Climate finance isn’t broken, our assumptions are with Climate Bonds Initiative

What happens when the world is on fire – and someone tells you the solution is a financial instrument?

In this episode of Shaken Not Burned, Felicia Jackson speaks with Sean Kidney, co-founder and CEO of the Climate Bonds Initiative, about how green, climate, and resilience bonds went from a niche idea to a multi-trillion-dollar global market, and why that matters now.

This isn’t a technical deep dive into taxonomy footnotes or ESG compliance. It’s a conversation about how capital actually moves, who it serves, and what it takes to redirect finance toward climate action, adaptation and resilience at scale, without pretending markets are driven by sentiment alone.

Sean explains why long-term investors such as pension funds and insurers are central to climate finance, why bonds unlock scale, and how adaptation and resilience investments can be financed even when they don’t generate obvious revenue streams. 

Along the way, we unpack the myths around “financialising” resilience, the role of labels and taxonomies, the political and social limits of climate finance, and why trust and legitimacy may be just as important as clever instruments.

As we figure out the markets of the future, we must remember that green finance today is sensible long-term planning. That shift, from should we? to how fast can we?, may be the most hopeful signal of all.

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