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After the nuns with guns portrayed by the environmental group Greenpeace, investment fund managers, bankers and the world's second largest reinsurer are turning into the new activists against climate change. Some 200 business actors at a meeting in Switzerland, organized by the reinsurance giant Swiss Re, toasted Russia's key ratification of the emissions-cutting Kyoto treaty on Friday with champagne. Barely a few years ago such a greeting would hardly have been imaginable. While Kyoto was being negotiated in the 1990s, the financial world was more likely to side with the defence of cheap, oil and coal-based energy, as industry clashed with environmentalists bent on stopping pollution and lobbied against governments seeking regulation. Instead, mainstream business executives at Swiss Re's meeting centre outside Zurich were discussing finance for renewable energy sources like wind farms and new markets designed to cut emissions of polluting carbon dioxide. 'Business has recognized that the lack of a global framework was not a solution,' said Andrei Marcu, president of the International Emissions Trading Agency (IETA), a Geneva-based grouping of major corporations seeking to develop the carbon 'cap and trade' mechanism that Kyoto opens up. Climate change is increasingly accepted as a reality, a costly business risk -- either through the damage it can cause or the threat of litigation -- as well as a business opportunity, according to the executives. 'Many companies in the United States are facing the nuns with the guns in the picture,' US corporate lawyer Ricardo Nogueira said, referring to an advert used by Greenpeace in its campaigning and the risk of litigation on pollution. 'But these nuns have been joined by investors, most importantly by US state pension funds,' he added. Shareholders, led by the huge pension funds, are taking an increasingly long term view and climate change is regarded as a risk weighing on investment revenu
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