of their debt facilities,

building on the experience of the COVID-era Common Framework. The triggering of this

provision would be monitored preferably by a new entity, similar to the Global Crisis Group, with

proper Global South country representation.

Second, public and private lenders should be incentivized to develop debt-for-natural-capital

assets at scale on the back of sovereign balance sheets (building on Recommendation 1) that

take stock of the country’s natural capital. Each natural capital asset can be gauged on GHG

mitigation potential by scientific software monitored by satellites and valued at the 24/7/365

unique and ubiquitous carbon price monitored by the G5 central banks (building on

Recommendation 2). A negotiated discount would equate to an equal offset in (additional)

natural carbon sink capacity, in the form of extending natural capital assets–through

regenerative agriculture practice or through green hydrogen procurement–and its equivalents in

the contribution to tangible progress in a country’s NDC.

D. Incorporate the polycrisis in monetary policy

The US Federal Reserve Bank was established in 1913, partially because of the effects of the

catastrophic 1906 San Francisco earthquake on the national economy (Odell and Weidenmier

2004) . In a similar fashion–but hopefully ahead of accelerated climate-change

calamities–transformational institutional reform is needed to tackle the polycrisis in what

otherwise may become a swiftly unraveling multilateral governance framework.

Yet to date, central banks, in the name of their independence, have been mostly absent from

global discussions about changes that are needed in the international financial architecture in

the face of the polycrisis. More than 80 years after the Bretton Woods Conference, this absence

is in stark contrast to their prominent role in 1944 to fix exchange rates and monitor global

balance-of-trade positions. In this and the following sub-section, we advocate for two related

recalibrations of the world’s central banks.

To begin, the current lack of discussion about central bank reform is especially conspicuous in

view of the following pain points. Society’s oversized and subsidized dependency on fossil fuel,

coupled with oligopolistic market structures, has produced unseen levels of inflation. Central

banks’ efforts to abate inflation–caused by a combination of OPEC supply-quota setting,

geopolitical tensions (recently, the invasion of Ukraine, intensified destruction in the Middle East,

and attacks by the Houthi that threaten global trade), and supply chains disrupted by climate

change–have been hampered by an inadequate monetary policy toolkit. Furthermore, current

valuation practice in the financial markets, premised on fully ignoring externalities, assign more

price value to business propositions and energy solutions that are more inflationary, worse for

public physical and mental health, and likely to be more perilous to system-wide financial and

geopolitical stability. Finally, note that the mitigation cost for solar energy, with a levelized cost of

less than 5c per kWh, has never been so low (Seel and Kemp 2024) ; and yet (as of February

24, 2025), the S&P Global Clean Energy index has lost 14.9% in value over the last three years

(S&P Global 2025a) while the S&P 500 Oil and Gas Exploration and Production is up by more

7.3% (S&P Global 2025b) . The decline of clean energy valuation is in reverse correlation to the

earth’s temperatures, which are in a rising 3-year trend, with the ten most recent years as the

warmest on record (NASA 2024) .

How is it that clean energy companies, with their tremendous growth potential and low carbon

impact, lose much more value than fossil fuel companies in a high-interest environment and

under hotter planetary conditions? When considering the mounting cost of inaction regarding

mitigation and adaptation, the current pricing methodology–carbon agnostic at its core–is hiding

risk in the fossil fuel sector and value in the clean-energy sector. All the while, the fossil fuel

industry, in search of short-term shareholder value, moves full throttle against mitigation

ambitions and planetary safeguard measures, even in the face of the possible wipeout of the

insurance and reinsurance sectors. In 2023, the industry doubled down on increasing

greenhouse gas emissions at full price, with Chevron buying up Hess in a $53 billion all-stock

transaction and Exxon striking a deal with shale producer Pioneer for an all-share purchase

valued at $60 billion (Clifford 2023) .

Given the polycrisis and the need to protect the world’s physical assets in the face of markets’

current carbon agnosticism, how could the world’s central banks play a more significant role?

