By Praveen Gupta
"Has killed his first tiger….” reads the top item in the newly-appointed Viceroy of India Minto’s (Earl of Minto) weekly dispatch of February 1906 to his boss, the Secretary of State Morley (later Viscount Morley of Blackburn).
Killing a tiger was a definitive, albeit unofficial, tick in the box for being baptised as the Viceroy of India. One of the most prized positions in the entire British empire.
This was not a one-off act of ‘subjugating’ nature; it was an act deeply embedded in the colonial mindset. Apart from what transpired between a Viceroy and his immediate boss in London, there were regular updates from the Home Department, Government of India, to the Secretary of State. For instance, one such dated November 24, 1855, was addressed to ‘The Right Honourable Lord Randolph Churchill (father of Winston Churchill)’ – Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for India. It informed his lordship about “the action taken for the destruction of wild animals and venomous snakes during the year 1884”.
The most infamous photograph depicting bison extermination captures a gruesome scene – a towering pile of bison skulls. Taken in 1892 outside Michigan Carbon Works in Rougeville, Michigan, it reflects a devastating loss. Once numbering 30-60 million, only 456 wild bison remained by then. Photo: Public Domain/Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.
In the appendix to the attachments were complete details for each district, including the number of persons and cattle killed by wild animals and snakes, the number of wild animals ‘destroyed’, and the rewards paid for their destruction. It also listed the total number of licenses issued for the possession of arms for the destruction of wild animals in the year under review.
Source: British Library, London.
Here is an extract from the Proceedings of the Government of Madras, dated June 19, 1885. Mind you, the Madras Presidency was a relatively small portion of the sprawling Indian geography, and it was not the most intensely ‘tiger-infested’ jurisdiction in the country.
Let’s move the theatre to North America for a moment. In The Nutmeg’s Curse, author and climate champion Amitav Ghosh provides a brutal insight into the colonisation of the Americas and, thereby, the colonisation of its Indigenous peoples. Ghosh alludes to active ecological interventions that accompanied colonial expansion. One example he cites is the extermination of the buffalo herds of the Great Plains. Just when the US Army realised that the highly mobile warriors of the Lakota-Cheyenne-Arapaho alliance could not be defeated in conventional battles – it sanctioned the mass slaughter of buffalo to shatter their will to resist by eliminating a primary food source. During 1865 and 1883, American soldiers and hunters thus killed between 10 and 15 million buffalo, leaving only a few hundred alive.
The sheer scale and rapidity of the environmental transformation that accompanied this event is what makes the European colonisation of the Americas radically distinctive. It altered more than a quarter of the Earth’s land surface in just a few hundred years. “These transformations may even have contributed to planet-wide climatic disruptions,” says Ghosh.
The explicit aim of ecological interventions, writes Ghosh, was to turn territories that were perceived to be wastelands into terrain that fitted a European conception of productive land. Indeed, the settlers’ very claims to the territories were based on an idea that was essentially ecological: the notion that the land was “savage”, “wild”, and vacant, because it was neither tilled nor divided into property.
Back home in India, Uttarakhand remains one of the most brutalised Indian states in terms of treatment meted out to nature since the British rule. Historian Ramchandra Guha writes in his book The Unquiet Woods, “The landmark in the history of Indian forestry is undoubtedly the building of the railway network. The large-scale destruction of accessible forests in the early years of railway expansion led to the hasty creation of a forest department…”.
A prolonged debate within the colonial bureaucracy on whether to treat the customary use of forests as based on ‘right’ or on ‘privilege’ was settled by the selective use of precedent and the principle that ‘the right of conquest is the strongest of all rights – it is a right against which there is no appeal.’ Thereby, the colonisers conveniently prevailed!
But it was primarily for their benefit. By the time the British left India, poverty had intensified and as agricultural production plateaued, the artisanal industry collapsed. The government had a mammoth task at hand. It adopted the route of rapid industrialisation in the 1950s to achieve growth. This period was driven by an increase in resource use to fuel the production of steel, machines and tools, chemicals, locomotives, and power. The ‘green revolution’, introduced in the 1960s to ensure the country’s self-sufficiency in food crops, was achieved on the back of chemical inputs to increase yield. By the 1980s, government norms were changed to reduce control on industries, which accelerated industrial growth. The biggest reforms came in 1991 with economic liberalisation, when India opened its markets to the world, allowing an influx of products, many made at the cost of a clean and secure natural environment.
