On
Tuesday, 31st October 2023, Red Sycamore, in collaboration with
Think & Grow, held an exclusive panel discussion at the Mandala Club. The panel title was “Taking Sustainability to
the Next Level.”
Why
the Panel was Convened
The
carbon market is evolving rapidly.
Genuine contention persists over the direction the market should take,
in line with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and its various
protocols and treaties. The regulatory
framework was, and remains, playing catch-up to realities on the ground. This creates a considerable grey market of
opportunity for startups. The panel set
out to explore these opportunities in depth, drawing on the panellists’
collective experience. Fighting the
climate crisis and generating a genuine return are not mutually exclusive. This summary reflects the framing given by Ng
Kin Foong, Chief Executive Officer of Red Sycamore.
The
Panellists
De’Angelo
Harris, Partner at Think & Grow, moderated.
Eric Tanoto, Chief Executive Officer of USP Group; Tali Goldman, Founder
and Managing Director of Market for Good; and Terence Kenneth John Nunis, then President
of Red Sycamore, joined the panel.
The
Loss and Damage Fund, Then and Now
The
Loss and Damage Fund was the defining financial promise to emerge from COP28,
held weeks after this panel convened. It
was intended to compensate vulnerable countries for climate-driven disasters
exceeding their own capacity to adapt.
COP28 closed with pledges totalling just over US$600 million. The initial pledge was smaller than the cost
of building the Dubai Expo City venue hosting the conference itself, a
comparison that still stings.
COP29,
held in Baku in November 2024, set a new global climate finance goal of US$300
billion annually by 2035, widely criticised as inadequate against developing
countries’ own request for US$1.3 trillion.
The Loss and Damage Fund reached full operational status at that
conference. COP28’s own commitment to “transition
away from fossil fuels” simply disappeared from COP29’s final text, a genuine
reversal of the previous year’s hard-won language.
COP30,
held in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025, called for mobilising at least US$1.3
trillion annually by 2035, and confirmed operationalisation and replenishment
cycles for the Loss and Damage Fund itself.
Adaptation finance commitments were softened to “calling for efforts” to
triple by 2035, five years later than earlier drafts had proposed. More than eighty countries backed Brazil’s
proposal for an explicit fossil fuel phase-out roadmap. It did not survive the final hours of
negotiation, and the adopted text still refers only to COP28’s own two-year-old
language.
One
Structural Win
Article
6’s rulebook, governing international carbon markets, was finalised at
COP29. The Paris Agreement Crediting
Mechanism became fully funded and operational at COP30, a full year later. Carbon markets, the actual commercial
mechanism behind blue carbon credits and every conversation this panel explored
in 2023, are now credible, scalable infrastructure rather than a negotiating
chapter still under construction. Two
years after this panel discussed a market playing catch-up to reality, reality
has finally caught up to the market.
The
grey market of opportunity this panel identified in October 2023 has, since
then, been given genuine regulatory scaffolding, slowly, and only
partially. Finance pledges have grown
from a sum smaller than a conference venue’s construction cost to a headline
target of US$1.3 trillion a year. Fossil
fuel commitments have moved backwards, then failed to move forward again. Carbon markets, the mechanism this panel’s
own participants were building businesses around, are the one area where three
years of negotiation have delivered something concrete. The opportunity was real in 2023. It remains real now, and considerably better
funded than the sceptics in that room might have expected.
Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith
& Red Sycamore | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code
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