"Martin Stuchtey shows what it means for a nation to know what it owns, in what condition, and what it can bear as collateral for its own future. The strongest wake-up call yet, and a riveting read."
Too Big to Bail
Too Big to Bail: A Playbook for Recapitalising the Living World
BY MARTIN R. STUCHTEY
“Martin Stuchtey shows what it means for a nation to know what it owns, in what condition, and what it can bear as collateral for its own future. The strongest wake-up call yet, and a riveting read.”
Trevor Manuel
Member of Nelson Mandela's first cabinet; Minister of Finance of South Africa 1996–2009
Pre-order available from October 15
DLD exclusive: Join reading list now
Endorsed by Global Leaders
"Our natural capital is the world’s most precious asset. This crucial book shows how to protect it, invest in it and build the institutions to finance it. A book of real insight and imagination. Its time is now."
"When Deutsche Post left the state, one of the hardest tasks was giving it a balance sheet. Martin Stuchtey shows that nature is still run without one, and that financial stability cannot survive the degradation of its own collateral. A book decision makers can act on."
"Martin Stuchtey does not only provoke. He explains how biased our economies are, ignoring what nature provides to companies and households. He makes tangible proposals to better price ecosystem services. Solutions exist. Let's implement them."
"Nature is not only the foundation for everything we call wealth. Nature determines the stability, resilience and life-support of the entire planet. It is what the economy is based on, making nature not only too important to fail, but also too big to bail. Even a fossil-free world will fail if ecosystems continue to weaken. Once understood, this provides the cure: make all living systems count, so that safeguarding them becomes the economically rational choice."
"This book gives land stewards and their communities what fifty years of nature finance never did: agency. Not as recipients of aid, but as providers of the infrastructure services every economy runs on — paid because they keep the land whole. The people beneath our prosperity move from its margins to its centre."
About the Book
Since 2008 the world has run from refuge to refuge — gold, government bonds, the dollar, crypto — and found lasting safety in none. Too Big to Bail argues that the search has never gone to the bottom. Every loan, bond, share and currency is a promise of future production, and production runs on water, soil, pollination and a stable climate. Some $620 trillion of real assets stands on that ground.
Yet for two centuries nature has been booked as income and never as capital: the forest felled appears as revenue, the forest standing appears nowhere. Every leap in wealth widened what counts as good security — gold once it could be assayed, land once it was mapped and registered. Nature is the last great thing outside the register, the largest, and the only one that cannot be rescued if it fails. In 2008 a state could ring-fence the collateral that broke. No central bank can restart a forest.
What has changed is measurement. Satellites, sensors and AI now resolve the condition of a named place into a signal strangers can agree on. From signal comes value, and from value an entry in a public cadastre: Signal, Value, Book.
- Nature belongs on the balance sheet. Almost no one says which side, at what value, or who signs. This book does.
- The playbook for making living systems measurable, priceable and pledgeable — in twelve provocations, written from inside the machinery.
Meet the Author: Martin R. Stuchtey
Geologist, economist and serial entrepreneur
One question runs through everything he has done: why does the economy behave as though the natural world does not exist? He has worked at it as academic, consultant, entrepreneur, investor, farmer and conservationist.
He began his career mapping mineral deposits in Southern Africa and took a doctorate on externalities, the costs markets leave off the books. At McKinsey & Company he became a senior partner and managing partner of the Munich office and co-founded the firm's sustainability practice. There and afterwards he helped put a succession of unpriced systems on the economic agenda: materials, through his work on the circular economy; freshwater, as co-initiator of the 2030 Water Resources Group; and the ocean, as lead author for the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy.
He co-founded Systemiq to accelerate that transition and then, with Sonja Stuchtey, The Landbanking Group, a leading NatureFinTech that makes thriving nature measurable, priceable and investable. He is Professor of Resource Strategy and Management at the University of Innsbruck and author of “A Good Disruption: Redefining Growth in the Twenty-First Century” (2016). A father of six, he farms in the Austrian Alps and is an alpinist.
With forewords from
- Kristalina Georgieva
- Klaus Zumwinkel
- Nicolai Tangen
Ready to understand the future of nature and economy?
Pre-orders begin October 15. Join the reading list for exclusive insights and early access.
If you would like to invite Martin Stuchtey to speak about Nature Finance, Biodiversity, Nature-Related Business & Risks and Opportunities, write to us here.