Hey, it's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. How could those of us who invest do more to encourage companies to lower emissions faster and even remove carbon from the atmosphere?

In her talk at the countdown summit in 2021, investment decarbonization expert Nilly Gilbert shares a vision for overhauling the economy

that's a real net positive for the planet and its people.

For the past two decades, I've been professionally managing assets for large financial institutions.

But you know, this wasn't my plan when I first entered the workforce.

I was a 20-year-old dreamer who wanted to change the world.

And so at first, I entered a nonprofit.

And this was where I started asking myself questions

about how we attribute value to things as a society

and how capital affects our shared reality. And this was what made me want to enter the finance

sector. And you know what? Still today, I believe that changing the markets can be a way to

change the world.

Today, among investors, there are a lot of questions about decarbonizing portfolios and how to achieve net zero.

But when I think about the intersection of climate and capital, I'm always asking myself, what effect is this really having on the

ground? Because there could be a profound difference between investing just to protect your assets

from the effects of climate change and actually investing to prevent those effects from coming about.

You could imagine creating a portfolio that appears to be decarbonized on paper,

but that doesn't have any real effect on the trajectory of climate.

And I would argue that that type of risk management on paper

will also one day prove to have been just an illusion.

Because what the world really needs is real decarbonization.

We need to decarbonize the old economy that we have

...