Introduction to the book forum on Climate Finance: Taking a Position on Climate Futures

Abstract

This introduction frames the book forum on Gareth Bryant and Sophie Webber’s Climate Finance: Taking a Position on Climate Futures, which reframes climate finance not as a technical fix but as a contested political terrain. It outlines how financial instruments shape possible climate futures by privileging private capital over public good. Drawing from a 2025 AAG panel, the piece introduces commentaries that critically engage with the book’s concepts and affirms the urgency of taking a position within the financialized politics of climate action.

Introduction

Who gets to make the future? What if the multi-trillion-dollar markets supporting climate finance are not solving the climate crisis, but are instead creating a profitable new frontier for the same financial system that helped to cause it? Gareth Bryant and Sophie Webber critically confront these questions and more in their provocative new book Climate Finance: Taking a Position on Climate Futures. The authors’ intervention reframes climate finance as less a set of technical fixes, but rather a profoundly and contested project, one where financial instruments are never neutral but rather bets hedged to win a particular kind of world. Through this lens, the authors argue that the politics of climate change is now being fought on the terrain of finance, providing an indispensable look into the struggle over what possible climate futures could be—and who could ultimately decide them.

It is true that ‘all finance is, in a sense, climate finance’ in this context (Bryant and Webber, 2024: 14). The book does a lot to demystify this assertion for readers, using ‘gap talk’ to describe the discourses that attempt to quantify and solve for financial shortfall with private capital in places with exposed risk. For Bryant and Webber, these discourses are not merely rhetorical, but are integral to an apparatus that shapes and is shaped by the global financial system’s foundational logics. Here, gap talk functions to seek out and identify new frontiers of capital accumulation for finance, legitimizes the retreat from failed or insufficient public climate action, and rationalizes the restructuring of the state as a partner to—rather than a regulator of—private capital. Indeed, where Climate Finance makes a critical conceptual move from the technical to the political, the authors draw attention to gap talk to directly address this systemic infrastructure without cynicism, but also refuse solutionism by undertaking the harder work of rigorous and timely critique.

This discursive framing enables the book to map the field through dialectical ‘positions’ taken with and through climate finance. Bryant and Webber outline six of these positions in dedicated but loosely paired chapters that are very effective in illustrating emergent tensions. The first tension, between climate capital and climate risk, examines finance’s dual identity as both a source of profit-driven investment in green projects and a tool for managing the financial instability created by the climate crisis. The second, between precision markets and speculative markets, contrasts data-driven, engineered pricing instruments with the reality of markets as arenas for making volatile bets on the future. Finally, the tension between ‘Big Green States’ and climate justice finance juxtaposes top-down, state-led plans that partner with global finance against bottom-up, grassroots movements that seek to repurpose financial tools for radical redistribution and community control—a space in the puzzle where the authors locate the most potent possibilities for just climate futures.

However, as the book’s title suggests, readers are urged to do more than take note. Playing on words, the authors compel us to take a position ourselves by locating our own stakes in the struggle. This is urgent work, particularly as the institutional foundations beneath us shift. The academy itself—which houses and funds our research—is pushed to be increasingly ‘entrepreneurial’ alongside the fascistic dismantling of Higher Education across disciplines. Educators face a rising tide of investment in LLM products that make it harder to engage with the production of knowledge, and an increased focus on students as producers and consumers—not thinkers. At the conjuncture of myriad challenges, we have fewer tools than ever to confront the hubris of private capital-driven technical solutionism and extraction. Indeed, market pressures new and old create foundational rifts in how we approach a crisis that is not a technical problem to be solved, but a political economic struggle with material causes and effects that are spun to serve the interests of powerful billionaires.

Considering this, the book does begin to parse the chaotic rebranding of ‘climate action’ in an era of rising populism and reactionary violence. Most importantly, it points to how we might develop the epistemological and methodological tools needed to track the actual motivations and consequences of those climate finance positions directing our collective futures. Written amid growing friction and justified pushback at the most recent annual UN Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings, where climate action has been repeatedly steered by petrol states and powerful fossil fuel interests (Lakhani, 2025), the authors detail the ways finance itself is a site of ongoing contestation, tension, and possibility. In this unrelenting environment, I have found Climate Finance is indispensable for teaching geography students about climate change and political economy, and continue to urge students to take a position on climate politics and its entrenchment in our everyday lives.

It was with this spirit of critically constructive engagement that we convened a panel at the 2025 American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Detroit, Michigan—a city which is itself a testament to destructive capitalist accumulation, financialized urbanism, and debt (Peck and Whiteside, 2016). Sidestepping the traditional ‘author-meets-critics’ format, we committed to a dialogue about the book’s strengths and its provocations for our own work and teaching, and were graced with a generous and engaged audience of scholars at the conference.

The following collection of commentaries was born from that exchange, and covers the range of our discussion. It consists of writing by Leigh Johnson, Tanya Matthan, Peter Newell, and Jon Silver, who all offer unique perspectives and readings of the book, followed by a response from Gareth Bryant and Sophie Webber on ‘repositioning’ climate futures for what is unfolding around us now. Each commentary affirms climate finance and risk as politically contested terrains. Taken together, they explore how the authors’ work sets us up to ask better, more urgent questions in the face of unprecedented risk and profound economic and environmental change.