Announcement

Oct 1, 2026.

It's been 6 months since I stepped out of my executive and founding role at Tribe Impact Capital. Quite a few people have asked me what I am doing. Aside from my NED and charity board roles, I've been building. Something new. 

As an Earth scientist by education, systems fascinate me. As a citizen, beliefs fascinate me too. Look closely and both offer a mirror to the human condition and the state of our planet.

One of my favourite observations from Donella Meadows is that we don't just measure the world, we shape it through what we choose to measure.

At first glance, that sounds obvious. Of course indicators influence behaviour.

But follow the logic through and it becomes a little unsettling.

We measure what we care about. Then, over time, we learn to care about what we measure.

Sustainable finance provides a near-perfect case study.

For more than 30 years we've become increasingly sophisticated at measuring disclosure quality, policy commitments, governance structures and risk exposures. We've built ratings, rankings, benchmarks, scorecards and dashboards. Entire markets now sit on top of measurement systems that barely existed a generation ago.

And what did we get?

Better disclosure. Better policies. Better reporting.

In other words, the instruments worked.

The uncomfortable question is whether they were pointed at the right thing in the first place.

Over the past year I've immersed myself in sustainable finance, Earth system science, actuarial research and systems thinking. What strikes me most isn't where these disciplines disagree. It's where they converge.

The biggest risks facing long-term investors increasingly sit at the system level.

Not company risk.

Not portfolio risk.

System risk.

Climate stability, freshwater systems, biodiversity, food security and social cohesion are not externalities to markets. They're the conditions that allow markets to exist in the first place.

Yet finance still tends to treat them as background scenery: something to measure exposure to, rather than something capital allocation actively shapes.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes beautifully about reciprocity: the idea that we are not separate from the living systems that sustain us. We participate in them. We influence them.

Financial systems are no different.

Markets don't simply reflect reality. They help create it. Which brings us back to Meadows.

An indicator isn't a mirror. It's a lever.

The most important question isn't whether a metric is accurate.

It's: what behaviour does it produce?

Because if we reward disclosure, we'll get disclosure. If we reward relative performance, we'll get relative performance.

And if we fail to distinguish between activities that regenerate the systems we depend on and those that erode them, we shouldn't be surprised when progress feels slower than the reporting suggests.

I've become convinced that one of the biggest opportunities in finance isn't finding a better product.

It's finding better things to count.

And that's what I've been quietly working on.

More soon. 👀