A Personal Reckoning with the Most Urgent Obligation of Our Age
I want to tell you about a glacier. Not in the abstract, policy-document way we are used to reading about climate change — but personally, urgently, because what is happening to the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica keeps me awake at night. In January 2026, a team of scientists set off on one of the most dangerous expeditions ever attempted on this planet. Their destination: a mass of ice roughly the size of Great Britain, buried in the frozen wilderness of West Antarctica. Scientists call it the “Doomsday Glacier.” That name alone should stop you cold.
Warm sea water is eating it from below, eroding its underbelly silently, invisibly, relentlessly. If Thwaites collapses — and the models are not reassuring — global sea levels could rise by 10 to 15 feet. Imagine every coastal city you have ever loved: Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Miami, Jakarta, New York. Gone, or permanently besieged by the sea. This is not science fiction. This is the trajectory we are on. The writing is on the wall. We need to urgently prepare for a world of planetary instability.
That we are simply not equipped to handle this environmental crisis at the mega scale that it demands is evident. Consider what strikes me as a profound and dangerous absurdity; human beings build financial systems that think in quarters. Politicians think in election cycles of four or five years. Even our most visionary institutions — central banks, sovereign wealth funds — rarely plan beyond a generation. And yet the ecological systems that keep us alive — tropical rainforests, polar ice, coral reefs, river basins — operate on timescales of thousands of years. They are, for all practical purposes, permanent.
Once a glacier melts beyond a tipping point, it does not come back in our lifetime, or our children’s, or their children’s. Once a forest is gone, it cannot be restored in any meaningful human timeframe. Once a coral reef bleaches to death, the fish that fed millions of people do not simply return. This is what I call the “permanence mismatch” — and it is the single most catastrophic design flaw in how we fund conservation today.
I have spent years studying how the world finances nature and the system is structurally unfit for the task. Take endowments — pools of capital whose returns fund conservation. In theory, elegant. In practice, they shrink in downturns, lose to inflation, and treat nature as a passive recipient of surplus returns rather than as an irreplaceable asset. Project-based grants are worse: when the funding cycle ends, protection ends. Ecological systems do not recognise grant cycles. Then there are carbon markets and biodiversity credits — useful tools, but carbon prices fluctuate, regulations shift, and political will erodes. None of these mechanisms make a permanent, legally binding commitment to keep nature alive. We are treating the life-support system of our civilisation as a discretionary expense. That is not a policy failure. It is a category error.
Let me offer you a different frame. Think about how modern economies handle things they truly cannot afford to lose. Roads. Bridges. Power grids. National debt. We do not fund these through charity or market enthusiasm. We fund them as permanent obligations — legally binding, non-expiring, immune to political mood. Why on earth do we not do the same for nature? The Himalayas provide drinking water to over a billion people. The Sunderbans mangroves shield millions from Bay of Bengal cyclones. The forests of the Amazon regulate rainfall patterns across an entire continent. These are not scenic amenities. They are critical infrastructure. And right now, we fund them like a charity bake sale.
The idea I want to put before you is this: a Perpetual Ecological Obligation (PEO). Legally binding, non-expiring payment obligations imposed on every economic activity that depends on or degrades global ecological commons. Not voluntary. Not market-dependent. Obligatory. User fees for planetary infrastructure — the same logic we apply to water utilities, power companies, and motorways, now applied to the ecosystems that make all of those things possible.
The mechanism is simple : In the Himalayas, a Flow Fee on every megawatt of hydroelectric power generated from Himalayan rivers, and every litre of bottled water extracted from those ranges. This money should be used to pay local communities to maintain the high-altitude wetlands and forests that slow glacial melt, enough to monitor over 500 glacial lakes round the clock and protect over 10,000 villages from Glacial Lake Outburst Floods, in perpetuity. In the Sunderbans, a Coastal Protection Levy on shipping traffic entering Kolkata and Haldia, and a fee on the regional aquaculture trade, to generate a permanent wage for Forest Guardians from local communities and fund the biosensor monitoring and embankment maintenance that keep these villages alive.
