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Beyond adhering to the industry-leading standard established by third parties, Pictet also uses its influence to forge change. We are committed advocates of responsible investing and want to play an active role by encouraging sustainable finance. The industry must be steered towards more inclusive thinking around people, planet and portfolios, because over the long term, they are inextricably linked. Our advocacy efforts are focused on areas which are particularly material to us, and on which we can bring expertise to provide valuable inputs to our partners.Global environmental change presents us with an unprecedented challenge: preventing the worst outcome will require highly effective, decades-long cooperation of at least 20 of the world’s largest economies. Let’s not forget that, for example, 100 million Vietnamese produce annually less than 0.5 per cent of the world’s and less than 2 per cent of China’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.Even if the Vietnamese were to switch rapidly and become completely emissions-free, their sacrifice would still be equal to a mere rounding error of the global total. And as the effect of greenhouse gases depends on their absolute atmospheric concentration, and not on any relative measure, all smaller emitters are, as nations and not just as individuals, powerless in the absence of any effective global compact. The likelihood of reaching the latter is best appreciated by imagining China and the US on shared sacrifices sometime soon.The fundamental error is to see global decarbonisation as just another discrete event that could be solved by targeted technical solutions, like switching from a landline to a mobile phone, or replacing a gas furnace by a heat pump. In reality, global decarbonisation amounts to a fundamental restructuring of the world’s most essential and complex activity − its energy supply and use. It’s therefore a much more complicated and much more expensive proposition that has to tackle everything from fertilisers to jetliners, from steel to plastics, and from grain harvests to intercontinental container shipping. And then there is the sheer scale of it all. Dealing with billions of tons and trillions of cubic metres and kilowatt-hours will need gradual advances extending across decades. The process can be accelerated but it cannot be accomplished using arbitrary scenarios devised by office-bound bureaucrats in Paris or Brussels by years ending in 5 or 0.Hydrogeneration was the original green solution. The first small hydro plant began working in 1882, the same year Edison built his first coal-fired station, and it remained a great favourite for a century. Then attitudes shifted, hydro became an environmental problem and eventually the World Bank stopped financing any new projects in low-income countries with large remaining hydro capacities. This is most unfortunate because the world – both rich and poor − still abounds in opportunities to build lots of small hydro stations whose combined capacities would be a welcome adjunct to intermittent electricity supplies. China, of course, has kept on building on a gargantuan scale as hydro became a critical part of their generation. Why should Africa, with its large hydro potential, be deprived of the same chance?