We believe that the answer lies in the recent past, building on unorthodox monetary policy

interventions in the face of two previous (and related) crises: the systemic threats of the Great

Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2008, the four largest central banks have

injected more than $25 trillion of liquidity through QE (Wilkes 2022) . Consequently, the equity

and the real estate markets have boomed. As we share in the next section, we believe that a

new round of QE could be at the foundation of a new global currency.

Building on Recommendation 1–placing ecocentrism at the core of international finance

reform–we propose here an innovative new monetary policy tool: the bifurcation of interest rate

monetary policy to support long term refinancing operations for clean-energy and ecocentric

investments.

Here’s our case. Interest rate monetary policy setting should be distinguished by two different

factors: interest rates for general activity and a nature-centric incentive margin. The latter would

be deducted from the general policy rate and be offered to “carbon nimble” and biodiversity

enhancing activities. Notably, the magnitude of the margin would be modified as a function of

the remaining carbon reserve, a proxy for the rate of global transition, the trend development of

observable ppm CO2, and a scientific data subset of biodiversity observations. This approach

would need an integrated dashboard of climate and biodiversity risk variables as well as a

taxonomy of nature-centric activities: the EU’s current taxonomy for sustainable activities could

be used as a starting base.

As a complement to this new interest rate policy, central banks should recommend–on the back

of the unified carbon price detailed above–carbon-adjusted valuation methodology for firm

valuation, fixed income securities, fairness opinions, post-money venture capital valuations,

executive compensation schemes, and capital allocation processes. These efforts would lead to

tangible and transparent price bifurcation and lower weighted average cost of capital for agents

with more nimble carbon footprints, including sovereign states.

All told, this financial reform would incentivize capital reallocation to activities that benefit

communities at large and the planet, and disincentivize activities that are harmful and extractive.

Such ecocentric financial infrastructure would be robust and resilient in mitigating and

containing the multidimensional risk exposures triggered by the polycrisis and would be a

complement to the modified institution detailed in the next recommendation.

E. Design novel nature-based currencies

A new nature-based currency, an innovation that the four previous recommendations fully inform

and support, would place the finance sector at the forefront of a global movement which formally

values natural assets, accelerates the transition to renewables, prioritizes the well-being of

citizens of the Global South, and seeks to rectify discontents in the Global North. In this section,

we detail our vision for how to construct it and then make a case for its worldwide benefits.

The creation of this new currency–let’s call it the Climate Stabilization Coin (CSC)–would be

shaped by the stablecoin concept, through which value is tied to an external asset, such as a

fiat currency (the USD) or commodities (gold) to stabilize the price. The CSC could be issued by

the IMF as a sequence of essential stepping stones.

First, IMF quota member countries would engage in a QE policy initiative at their central bank

level, sparked by the urgency of the climate crisis. Such a procedure would be similar in mode

to QE policies undertaken during the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

The generated funds at the respective central banks would then be transferred as contributions

to the IMF, who in turn would convert these contributions from fiat currency into SDRs.

Next, within the context of the 2015 Paris Treaty, the IMF would create a “Whole Earth Fund,”

akin to the principles of a sovereign wealth fund. To provide the entity with capital, the IMF

would transfer the newly-generated SDRs, potentially including those already on the IMF

balance sheet, to the Whole Earth Fund, from which it would issue CSCs. Subsequently, the

investment team of the Whole Earth Fund would invest in a combination of natural assets and

crucial decarbonization sectors, across a combination of top performing, sustainably managed

companies and venture capital initiatives.

