Post date 30 Mar 2026 (original LinkedIn date)
Original LinkedIn version· 1,893 words
“No half measures.
That is how Charlie lived his life. I could take this time to talk about the things that Charlie did (the huge blisters that he acquired on his Two Moors Way fundraising walk), the enthusiasm he threw into whichever activity he turned his attention to (pulling a tire on Saunton Sands for hours on end) and the kit research that went along with any activities that Charlie undertook (the shop’s worth of different chocolate bars in freezer anecdote), but fundamentally the loss we all face is that of a man whose unwavering kindness and care for others was what defined him rather than what he did and for that we will miss him. Always a friendly smile, always a kind word. He will be remembered as you have heard as teammate, as Honorary Secretary, as Swiftwater rescue technician, as casualty carer. He was our friend.
Many of you will know that we use the phonetic alphabet in communications in mountain rescue, as they do in all blue light services and the military. The third letter ‘C’ is Charlie. Maybe less of you will know that in the nautical world they also translate the alphabet to flags for ease of communication. ‘C’ or Charlie is represented by this flag, also fittingly signalling ‘yes’ or ‘affirmative’. With your blessing, George [Charlie’s partner], and the kind permission of my fellow trustees, we will hang this flag, the Charlie flag, in our Rescue Centre in South Milton. It will serve to remind us of everything that our friend stood for.
No half measures”
Memorial speech remarks for Charlie Wilkins, 13th August 1989 – 29th March 2024
For years, climate discussion in the UK has been framed as though the future is simply a slightly warmer version of the present. A bit hotter, a bit wetter, a bit more volatile. But what if that is completely the wrong mental model. I want to suggest that the deeper issue is not just rising average temperatures. It is the growing instability of the physical systems on which our economy depends. That is why the debate around the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, matters so much.
The popular version of the story is dramatic enough. If the AMOC weakened severely, north-west Europe could experience much harsher winter conditions than most people associate with a warming world. But the real significance of AMOC risk is not that Britain might one day feel colder (as cold as they have it in the Nordics) in winter. Rather it is that climate change does not always show up as a smooth shift in averages. Sometimes instead it shows up as a destabilisation of the systems that make a country habitable, productive, insurable and investible, and that distinction matters.
The IPCC still judges an abrupt AMOC collapse before 2100 to be unlikely. Let’s not ignore that - it should be stated plainly. But that is not the same as saying the risk is irrelevant. The AMOC is expected to weaken, and newer work (using the extended CMIP6 model) suggests that the longer-run risk of a northern overturning shutdown after 2100 may be materially higher than many people had assumed, with a large reduction in northward heat transport and strong cooling in the subpolar North Atlantic and north-west Europe in various shutdown states.
But for me, the most interesting implication is not meteorological. It is financial, because this is exactly the kind of problem where the median outcome can become a dangerous guide to decision-making. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) has made this point clearly. The sting is in the tail. In other words, what matters is not just the central estimate of future warming, but the plausible severe outcomes that could threaten the economic and social systems on which long-term financial promises depend. Economist Simon Sharpe’s work points in a similar direction. In situations of structural change and deep uncertainty, narrow cost-benefit logic can give a false sense of precision. The more relevant question is how decisions perform under a wider range of possible futures, especially when systems can shift in non-linear ways.
This should resonate particularly strongly with pension investors. Pension funds are not short-horizon traders; rather they are long-duration owners of the future economy. Their performance depends on whether the underlying system remains capable of producing real returns over decades, ie productive companies, functioning infrastructure, insurable property, and stable sovereigns. Not to mention reliable food, water and energy systems, and social and political conditions that allow all of the above to keep working.
So when we think about AMOC risk, the relevant question is not “what is the most likely winter temperature in London in 2085?” It should instead be “what happens to a 30 to 50-year investment portfolio if physical instability starts repricing multiple parts of the economy at once?”. Now it gets interesting, because that is a different question altogether. And it is far more relevant to fiduciary thinking.
The Pensions Regulator now describes climate change as a major systemic financial risk and a threat to the long-term sustainability of UK occupational pensions. Once you accept that framing, it becomes much harder to treat physical climate risk as a side issue, or as something that can be captured by a neat central-case scenario and a few disclosure metrics. Systemic risks do not stay politely within asset-class boundaries. They move through insurance markets, infrastructure performance, municipal and sovereign balance sheets, food prices, public finances, labour productivity and regional growth.