“Much, if not most, of humanity today lives as colonialists once did – viewing the Earth as though it were an inert entity that exists primarily to be exploited and profited from, with the aid of technology and science,” laments Amitav Ghosh.
As a result of the colonisation of our planet’s most critical ecosystems – which regulate the climate, support biodiversity and sustain life – are now facing alarming decline. Roberta Boscolo shares data from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), highlighting four key areas of concern:
* Wetlands: Down by 85 per cent since 1700
* Coral reefs (live coral cover): Down by 50 per cent since 1870
* Natural ecosystem extent and condition: Down by 47 per cent
* Global forest area: Down by 32 per cent from pre-industrial levels
The Palisades Fire erupted on January 7, 2025, in Los Angeles, originating as a brush fire near Pacific Palisades, east of Malibu. Fueled by strong winds, it spread rapidly, devastating downtown Palisades and prompting mass evacuations. Photo: Toastt21/CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Here is some breaking news which has not made it to the front pages, yet. “The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund – guardian of $1.6 trillion in assets – has executed what may be the most consequential financial manoeuvre of the 21st century,” writes Matthew Ross, visionary founder of INDO EDEN and operating at the intersection of natural capital, decentralised economies, and regenerative finance. Sheridan Tatsuno explains how this is pricing externalities, typically missing from markets and corporate balance sheets – rising climate impacts, insurance, mitigation, adaptation recovery, healthcare, disaster management, and other off-spreadsheet costs, which impact ALL bank and corporate assets, even though they ignore them as they have done historically.” This represents a tectonic shift and a wake-up call for boards, accountants, actuaries, auditors, rating agencies, et al.
KPMG’s 2023 report The Impact of Climate Risk on Financial Statements emphasises the increasing importance of integrating climate-related risks into financial reporting. The report provides examples of how climate risks can affect financial statements, discusses disclosure requirements related to climate change, and highlights the International Accounting Standards Board’s (IASB) project on reporting climate uncertainties.
Shouldn’t we, therefore, consider climate risk, and the likes of meeting regulatory environmental requirements and managing supply chains, as fiduciary risks that every company board must address?
Scope Ratings’ analysis warns that European banks could see credit losses triple by 2045 if climate policies are delayed, with southern Europe being most exposed. Disorderly transitions could send risk costs soaring, underscoring the need for proactive climate strategies to safeguard financial stability.
The study highlights that physical climate risks, such as rising temperatures, sea level rise, floods and wildfires, pose a much greater threat to a banks’ financial stability than transition risks linked to the economic shift toward a low-carbon economy. This underlines the pressing need for financial institutions to bolster resilience against environmental disruptions and integrate climate risk considerations into their long-term strategies.
In ‘The End of Insurance’ – a column by Anna Scherbina and Joel Lander – for the Morningstar newsletter, they remind us: “Traditional insurance models aren’t able to handle escalating natural disaster risks. A major hurricane striking Miami or Manhattan could make hurricane Helene and the Palisades Fire look like trivial events. The Los Angeles wildfires have caused economic losses currently estimated at $275 billion. Meanwhile, insurance is disappearing. Many homeowners now choose to skip insurance altogether, owing to the difficulty of obtaining coverage at all or even at a reasonable price. Insurance coverage has been diminishing in many respects, with rising deductibles and exclusions that effectively mean there is less true coverage”.
Global risk management practices for policymakers are inadequate, and we have accepted much higher levels of risk than is broadly understood. The global economy could face a 50 per cent loss in gross domestic product (GDP) unless immediate action is taken to tackle the growing climate crisis, according to a study by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) and University of Exeter. It warns that development, wellbeing and economic health are “intertwined with and dependent” on the stability of Earth’s ecosystem.
Economist Mark Cliffe has issued a prescient warning: “Markets are forward-looking. Although they may be complacent for now, they could collapse as soon as they were to perceive critical Earth systems are heading towards breakdown.”
Banks, asset managers, and insurers have chosen to eject themselves from respective net-zero alliances. While nations may take pride in their thriving economies – according to the landmark review by Prof. Partha Dasgupta, ironically, at the same time their biological assets are decimated. “Estimates show that between 1992 and 2014, produced capital per person doubled, but the stock of natural capital per person declined by nearly 40 per cent,” highlights the review.
Let us remember biodiversity shall have the last roar.
Praveen Gupta is a former insurance CEO. He believes insurers have a critical and urgent role to play in nurturing our environment. Europe-based ‘illuminem’, which has emerged as the world’s largest and premier expert network in sustainability, adjudged Praveen as “Most read in Climate Change 2024”.
