ICE: Preserving nature by trading it

Elizabeth King

President, Sustainable Finance
ICE

Ecosystem services are all around us. They are what sustain life on earth -- clean water, clean air, productive soil, carbon sequestration. 

Ecological services are worth more than $125 trillion each year, which is more than the combined GDP of all the countries in the world. But we've taken them for granted because they are not valued in our economic system.

ICE's New York Stock Exchange, in partnership with the Intrinsic Exchange Group, is proposing to list natural asset companies – a new asset class -- subject to SEC approval. Their purpose is to protect and restore the ecosystem services that they produce.

Increasingly we see that investors are looking to express their sustainability beliefs through how they deploy their own capital. Natural asset companies would be a direct way for them to do this.

One of the ways that they could provide a financial return to investors is to issue carbon credits.

The sequestration of CO2 is critical to the world's net-zero goals. 

ICE and Well Fargo have worked together for more than a decade and we have collaborated on creating sustainable products.

Geneviève Piché

Head of Sustainable Finance & Advisory
Wells Fargo Corporate & Investment Banking

We've worked together on market data, on ETFs, on mortgage solutions, and now on this new, innovative form of market activity.

The market that ICE is working to develop will be an essential tool for mitigating emissions that we cannot eliminate.

Back to Elizabeth

It might seem counterintuitive that by placing a value on nature, we take a step towards preserving it.

But companies and countries are increasingly making net-zero commitments. We're never gonna get to zero emissions. And therefore, the net part of that is to remove it from the atmosphere and sequester it in the natural assets that we have.

It's exciting to be working on a new asset class that can help the world meet its net-zero goals.