Initially, CSCs–as units of value and in time as stores of value–would be offered to the V20

countries in exchange for tangible, third-party-verified, and permanent progress in abating

greenhouse gas emissions, expressed in tons of CO2eq. Ideally, these achievements would be

in accordance with each country’s NDC. Furthermore, V20 countries could obtain fiat

currency–primarily dollars, yuan, euros, and yen–by offering the CSC in medium term “repo

transactions.” These transactions allow a counterparty to offer an instrument or a coin in

collateral–in this case, CSCs–in exchange for cash, adjusted for a discount applied to the

underlying collateral value. The generated funds would then be used by the V20 countries to

make proven clean and green technology acquisitions in all IMF quota member countries. We

believe that these capital expenditures have the potential to scale and expand the V20

decarbonization ambitions to accelerate further progress on the goals of their NDCs. In time, the

program could be expanded to all 2015 Paris Treaty signatories.

Critically, the supply of CSCs would be limited to a pre-identified reserve that represents a

scientifically-determined carbon quota. And the coin value would be set to the USD amount of

abated CO2eq tonnage, derived from the 24/7/365 ubiquitous carbon price monitored and

supported by G5 central banks, described in the recommendation above.

Consider these rough but telling estimates of the magnitude of this potentially game-changing

recommendation. Scientists estimate that emitting more than 180 gigatons of GHGs would

exceed the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. The CSC would be designed to protect and extend

that reserve for as long as possible. Assuming a carbon price of $100 per ton of CO2 abated,

one trillion USDs of CSCs would protect or abate about 10 Gigatons, or about 16% of the

annual GHG sessions, now at 60 Gigatons CO2eq. On the back of those assumptions, a first

envelope of $6 trillion equivalent in IMF stablecoins could be released. These magnitudes would

have to be calibrated with the additional capital investment expenditure to yield net zero by 2050

in the rest of the world. If efforts need to be ramped up, then a CSC II series could be launched

under the same design principles, but still within the limits of the annual 60 Gigatons CO2eq.

We believe that this proposed structure for a new IMF-issued currency would offer the following

benefits related to governance and impact:

● The envisaged structure of the CSC could be implemented within the current IMF

mandate with only slight modifications;

● The structure entails a fully global, circular system, whereby QE-originated funds are

recycled back to benefit green and clean energy industries;

● The CSC has two inflation-containing design features. First, the circular capital flows

supporting capital investments would keep inflationary pressure in check. Secondly, the

coin supply is limited to a predefined target level of the carbon reserve.

● The CSC would be a reward for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The climate coin

would impart an indicative global price level for carbon, identified as one ton of GHG

emissions.

● The CSC would, through its collateral components, convey strong price signals to the

valuation of land and forestry as well as decarbonization efforts and would help to de-risk

climate technology venture-capital investment exposure.

● The CSC would provide tangible support to the plight of the poorest countries

represented by the V20, whose member countries would be recipients of proceeds for

protecting land and forests and would become destinations for establishment of

moonshot projects. The same countries could also receive IMF climate stablecoins for

tangible progress in their climate mitigation efforts, as represented in their NDC

commitments.

● The CSC would also foster tracking of funds in a transparent manner and on a global

scale, ensuring that the use of proceeds would be in full alignment with NDC

commitments.

● On the back of scientifically assessed reserves, CSCs could be offered for leaving fossil

fuels–measured as their CO2eq–left in the ground.

We conclude with a final proposal: that the CSC be named the “Mottley” referring to the

visionary Barbados PM Mia Mottley, who brought the issues confronting small island states–and

by extension the global South–to the world’s attention. Those states are most at risk for

heightened sea levels, yet they have contributed the least to the overall level of greenhouse

gases.

F. New forms of global governance

As we have detailed above, this new (and what we hope is an emerging) finance paradigm

should center ecocentricity as a guiding design principle, support prices should reflect real

value, and recalibrate institutions toward the Global South and future generations. The final

pillar of Whole Earth Finance is that governance of the international financial architecture must

not just ensure fairness: it must acknowledge and be built around the urgency of survival over

these next few decades. In this concluding sub-section, we briefly share our vision for a new

approach to global governance, proposing four new entities for the international community.