This is where AMOC risk becomes such a useful lens for me. It reminds us that climate risk may arrive not just through hotter summers and rising mean temperatures, but through a broad erosion of stability. We should expect (and plan for) the possibility of colder winter extremes in some places, different storm tracks, certain changes in rainfall (see RE’s recent work, thanks Neil and George), and agricultural stress. And then there’s freeze-thaw damage, transport disruption, energy system strain, insurance repricing (as we’ve discussed at length before), and fiscal pressure on states and local authorities too.
Even if the most dramatic versions of that future do not materialise this century, I believe that this lesson still holds. The economic value of resilience rises as physical instability rises. And that, to my mind, is where the Rebalance Earth framing becomes especially powerful. If the problem is system instability, then adaptation is not a peripheral climate theme, rather it becomes core economic infrastructure.
And if resilience is truly infrastructure, then nature belongs firmly inside that camp. A healthy catchment is not just ‘good for biodiversity’. It is part of a water-regulation system - it stores water, slows runoff, reduces downstream flood peaks, supports baseflows in dry periods and protects soils. A wetland is not just a habitat story - it is hydrological infrastructure. A floodplain is not wasted land waiting for a better use - it is a shock absorber. Coastal habitats are not just ecological amenities - they are protective assets in an era of rising physical volatility. And so on - you get the picture!
That is the investment implication. Long-term investors, especially pension investors with sterling liabilities and deep exposure to UK economic performance, should care about the resilience of the landscapes and water systems that support the real economy they ultimately own. Because if the UK becomes less resilient to physical shocks, pension portfolios do not somehow sit outside that reality. They are firmly inside it.
This is where decision-making under tail risk, not median comfort becomes more than an elegant turn of phrase. Median comfort says the world changes gradually enough for markets, infrastructure and public policy to adapt in an orderly way. Tail-risk thinking asks something harder: what if it does not? What if physical instability moves faster than adaptation, what if critical systems prove less robust than assumed, what if assets that looked diversified on paper turn out to share the same dependence on a stable water cycle, affordable insurance, functioning transport corridors and fiscally resilient public institutions? [I’ll return to this latter point in a portfolio context in a forthcoming future piece]
For long-term pension investing, that is not alarmism. For a fiduciary, it is basic prudence. Indeed, one of the weaknesses in much climate finance thinking has been the assumption that decarbonisation alone is enough to manage long-run risk. It is essential, obviously, but it is far from sufficient. Even in scenarios where emissions fall, investors remain exposed to physical damage already locked in, to transition frictions, and to the possibility of non-linear Earth-system responses.
That means the investment conversation has to widen. Not just how to avoid stranded assets, but how to preserve the asset base on which long-term returns depend. Not just how to report climate risk, but how to reduce it in the real world. And certainly not just how to optimise a portfolio against historical data, but rather how to build resilience into the economic systems that will determine future cash flows. This is why I hold strongly that nature restoration deserves to be taken much more seriously by institutional investors. Not as a concessionary side pocket, nor as a reputational exercise, and not even only as an impact allocation. But as part of a broader resilience strategy.
The more unstable the climate becomes, the more valuable resilience becomes. And the more valuable resilience becomes, the stronger the case for treating nature restoration as infrastructure with financial relevance.
For the UK, water is the clearest entry point. Too much water, too little water, water in the wrong place – you’ve heard it before! Water carrying the wrong sediment load, nutrient load, or pollution burden. Coastal erosion happening at worrisome scale. These are not separate environmental annoyances. They are signs of a degraded resilience system. Restore the system, and you do not just improve environmental outcomes.
You also improve the conditions for asset protection, economic continuity and long-duration value. And that should matter to pension trustees. Because trustees are not only stewards of a portfolio. They are stewards of long-term promises made against the future capacity of the economy to deliver. And in a world of climate tail risk, preserving that capacity increasingly means investing in resilience.
Which brings us neatly back to AMOC. The most important lesson is not that the UK might one day have some very cold winters (Charlie would have loved that!). It is that the future may be shaped less by average warming than by the instability of the systems on which modern prosperity rests. Once you see climate risk that way, nature restoration stops looking like some sort of soft option, a refuge of rewilders and tree-huggers. It starts looking like infrastructure, and for long-term pension capital, that makes it look less like optional virtue and more like fiduciary common sense.
References
IPCC AR6 Working Group I. The AMOC is projected to very likely decline over the 21st century, with medium confidence that the decline will not involve an abrupt collapse before 2100.
Drijfhout et al. (2025), Environmental Research Letters, “Shutdown of northern Atlantic overturning after 2100 following deep mixing collapse in CMIP6 projections”.
Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, Climate Scorpion: the sting is in the tail.
The Pensions Regulator, Climate adaptation report 2025.
Simon Sharpe and colleagues, Risk-Opportunity Analysis Implementation Guidance and related analytical tools.