Drive up the coastal highway from Mumbai to Jamnagar and you will see what I mean. Cranes. Concrete. Reclaimed coastline where mangroves once stood. A Permeability Tax on coastal real estate developers — reflecting the drainage capacity they are destroying — and fees on industrial ports could generate enough funding to support Mangrove Nurseries and Blue Carbon vaults that protect Mumbai and Surat from the flooding that is already intensifying every monsoon season.
This logic scales seamlessly to the world’s most vital—and threatened—biophysical organs. In the Amazon Basin, a Transnational Carbon Sequestration Royalty on industrial soy and cattle exports could transform the “lungs of the world” from a resource to be pillaged into a global utility maintained by indigenous stewards. Along the Great Barrier Reef, an Oceanic Thermal Surcharge on international shipping and nitrogen-heavy agriculture would create a permanent endowment for coral resilience and heat-stress monitoring. Closer to home, the Western Ghats—the water towers of South India—could be sustained by a Hydrological Service Fee levied on the massive industrial corridors and thirsty tech hubs downstream that rely entirely on these mountain forests for their water security. Even the Sahel could see a Dust-Shield Levy on transcontinental infrastructure projects to fund the Great Green Wall, turning a defensive ecological barrier into a permanent source of green employment. By shifting from the fragility of “charity” to the permanence of obligatory maintenance contracts, we finally align the ledger of human commerce with the non-negotiable accounts of the Earth.
Alongside the financial architecture, we need a new kind of institution: the Perpetual Nature Utility (PNU). Think of it as a public water utility or a sovereign wealth fund, but for ecosystems. Each PNU is vested with one unbreakable mandate: ensure the perpetual existence of its designated ecological asset. Each PNU operates under Nature Service Level Agreements — measurable ecological thresholds, published annually, subject to public consultation and independent audit. And crucially, PNU boards must include indigenous stewards, scientific guardians, and fiduciary managers. Their mandates are legally locked. Assets cannot be sold. Missions cannot be changed.
India’s legal framework already contains the skeleton for this. Article 48A of the Constitution directs the State to protect forests and wildlife. Article 51A(g) places a fundamental duty on citizens to protect the natural environment. Courts have read a right to a clean and healthy environment into Article 21. The public trust doctrine already treats the State as a trustee of air, water, and forests. The bones are there. What we need now is the muscle: permanent fiscal obligations, independent ecological authorities, and financial instruments that match the timescale of the systems they protect.
Traditional finance discounts the future. But this logic breaks catastrophically when applied to irreversible losses. You cannot discount a dead glacier. You cannot put a net-present-value on a civilisation without drinking water. Obligation-based systems explicitly value irreversibility. When ecological thresholds are breached, pre-funded capital is automatically deployed. Ecosystem collapse is treated as a systemic emergency, not a fundraising problem. And crucially, ecological funding is made senior to all financial returns. In periods of stress, investors absorb losses before ecosystems do. Finance is designed to fail before nature does.
A coordinated global obligation framework — user fees on economic activities that depend on or degrade ecological commons — could generate more than sufficient to fund global ecological maintenance indefinitely. This revenue is stable, counter-cyclical, and decoupled from political mood swings. It transforms conservation from charity into infrastructure maintenance.
We have the tools to do this. We have the legal frameworks, the financial instruments, the ecological science. What we lack — what we have always lacked — is the will to treat nature not as a resource to be exploited or a cause to be funded charitably, but as the sovereign infrastructure of civilisation itself. As permanent and non-negotiable as the roads we drive on, the water pipes beneath our cities, the electrical cables that carry light into every home. Capitalising nature forever is not a radical or novel idea. It is the minimum rational response to permanence. Every other path leads, sooner or later, to a world that cannot sustain the life we have built within it. In institutionalising nature’s continuity, civilisation begins to measure its progress not by extraction, but by endurance. This is the architecture of capital that remembers its origins — and honours them, forever.