First, we believe that a G20 Central Bank should be created to deploy innovative monetary

policy tools, financed in part by climate QE supplied by the constituent central banks. Building

on the final recommendation above, the G20 Central Bank would act as an aggregator of

climate QE and an allocator of funds to address mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage

claims impacting individual countries or regions across the world. If the global-entity ambition

proved to be a bridge too far, regional G20 central banks could be created to contain continental

or regional portfolio risk.

Second, we propose a new global facility–with access to requisite funds–that supervises

globally the respective top-10 hot spots, combined with supply chain analysis, geopolitical

intelligence gathering, anticipatory migration flow monitoring, contingency planning and

intervention, inclusive of conflict resolution and management. Currently, the global management

of food supply and water access comes from inadequate piecemeal mandates at the Food and

Agricultural Organization, the World Bank, and the United Nations High Commissioner for

Refugees.

Third, a subdivision at the Financial Stability Board (FSB)–an international body established in

2009 that monitors and makes recommendations about the global financial system (Financial

Stability Board 2025) –could help convert the IPCC’s scientific findings, which have proven hard

to interpret for corporate and financial-institution executives as well as central bankers. This new

FSB entity would, transparently and publicly, provide transition planning imperatives for

corporate and financial institutions and recommendations towards central banks to avert

systematic risk. The same subdivision could also ascertain, on an independent basis, whether a

climate change calamity would qualify for an event triggering a debt-pause clause, akin to DSSI

provision language.

Fourth, regarding our recommendation for the creation of a sovereign natural capital balance

sheet, there is a need for an internationally-recognized custodian to gauge, monitor and report

on those identified assets. As noted, the natural capital balance sheet would consist of tropical

rainforests, regenerative agriculture land, mangroves, seagrass and livestock essential to the

carbon cycle. The custodian–building on work to date at the World Resources Institute (World

Resources Institute 2022) –would ensure standardized practices for the valuation and reporting

of natural capital assets, using satellite imagery and scientifically-rigorous applications, procured

on a non-tamperable blockchain-supported platform.

VI. Discussion and conclusion

In this paper, we are calling for a profound change in the purpose and structure of finance. We

believe that private citizens have ceded governance of planetary health and human wellbeing to

an economic and financial paradigm–based on neoliberalism’s belief in near-perfect

markets–with a flawed operating system.

Are the recommendations in this paper hopelessly ambitious? Do we somehow believe that by

declaring that powerful leaders and organizations should do something, somehow they will? The

diffusion of ideas and innovations does not work that way (Rogers 2003) . With years of

experience at investment and multilateral banks (not to mention in academia), the three of us

know how hard it is to effect internal change. And imagine the seismic shifts in geopolitics

required to–just for starters–launch a 24/7/365 carbon price.

As we complete this draft, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is closing a three-day

conference of the powerful, including leaders of fossil-fuel companies, commercial and

investment banks, climate denier organizations, and major religious-right groups (Alliance for

Responsible Citizenship 2025) . The London conference also features Trump officials and

architects of Project 2025, including the Heritage Foundation (DeSmog 2025) , one of

neoliberalism’s many handmaidens. In early 2025, this global alliance has the power, and its

power is in the ascendance.

All of this is a long way from the ideals and vision of the 1944 gathering of the powerful at

Bretton Woods. And it begs the question: how does a different alliance–with awareness of the

urgency of the polycrisis and a moral code that prioritizes nature, equity, and future

generations–begin to claw back power? To develop, say, an alternative to Project 2025?

At BBW, we don’t fully know. But our blueprint for moving forward is based on experience

working alongside leaders of social change (Sheldrick 2024) and our understanding that when

the national and global Zeitgeist is flipped on its head–the fight for women’s rights, South African

and African-American liberation, the environmental movement, LQBTQ equality–seismic shifts

are possible (Ackerman and Duvall 2000) . Social movement scholars remind us that less

powerful coalitions increase their odds of gaining power by framing values for a broad audience,

mobilizing via extant and new networks, and taking advantage of political opportunities

(McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996) . Under the right conditions, the Overton Window–the

politics of what’s possible–can shift for those who clamor for justice guided by scientific laws

(Schifeling and Hoffman 2017) . Change can come fast in times of quickly approaching tipping

points and geopolitical dynamics.

