What should the business and finance communities expect from this summer's Rio+20 talks?

The biodiversity agreement in Nagoya is to be welcomed – but a dose of realism on financing is well overdue, says Mark Nicholls

What is it that environmental policy-makers don’t understand about sticking to contracts, asks Mark Nicholls

US coal miners, oil refiners and the country’s Chamber of Commerce are, no doubt, congratulating themselves on a job well done, says Mark Nicholls

What is the economic value of an endangered species? How much is as yet undeciphered genetic information worth? Can a price be put on a habitat’s delicate ecological balance?

Investment banks are renowned for it: taking an axe to staffing levels as the economic picture darkens, only to rush to hire once the outlook improves. And environmental finance and responsible investment are no different.

It was never meant to go like this, says Mark Nicholls

It is, it seems, an idea whose time has come. Support is building for the concept of government- backed ‘green investment banks’, which would use taxpayers’ money to help move capital towards the low-carbon investments that will be needed to tackle climate change, helping to address market failures and focus early-stage investment.

Could this year bring some cheer to the pinched faces of those investment bankers specialising in clean technology?

It’s Environmental Finance’s 10th anniversary. Editor Mark Nicholls looks back at a decade of progress – and a few pitfalls on the way

In mid-August, more than 100 UK police swooped on a number of addresses in and around London on behalf of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC). Nine people were arrested on suspicion of involvement in a £38 million ($62 million) carousel fraud, involving carbon allowances in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

For many, the recent G8 and Major Economies Forum (MEF) were a big disappointment. Environmentalists had hoped the industrialised world would agree to emissions reduction targets for 2020. They were also expecting signals from some of the larger developing countries, members of the MEF, that they would accept limits to their emissions, maybe committing to 2050 targets.

It might seem an odd place to look. But for evidence that environmental issues are, finally, becoming squarely incorporated into the corporate mainstream, one could do worse than examine the banking sector.

Whisper it softly, but could the worst be over? The financial pages are full of stories suggesting that, according to one piece of data or another, the bottom of the recession may be in sight – or, at least, the precipitous declines over the past two quarters in pretty much every economic indicator may be levelling off.

For anyone still labouring under the illusion that the clean technology sector might escape the worst of the global downturn, the release of investment numbers for the first quarter of 2009 will have come as quite a wake-up call.

The anaemic price of carbon allowances is generating growing anxiety about the role of emissions trading in tackling climate change, and some predictably confused reporting. It is also generating calls for intervention in the market to ensure that a sufficiently high price signal is transmitted to change corporate behaviour.

I must admit to some scepticism over recent months as to the likelihood of a ‘Green New Deal’ emerging as a response to the economic turmoil in which the world finds itself. Governments were more likely, it seemed, to rush to save jobs in struggling sectors of the old economy than attempt to create jobs in the fledgling sectors of the new.

So much for all the whistling in the dark. Those optimists who had been persuading themselves that, this time, it was going to be different – that, this time, the environment wouldn’t be one of the first victims of recession – are gradually being disabused.