Finance seminars

This panel examines how biodiversity science can inform decisions in business, finance and government. It assesses what is known about biodiversity status and trends in marine and terrestrial systems, which dimensions matter for decisions, and how to navigate financial-disclosure frameworks, science-based targets, national indicators and biodiversity credits. The discussion considers emerging methods including genomics, AI-based monitoring, functional traits, multiple knowledge systems and global indices. It asks how these approaches can support ecological recovery without reinforcing extractive measurement or governance, and how metrics can respect Indigenous rights, knowledge and decision-making. The panel also recognises that better measurement is only one component of changing business impacts on nature.

Risk occupies a central role in both the theory and practice of decision-making. Although it is deeply implicated in many conditions involving dysfunctional behavior and thought, modern theoretical approaches to understanding and mitigating risk in either one-shot or sequential settings, which are derived largely from finance and economics, have yet to permeate fully the fields of neural reinforcement learning and computational psychiatry. I will discuss the use of dynamic and static versions of one prominent approach, namely conditional value-at-risk, to examine both the nature of risk avoidant choices, encompassing such things as justified gambler's fallacies, and the optimal planning that can lead to consideration of such choices, with implications for offline, ruminative, thinking.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb develops two approaches to reasoning about extreme risk. In the first part, on the law of large numbers in the real world, he defines fat-tailed distributions and examines why conventional statistical procedures can perform poorly for economic variables. He stresses the much larger data requirements and the choice of estimators when rare observations dominate outcomes. The second part considers how to detect fragility in portfolios. Taleb describes fragility as sensitivity to volatility and argues for analysing the shape of an exposure and its response to shocks when reliable numerical estimates of tail probabilities are unavailable. The lecture connects limitations of statistical estimation with practical heuristics for identifying vulnerability.