Lenders and Investors Environmental Liability: How much is too much? presents an overview of Lender Environmental Liability (LEL) and Investor Environmental Liability (IEL) regimes and issues. Environmental harm and degradation are often irreparable. Therefore, our assumption is that precaution is the main objective of any international and domestic environmental legal regime. The paper explores the conditions under which LEL/IEL can be the effective tool to promote precaution. To illustrate our premise, we created a model based on Nash’s game theory in an attempt to universalize some basic concepts in the design of these systems. By using Nash’s game theory we aim to answer the question presented in the title of our paper: how much is a too much environmental liability for a financial institution to bear?
We argue that full environmental liability (where financial institutions bear unlimited liability) may have the perverse effect of incentivising them to internalize any duty of care, in case they bear full liability.
This resource is also available in English.
The Scaling Citizen Action on Climate: ANT Financial's efforts towards a digital finance solution report shows that almost half of Ant Financial Services Group’s 450 million users signed up to Ant Forest, an app that gamifies carbon footprint tracking – cutting greenhouse gas emissions and demonstrating the massive potential of Fintech (financial technology) for supporting sustainable development. By the end of January 2017, the approach had avoided 150,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, thanks to the accumulation of small behavior changes, with much more to come.
