Last week, the sustainability minded flocked to Switzerland for Building Bridges — a three-day conference designed to link finance with sustainability.
More than 2,000 people debated how to value nature, advance climate commitments, and accelerate blended finance. For this Devex correspondent, it was a whirlwind: Each session was packed with attendees, leading many to stake out spots on the green-carpeted floors.
Conversations ranged from high-level panels to fishbowl discussions, where people were invited to step into a ring of chairs and voice their opinions — especially if they disagreed with what the panelists had to say. And between meals of fondue and raclette, attendees learned about a multitude of solutions to drive sustainability forward, from the expansion of carbon markets to platforms that can detect greenwashing.
“Building Bridges is about being able to demonstrate where you have investable opportunities that are part of having a future-fit portfolio,” Marie-Laure Schaufelberger, the vice chair of the Building Bridges Foundation and the chief sustainability officer of the Pictet Group, told me. “The number one priority is just keeping sustainable finance on the global agenda, and the parts of it that we absolutely need to keep going — like transition financing, things like that — because the physical limits of our planet are not going anywhere.”
The event started and ended with where the world was at, with former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry lamenting the Trump administration’s complete rollback of anything climate-forward. But by the end of Day 3, the main conference center was still buzzing with corporates, United Nations staff, and sustainable finance types — most of whom, despite the exhaustion of the 70-session marathon, remained clear-eyed about the challenges ahead, but hopeful it could be done.
“The narrative of morality, powerful as it should be and is and was, brought us a certain distance,” said Kerry, speaking from the Building Bridges stage at the start of the conference last Tuesday. “Now, we need the power of investability. The power of showing people that you can invest and have money come back to you.”
About the US — and without the US
The conference was held nearly 4,000 miles from Washington, D.C. But well before Building Bridges began, the Trump administration’s actions had already permeated the lakeside city. For months, Geneva has been rattled by the president’s cuts to U.S. foreign assistance, with local media reporting 2,500 job losses at the city’s U.N. agencies alone.
One day before Building Bridges began, the Trump administration announced it would be reinvigorating America’s coal industry, opening up 13.1 million acres of federal land for mining, and scrapping pollution limits for one of the largest contributors to climate change across the world.
“That is so totally divorced from the reality of where we need to be that it just emphasizes to all of us that if we’re going to win this battle, we have to apply our own minds, we have to forge our own alliances, we have to come together, in a way really that the world has never come together,” said Kerry, referencing the U.S.’ coal plans.
For the rest of the conference, that seemed to be the attitude that attendees pushed forward. The outlook echoed those who attended this year’s Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development in Spain, which the U.S. pulled out of at the last minute — and in Geneva as in Sevilla, those still committed to sustainable financing declared they would move ahead, with or without the world’s richest country.
“It’s tough to realize when you’re in Washington, but the world is a whole lot bigger than the USA,” Peter Bakker, the president and CEO of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, told me. “I just got back from a trip to India, and anti-woke and that type of thing doesn’t exist there. It’s all about how we go fast — because this is about the competitiveness of the country, its companies, and the progress they want to bring to the market.”
So, what type of progress should be prioritized? At Building Bridges, a few central themes kept popping up again and again: nature, and how to value and finance it; the physical risks of climate change, and how companies could protect their supply chains against them; and how to drive sustainable development — whether that be through impact investing, blended finance, or even experimenting with insurance — while turning a profit.
“If anyone gives me a microphone, I will tell them: If you do not take this seriously, if you do not get your arms around physical risk, and if you do not continue to drive your emissions down, you are just eroding the competitiveness of your country, your company, your bank, or whatever it is you’re running,” Bakker said. “Obviously any country, political movement, is free to make their own choices — but that’s what it boils down to.”
Read: The world is moving ahead on climate — with or without the US, says John Kerry
ICYMI: Europe’s peace capital feels sting of Trump funding cuts
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And you can also register to join us live or virtually at Devex Impact House from Oct. 15-16 on the sidelines of the meetings in Washington, D.C.
Armed for the anthropocene
It wasn’t just the private sector that felt that way. Martin Pfister, the head of Switzerland’s Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport, started off the conference by telling the crowd that sustainability isn’t just an environmental concern. It’s a pillar of national security.
And sure, that might be because the Swiss haven’t fought in a foreign war since 1815. But it also might be because increasingly, climate change is being viewed as a security threat.
“Inviting a defense minister, and by extension, a representative of the military, to speak on the topic of sustainability may seem contradictory,” said Pfister. “But the opposite is the case. Sustainability has an impact on the military and stability, just as it does on the economy and society.”
Today, climate change is sparking crop failure, heat stress, and extreme weather events across the world — making it harder, and in many cases, more expensive, for people to access food. By 2030, climate risks such as sea level rise and desertification are expected to cost low- and middle-income nations between $400 billion to $800 billion. And by 2050, up to 1.2 billion people are expected to be displaced from climate change, the vast majority from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
“Sustainability strengthens us, particularly in difficult times,” Pfister said. “Those who act sustainably — whether as a country or as a company — are more resilient in times of crisis.”
