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Fiduciary Duty vs. Saving the Planet
Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?
This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.
Layal Naban is Global Head of Sustainability for Financial Institutions at Société Générale Corporate and Investment Banking. She works at the intersection of large-scale capital and climate investment. Her job, in practice, is to convince the people who manage our pensions, sovereign wealth, and insurance reserves to channel money toward the energy transition. The capital she’s talking about is very real: pension funds alone hold $60 trillion worldwide.
When I asked her what keeps her up at night, she didn’t talk about climate denial or political backlash. She talked about plumbing: the financial plumbing that determines where money actually flows and the structural reasons it keeps flowing to the safest, most familiar destinations while a billion people still lack access to electricity.
The numbers she lays out are striking. $2.3 trillion was invested in low-carbon energy in 2025. That’s a record. But nearly all of it went to established developers in advanced economies. Meanwhile, adaptation (includong flood protection, water infrastructure and resilience) requires $230 to $300 billion a year in investment that generates no cash flows.
A flood wall protects your asset.
It doesn’t pay you back.
That’s the quiet contradiction at the center of this conversation. The investments the planet needs most are the ones that make the least sense on a balance sheet. And the people managing our money have a fiduciary duty to the balance sheet.
Layal frames this as a channeling problem: the solution is structural, not moral. That’s worth sitting with…
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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe
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By Jeremy GhezWelcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?
This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.
Layal Naban is Global Head of Sustainability for Financial Institutions at Société Générale Corporate and Investment Banking. She works at the intersection of large-scale capital and climate investment. Her job, in practice, is to convince the people who manage our pensions, sovereign wealth, and insurance reserves to channel money toward the energy transition. The capital she’s talking about is very real: pension funds alone hold $60 trillion worldwide.
When I asked her what keeps her up at night, she didn’t talk about climate denial or political backlash. She talked about plumbing: the financial plumbing that determines where money actually flows and the structural reasons it keeps flowing to the safest, most familiar destinations while a billion people still lack access to electricity.
The numbers she lays out are striking. $2.3 trillion was invested in low-carbon energy in 2025. That’s a record. But nearly all of it went to established developers in advanced economies. Meanwhile, adaptation (includong flood protection, water infrastructure and resilience) requires $230 to $300 billion a year in investment that generates no cash flows.
A flood wall protects your asset.
It doesn’t pay you back.
That’s the quiet contradiction at the center of this conversation. The investments the planet needs most are the ones that make the least sense on a balance sheet. And the people managing our money have a fiduciary duty to the balance sheet.
Layal frames this as a channeling problem: the solution is structural, not moral. That’s worth sitting with…
This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe