Simon and I travelled up to Edinburgh last month for NextGen’s first Sustainability Conference: Goodstock.
A day of discussing how us, as financial advisers, can help the planet.
Did you know that if we continue farming the way we do, our topsoil will become incapable of supporting food production within 30 to 60 years?
Our reliance on intensive farming practices is depleting essential nutrients from the soil. Farmers are having to use thousands of tons of chemicals to get anything to grow and destroy the pests that are accumulating with these one crop fields. This is unsustainable.
Just like investing, diversification is key, otherwise we get vulnerabilities.
Imagine putting all of your money into one share, let’s choose Blockbuster Video as an example. Starting in 1982, Blockbuster Video became massive and they were in every big town, renting out movies to all of us. By 1998, their global revenue hit $4.7 billion!! They had started off small and grown to enormous proportions. And then what happened? Streaming happened and now hardly any of us have dvds or videos anymore, we just stream our movies direct to our tv and Blockbuster is no more.
Imagine if you’d invested all your money in their shares?!
Thankfully, none of you did. Instead, you have diversified portfolios made up of thousands of different stocks, ensuring that if one underperforms, others can offset the loss. That’s the power of diversification.
If only it were as easy to diversify in farming as it is in investing . . .
What else was discussed?
How many of us have modelled climate change into our financial plans? – will we be spending our money the same way in 30 years time? What about flood risk? Increased cost of food?
My favourite quote of the day was from a fellow IFA who asked us all:
Are you happy to be complicit in the rapidly increasing climate crisis all in the name of growth and shareholder greed?
Do you want to make as much money as possible at the expense of our planet? My answer is a loud no. How about you?
That is why at Blueberry we put your money in positive impact funds, which invest in companies that are doing their bit for the planet and their people.
