Who decides what goes in the portfolio?

Ask people in this market how to divide climate finance, and in conversation they are generous. Nature and engineered removals, the near-term and the long-lived – all of it has a place.

Ask the same people what they would fund, and it narrows because the money drifts towards what they work on. If we all believe in the portfolio, why does the split keep collapsing back to who we are?

The portfolio approach is simple to state: reductions first, then a science-aligned, time-weighted mix of nature-based and engineered removals. Other tools are of course available, but nature and tech are where this series has spent its time. The portfolio approach has become the safe answer; almost nobody argues with it now.

Our June piece showed what happens when you ask for the actual numbers. Asked to divide a notional budget across those solutions, a room of experts split along professional lines. Their allocations followed their day jobs. The nature people leaned to nature, the tech people to tech. Where you sit shapes what you fund.

I don’t think anyone in that room was arguing in bad faith. The support for a portfolio is real, and they meant it. Agreeing with it asks nothing of us. “Every tool in the toolbox” comes with no number attached, so we can all say it without checking our own split against it.

The same word also means different things in different rooms. A funder hears “portfolio” and reads it as more of what it already funds. A developer hears a nod to its own pipeline. Both hear agreement, and the split stays unsettled. That includes me (I have my own leanings), this committee, and the people writing this series. We are each somebody’s constituency.

The bias runs both ways. The reversal risk in nature-based credits is real, and the tech side names it readily. Engineered removals carry their own version of the same question, because much of what sells today is a forward claim on tonnes from facilities that are not yet running at scale. Neither side gets to treat its own tonne as settled.

The conversation is moving, though. We used to argue about whether to have a portfolio. Now the argument is what goes in it.

A portfolio only becomes real when someone says what share goes where. But if the mix keeps defaulting to who we are, the split gets settled somewhere else. It gets settled by whoever writes the rules on what a company can count, and what it can claim, for the credits it buys. That work is happening now, at SBTi and in policy, and the people doing it hold positions of their own. So the bias moves upstream, into the rules. The next quarter asks who governs the rule-makers, and how we would know they were getting it right.