Valuing nature — before it’s gone
There was one theme that dominated Building Bridges this year: nature. For centuries, rivers, forests, and oceans have been treated as limitless resources to draw from, their contributions to human life and prosperity left off the balance sheet. In the process, more than half of the world’s economy now relies on natural systems — the forests, wetlands, oceans, and soils that are now straining under the weight of climate change, pollution, and overuse.
The idea of natural capital is pushing back on that approach, arguing that ecosystems should be recognized as vital assets whose services — from storing carbon to regulating water — underpin economic growth. Despite the potential, the world is still far from a coordinated valuation approach.
“Nature has no value in the economy, so the way people address that is by actually replacing nature with other interventions,” said Marcelo Furtado, head of sustainability at Brazilian conglomerate Itaúsa, during a session on the topic.
Read: Can nature be placed on the balance sheet?
You can’t sit with us — in public
Not long ago, environmental, social, and governance investing, aka ESG, was the darling of the investment world. Once touted as a way to align corporate profits with planetary and social good, the strategy saw U.S. sustainable assets grow more than 18-fold over two decades.
But today, that momentum has faltered — eroded by political backlash, internal criticism, and growing mistrust over what ESG really means. And yet, even as the term itself disappears from boardrooms and investor memos, the principles behind it are still quietly shaping corporate decisions and financial flows.
Read: The boom, bust, and bounce back of ESG
Betting on guarantees
As debates over ESG’s credibility continue, many at Building Bridges argued that the path forward lies not in abandoning the idea of sustainability finance, but in reimagining how capital is deployed.
At one point in the conference, panelists were asked a question: If you were given 1 billion euros, pounds, or Swiss francs, where would you deploy them — right now — to get the biggest impact? For Rhian-Mari Thomas, the answer was easy: guarantees.
“That is the way I think we move from the billions to the trillions,” said Thomas, who leads the Green Finance Institute, a nonprofit that works with governments, financial institutions, corporates, and experts to identify barriers to green investment. “By building familiarity with new sectors, providing guarantees [can help] regular institutional investors find a way of investing in new jurisdictions, new business cases, new types of sectors.”
So, what are they? Guarantees are a type of financial tool in which a third party — such as a government, development bank, or development finance institution — commits to covering part or all of a lender’s losses if a loan goes unpaid.
Even so, guarantees remain a small portion of global development finance, representing roughly 2% of total transactions at many of the world’s largest multilateral development banks, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. They can be complicated to establish and require both financial and risk-management expertise.
That being said, guarantees are at work across the global development sector, with the World Bank Group’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency mobilizing $33 billion of private capital through guarantees since its formation in 1988.
ICYMI: The World Bank launched a one-stop guarantee shop. Here’s how it’s going (Pro)
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The rising role of insurance
Guarantees weren’t the only tool offered up as a solution. Those from across the insurance sector showed up at Building Bridges in force, with many offering ideas about how their work — assessing and pricing against risk — could be a driver of sustainability.
That idea came up again and again when it came to nature, with the conference’s second high-level plenary organized under the title “What cannot be insured cannot be invested in.” But it also came up in other ways — including how to open up insurance policies to the world’s poorest.
“Insurance is about tomorrow,” said Solène Favre, the global director of insurance at VisionFund International, the microfinance service provider associated with World Vision. “It’s about ensuring that even when disaster strikes, a child’s education does not end … that when tragedy strikes, hope still lives on.”
Increasingly, the nonprofit sector is turning toward insurance to fight entrenched poverty, and at Building Bridges, representatives from VisionFund, UNICEF, and World Vision Australia argued that insurance can mitigate financial shocks and promote stability for people across the world.
Still, most at Building Bridges agreed the insurance sector’s reputation is far from glowing — and one dollar spent on prospective risk, even at the risk of losing everything, is one less dollar spent on immediate needs, such as school fees or medicine.
Do good or die trying
It was a week dominated by capitalism. But despite the energy around impact investing, nature financing, and insurance, beneath the buzz of the conference halls, there were some at Building Bridges who were less convinced.
At a session on inclusive insurance, Beris Gwynne, the head of the Global Rethinking Finance Collaborative, said she’d been to dozens of similar conferences before, and was tired of the needle never moving forward.
“We cannot achieve any of the Sustainable Development Goals, all of the climate action goals, on the current [capitalist] system,” Gwynne told me.
For several at the conference, such remarks surfaced a fundamental tension between the private sector, which exists to make a profit, and the sustainable development world, which exists to make change. But as most in the development world continue to reel from foreign aid cuts in the U.S., U.K., and across the world, the calls for private sector engagement are only getting louder.
“This is one of the most fundamental dilemmas that this whole community is grappling with,” Renat Heuberger, the chief executive officer of Terra Impact Ventures, said during a session. “But capitalism is powerful — so why miss that opportunity?”
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About the author
Elissa Miolene
Elissa Miolene reports on USAID and the U.S. government at Devex. She previously covered education at The San Jose Mercury News, and has written for outlets like The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Washingtonian magazine, among others. Before shifting to journalism, Elissa led communications for humanitarian agencies in the United States, East Africa, and South Asia.