So how do members of the BBW network plan to move forward? We are framing our advocacy

around ecocentrism and sound applications of economics. We are mobilizing allies worldwide: in

early 2025, we launched new collaborations with World Bank and G20 leaders and the COP30

organizers. And all the while, we are preparing for the opening of policy windows: for example,

citizens clamoring for even more access to the world’s cheapest forms of energy–solar, wind,

and storage (McKibben forthcoming) .

At the heart of BBW’s vision of radical paradigm shift lies the indispensable value of

intergenerational involvement. As stewards of our planet, we all hold a responsibility not just to

the present, but to future generations who are inheriting the consequences of our actions

(Krznaric 2020) . By engaging people of all ages in the dialogue and actions toward a

sustainable future, we harness a collective wisdom that ensures a legacy of environmental and

financial stewardship and resilience for generations to come.

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Aug 2024

Background Air pollution poses a significant threat to global public health. While broad mitigation policies exist, an understanding of the economic consequences, both in terms of health benefits and mitigation costs, remains lacking. This study systematically reviewed the existing economic implications of air pollution control strategies worldwide. Methods A predefined search strategy, without limitations on region or study design, was employed to search the PubMed, Scopus, Cochrane Library, Embase, Web of Science, and CEA registry databases for studies from their inception to November 2023 using keywords such as “cost–benefit analyses”, “air pollution”, and “particulate matter”. Focus was placed on studies that specifically considered the health benefits of air pollution control strategies. The evidence was summarized by pollution control strategy and reported using principle economic evaluation measurements such as net benefits and benefit–cost ratios. Results The search yielded 104 studies that met the inclusion criteria. A total of 75, 21, and 8 studies assessed the costs and benefits of outdoor, indoor, and mixed control strategies, respectively, of which 54, 15, and 3 reported that the benefits of the control strategy exceeded the mitigation costs. Source reduction (n = 42) and end-of-pipe treatments (n = 15) were the most commonly employed pollution control methodologies. The association between particulate matter (PM) and mortality was the most widely assessed exposure-effect relationship and had the largest health gains (n = 42). A total of 32 studies employed a broader benefits framework, examining the impacts of air pollution control strategies on the environment, ecology, and society. Of these, 31 studies reported partially or entirely positive economic evidence. However, despite overwhelming evidence in support of these strategies, the studies also highlighted some policy flaws concerning equity, optimization, and uncertainty characterization. Conclusions Nearly 70% of the reviewed studies reported that the economic benefits of implementing air pollution control strategies outweighed the relative costs. This was primarily due to the improved mortality and morbidity rates associated with lowering PM levels. In addition to health benefits, air pollution control strategies were also associated with other environmental and social benefits, strengthening the economic case for implementation. However, future air pollution control strategy designs will need to address some of the existing policy limitations.

