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Video transcript

Barclays Green Frontiers

Good morning and welcome to Barclays’ first Green Frontiers conference.

We are delighted to bring together so many experts and leaders to discuss what we at Barclays recognise as a most pressing issue: the challenge posed by climate change.

And we are, I think, at a sort of pivot point where we are seeing this unstoppable change towards low carbon.

It’s also one of the best documented and estimated shifts in the economy that I think possibly we have ever seen.

What we’re seeing is a transition from an old-model economy to a new-model economy.

We are in the middle of a revolution because if you compare the discussions just five years ago, 10 years ago this didn’t exist.

This is changing very fast. Green bonds have been the most visible element of green finance and issuances have doubled or tripled over the last few years.

The expectations that firms are behaving in certain ways, is having a greater impact on people’s willingness to invest in them.

You touched on the idea of investors and private capital but very clearly that has to go to someone. That’s where the entrepreneurs come in.

The green economy is the new economy. The new economy will be green because it’s going to be more profitable but we are seeing it across all industries, all sectors, all geographies.

And I never have a discussion anymore of ‘is electric vehicles going to be the future?’. I discuss at length the exact timing at which we are all going to be buying electric vehicles but it’s a very different space.

That plays a little but to the responsibility of everybody in this room to take some form of action.

The necessary and ongoing transition to a low-carbon economy presents one of the greatest opportunities for investment and growth of our times.

Get in touch

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