Post date 2 Feb 2026 (original LinkedIn date)
Original LinkedIn version· 1,346 words
Last week was an important one for Scots, as we donned our finery and tipped out to celebrate our national bard. My attendance at the Guild of Investment Manager’s Civic Dinner (with a strong Burns’ supper theme) got me thinking. If Burns wrote To a Mouse today (a beautiful, reflective poem), would he be looking up from the furrow and worrying about other physical risks? When Robert Burns turned his plough and broke the mouse’s nest, the ‘darkness’ in To a Mouse came from intimacy. One small life, one careless moment, one hard winter closing in.
To a Mouse [the original]
Wee, sleeket, couran, tim’rous beastie, O, what a panic’s in thy breastie! Thou need na start awa sae hasty, wi’ bickerin brattle! I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee wi’ murd’ring pattle!
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion has broken Nature’s social union, an’ justifies that ill opinion, which makes thee startle, at me, thy poor, earth-born companion, an’ fellow-mortal!
I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve; What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!A daimen-icker in a thrave’ s a sma’ request: I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave, an’ never miss ’t!
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin! It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin! An’ naething, now, to big a new ane, o’ foggage green! An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin, baith snell an’ keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste, an’ weary Winter comin fast, an’ cozie here, beneath the blast, thou thought to dwell, till crash! the cruel coulter past out thro’ thy cell.
That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble has cost thee monie a weary nibble! Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble, but house or hald, to thole the Winter’s sleety dribble, an’ cranreuch cauld!
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me! The present only toucheth thee: But Och! I backward cast my e’e, On prospects drear! An’ forward tho’ I canna see, I guess an’ fear!
Today, the foreboding is still there, but I want to make the case that it has moved upstream. It now sits squarely in supply chains, subsidies, credit models, water permits, insurance renewals, and the odd little phrases that have started doing the rounds: water “bankruptcy”, “planetary insolvency”, and “national emergency”. Not metaphorical, but literal. Alarmist? Maybe, but real certainly.
For context, recent UN estimates put nature-negative finance at US$7.3 trillion in 2023, versus US$220 billion flowing into nature-based solutions. A ratio of more than 30:1. Of that US$7.3 trillion, about US$2.4 trillion is public subsidies (including water, agriculture and fossil fuels) and US$4.9 trillion is private capital.
Meanwhile, the water story is shifting from scarcity to insolvency. The UK Parliament Library describes “water bankruptcy” as a condition where demand exceeds supply and stored water is depleted, with over-extraction and pollution featuring heavily. The UN University frames it similarly, tying it to climate pressure and unsustainable use. So, what might Burns write now?
A modern To a Mouse (courtesy of ChatGPT)
We’ve brakk the bank o’ burn an’ bog, Wi’ ledger-ink an’ steel, An’ priced the rain like common fog That disnae need tae feel.
The wee bit nest ye hid awa Beneath the stibble’s heid Is noo a line in someone’s law, A “risk” nae sorrow reads.
For drought comes no wi’ trumpet blawn, But clauses, calm and clean, Till insurers lift, till loans are drawn, An’ fields grow thin an’ mean.
An’ aye, we plant the cure in bits, A grant here, carbon there, While trillions feed the hungry pits That strip the land bare.
Still, mousie, ye were wise at least Tae trust what ye could see, For we hae built a feast o’ feast On borrowed certainty.
So what’s changed?
1) The “mouse” isn’t just a mouse any more, it’s the system
Burns wrote about one shattered shelter and a winter that followed. The moral punch was local: human plans collide with nature’s indifference. Today the ‘nest’ is entire catchments, aquifers, soils, wetlands, and coastal buffers. And we’re not just disturbing them, we’re running them down. That’s why “water bankruptcy” as a concept lands so hard. It’s not just drought, rather it’s the idea that we’ve already spent the stored reserves, and we’re still calling it income.
2) The villain has changed from misfortune to mispricing
In To a Mouse, the plough is the instrument of harm, but not a grand conspiracy. In 2026, the instrument is the financial system’s pricing engine. We are still allocating serious money to activities that damage nature, while comparatively little capital flows into repair. UNEP’s State of Finance for Nature 2026 makes that imbalance stark: US$7.3 trillion into nature-negative activities versus US$220 billion into nature-based solutions in 2023. That’s the modern darkness. Not that we don’t know better, but that the incentives still point completely the wrong way.
3) The consequences now arrive through markets, not just weather
Burns’ mouse faces winter. We face risk transmission, in a way that might even overwhelm our current insurance system. A useful modern translation is what PwC calls the pathway from nature loss to financial loss: degraded ecosystems raise input costs, disrupt operations, damage assets, and then show up as weaker earnings, higher default risk, falling collateral value, and repricing. A particularly chilling line is the dynamic where what becomes uninsurable can become unbankable. Their modelling suggests that, within the next 15 years, unchecked nature loss could erode 12–17% of GDP and 12–18% of stock exchange market value, with the latter put at roughly US$11 trillion across the economies they analyse. This feels like a very different kind of winter.
4) Burns’ uncertainty was personal, whereas ours is institutional
The famous line in Burns is about plans going wrong, even for “mice and men”. Now, we have more analytics than Burns could imagine. We talk in scenarios, stress tests, and “severe-but-plausible” shocks. And yet, the flows remain bizarrely stubborn. Private nature-negative finance stays in the US$5–6 trillion range across recent years, with limited progress decoupling capital from degradation. So the key difference is not awareness, rather it’s follow-through and deliberate pivoting action.
5) The moral centre has shifted from empathy to accountability
Burns invites you to feel for the mouse. The modern equivalent is asking: who pays when nature’s buffers fail? Often it’s households and taxpayers, especially once losses become systemic. You can see this logic in resilience discussions where insurers retreat, and public balance sheets quietly pick up the tail risk. That’s not sentimental - it’s fiscal.
I think modern Burns’ tone would still be dark (but aimed differently). The original poem is foreboding because it exposes a simple truth: we’re not as in control as we think. If he were writing now, the sting would be that we are in control of far more than we admit, in the sense that we choose what gets subsidised. We choose what gets financed. We choose what counts as ‘bankable’. And we’re still making a hash of it. UNEP notes that environmentally harmful subsidies and private investments often reinforce each other, locking in nature-negative sectors. It even gives the painfully concrete example of free or underpriced water depleting aquifers for irrigation. So the modern “To a Mouse” isn’t really about fate. It’s about design.
A closing thought for investors and operators: if nature-negative finance is still running at thirty times nature-positive flows, then ‘nature strategy’ can’t just mean a small pot of impact capital on the side. It has to mean confronting the big numbers: underwriting standards, lending books, capex plans, procurement, and the subsidy structures that quietly shape returns. Burns might still apologise to the mouse. Then he’d probably ask the sharper question. Who keeps turning the plough, despite everything we now know? “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley” - who keeps paying for the broken ground and why?