Global Polycrisis: The Causal Mechanisms of Crisis Entanglement

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2024

Multiple global crises – including the pandemic, climate change, and Russia's war on Ukraine – have recently linked together in ways that are significant in scope, devastating in effect, but poorly understood. A growing number of scholars and policymakers characterize the situation as a ‘polycrisis’. Yet this neologism remains poorly defined. We provide the concept with a substantive definition, highlight its value-added in comparison to related concepts, and develop a theoretical framework to explain the causal mechanisms currently entangling many of the world's crises. In this framework, a global crisis arises when one or more fast-moving trigger events combine with slow-moving stresses to push a global system out of its established equilibrium and into a volatile and harmful state of disequilibrium. We then identify three causal pathways – common stresses, domino effects, and inter-systemic feedbacks – that can connect multiple global systems to produce synchronized crises. Drawing on current examples, we show that the polycrisis concept is a valuable tool for understanding ongoing crises, generating actionable insights, and opening avenues for future research. Non-technical summary The term ‘polycrisis’ appears with growing frequently to capture the interconnections between global crises, but the word lacks substantive content. In this article, we convert it from an empty buzzword into a conceptual framework and research program that enables us to better understand the causal linkages between contemporary crises. We draw upon the intersection of climate change, the covid-19 pandemic, and Russia's war in Ukraine to illustrate these causal interconnections and explore key features of the world's present polycrisis. Technical summary Multiple global crises – including the pandemic, climate change, and Russia's war on Ukraine – have recently linked together in ways that are significant in scope, devastating in effect, but poorly understood. A growing number of scholars and policymakers characterize the situation as a ‘polycrisis’. Yet this neologism remains poorly defined. We provide the concept with a substantive definition, highlight its value-added in comparison to related concepts, and develop a theoretical framework to explain the causal mechanisms currently entangling many of the world's crises. In this framework, a global crisis arises when one or more fast-moving trigger events combines with slow-moving stresses to push a global system out of its established equilibrium and into a volatile and harmful state of disequilibrium. We then identify three causal pathways – common stresses, domino effects, and inter-systemic feedbacks – that can connect multiple global systems to produce synchronized crises. Drawing on current examples, we show that the polycrisis concept is a valuable tool for understanding ongoing crises, generating actionable insights, and opening avenues for future research. Social media summary No longer a mere buzzword, the ‘polycrisis’ concept highlights causal interactions among crises to help navigate a tumultuous future.

Air pollution deaths attributable to fossil fuels: observational and modelling study

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2023
Br Med J

Objectives To estimate all cause and cause specific deaths that are attributable to fossil fuel related air pollution and to assess potential health benefits from policies that replace fossil fuels with clean, renewable energy sources. Design Observational and modelling study. Methods An updated atmospheric composition model, a newly developed relative risk model, and satellite based data were used to determine exposure to ambient air pollution, estimate all cause and disease specific mortality, and attribute them to emission categories. Data sources Data from the global burden of disease 2019 study, observational fine particulate matter and population data from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellites, and atmospheric chemistry, aerosol, and relative risk modelling for 2019. Results Globally, all cause excess deaths due to fine particulate and ozone air pollution are estimated at 8.34 million (95% confidence interval 5.63 to 11.19) deaths per year. Most (52%) of the mortality burden is related to cardiometabolic conditions, particularly ischaemic heart disease (30%). Stroke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease both account for 16% of mortality burden. About 20% of all cause mortality is undefined, with arterial hypertension and neurodegenerative diseases possibly implicated. An estimated 5.13 million (3.63 to 6.32) excess deaths per year globally are attributable to ambient air pollution from fossil fuel use and therefore could potentially be avoided by phasing out fossil fuels. This figure corresponds to 82% of the maximum number of air pollution deaths that could be averted by controlling all anthropogenic emissions. Smaller reductions, rather than a complete phase-out, indicate that the responses are not strongly non-linear. Reductions in emission related to fossil fuels at all levels of air pollution can decrease the number of attributable deaths substantially. Estimates of avoidable excess deaths are markedly higher in this study than most previous studies for these reasons: the new relative risk model has implications for high income (largely fossil fuel intensive) countries and for low and middle income countries where the use of fossil fuels is increasing; this study accounts for all cause mortality in addition to disease specific mortality; and the large reduction in air pollution from a fossil fuel phase-out can greatly reduce exposure. Conclusions Phasing out fossil fuels is deemed to be an effective intervention to improve health and save lives as part the United Nations' goal of climate neutrality by 2050. Ambient air pollution would no longer be a leading, environmental health risk factor if the use of fossil fuels were superseded by equitable access to clean sources of renewable energy.

The association between fear of missing out and mobile phone addiction: a meta-analysis

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2023

Background Numerous studies have explored the association between fear of missing out and mobile phone addiction, but there are different viewpoints and the results are inconsistent. This study intends to estimate the strength of the correlation between fear of missing out and mobile phone addiction in general through a meta-analysis, and to analyze the influencing factors of the inconsistent results of previous studies. Methods We Searched China National Knowledge Infrastructure Database, Wan fang Database, CQVIP Journal Database、Web of Science Core Collection, Elsevier SD, Springer Online Journals, Medline, EBSCO-ERIC, SAGE Online Journals, PsycINFO, PsycArticles and ProQuest Dissertations and Theses。85 studies (90 independent effect size) were included from 2016 to 2023。The pooled correlation coefficient of the association between fear of missing out and mobile phone addiction was calculated by a random effects model using Comprehensive Meta-Analysis(Version 3.3). Results The main effect analysis revealed a high positive correlation between fear of missing out and mobile phone addiction (r = 0.47, 95%CI [0.44, 0.50]). Furthermore, the measurements of mobile phone addiction moderated the strength of the association between fear of missing out and mobile phone addiction, with the highest correlation measured using MPATS and the lowest correlation measured using MPDQ. The age, gender, year of publication, cultural background, and the measurements of fear of missing out had no significant effect on the correlation between fear of missing out and mobile phone addiction. Conclusion The results indicated that fear of missing out was closely related to mobile phone addiction, which complied with the I-PACE model. Psychological services and mental health services should be developed to reduce the emergence of fear of missing out in the digital age and thus alleviate dependence on devices.

Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2023

This planetary boundaries framework update finds that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity. Ocean acidification is close to being breached, while aerosol loading regionally exceeds the boundary. Stratospheric ozone levels have slightly recovered. The transgression level has increased for all boundaries earlier identified as overstepped. As primary production drives Earth system biosphere functions, human appropriation of net primary production is proposed as a control variable for functional biosphere integrity. This boundary is also transgressed. Earth system modeling of different levels of the transgression of the climate and land system change boundaries illustrates that these anthropogenic impacts on Earth system must be considered in a systemic context.

Real-Time Pricing and the Cost of Clean Power

Article

Nov 2024

Solar and wind power are now cheaper than fossil fuels but are intermittent. The extra supply-side variability implies growing benefits of using real-time retail pricing (RTP). We evaluate the potential gains of RTP using a model that jointly solves investment, supply, storage, and demand to obtain a chronologically detailed dynamic equilibrium for the island of Oahu, Hawai‘i. We find that, holding demand assumptions fixed, RTP reduces costs in high-renewable systems by roughly 6 to 12 times as much as in fossil systems, markedly lowering the cost of clean energy integration. (JEL G31, L94, L98, Q42, Q48)

Local Economic and Political Effects of Trade Deals: Evidence from NAFTA

Article

Jun 2024

Why have white, less-educated voters left the Democratic Party? We highlight the role of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In event-study analysis, we demonstrate that counties whose 1990 employment depended on industries vulnerable to NAFTA suffered large and persistent employment losses after its implementation. Voters in these counties (and protectionist voters regardless of geography) turned away from the party of President Clinton, who promoted the agreement. This shift is larger for whites (especially men and those without a college degree) and social conservatives, suggesting that racial identity and social-issue positions mediate reactions to economic policies. (JEL D72, F15, F16, J15)

Can the Belt and Road Initiative affect the “invisible” external wealth? The role of valuation effect

Article

Oct 2023

RISK AND RESILIENCE IN THE ERA OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Article

May 2023

Vinod Thomas

Once thought to be sporadic and only affecting faraway places, the profile and timetable of climate change have changed dramatically to be on the calendar of every country. Take the forecast that sea levels along the U.S. coastline will rise by a foot over the next 30 years as much as the increase in the previous 100 years wreaking havoc in low-lying regions. Faced with such trajectories, it will no longer be enough to cope and build back after disasters, but governments, businesses, and individuals need to anticipate and “build forward” the central message of “Risk and Resilience in the Era of Climate Change,”

Sortir de l’impasse sur le climat : l’Initiative Bridgetown

Article

Aug 2023

Avinash Persaud

Whole Earth Finance: Beyond Bretton Woods Solutions for the 21st Century

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