Mikkel Larsen, one of the most influential figures in establishing Singapore as a regional carbon markets hub, passed away aged 50 last week.
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The Danish national stepped down from his role as chief executive of carbon exchange Climate Impact X (CIX) last year to spend more time with his family after 25 years in finance and conservation, and had been advising non-profits on using carbon finance to support wildlife conservation.
He died unexpectedly on 23 January after a stroke. He is survived by his wife, two children and both parents.
Larsen is credited with integrating sustainability into the operations and policies of Southeast Asia’s largest bank, DBS – including the phase-out of coal lending – defining the role of a chief sustainability officer (CSO) in a financial institution, and helping to establish Singapore as a carbon trading hub.
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In a world of pretenders, Mikkel stood out as a real doer.
Fabian Huwyler, managing partner, Posaidon Capital
When he was head of tax and accounting policy at DBS, he took on the role of the bank’s first CSO in addition to his other duties. Although he was supported in his role as CSO by then-CEO Piyush Gupta, Larsen routinely challenged his former boss on ways to push the needle on transition finance, according to former colleagues.
DBS became the first listed company in Singapore to integrate sustainability into financial reporting, an achievement driven by Larsen.
Named on the Eco-Business Sustainability Leadership A-List in 2020, Larsen led a DBS working group for the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) to help corporates better understand their impact on nature.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, he sat on a group set up by Singapore’s Emerging Stronger Taskforce to work out how to bring about a more carbon-conscious society, and co-conceptualised the creation of a carbon services and trading hub in Singapore that later became CIX.
He also played a key role in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s green financing work group, which aims to establish Singapore as Asia’s green finance capital.
While at CIX, he worked on ways to improve the carbon market and pushed for mechanisms to ensure that projects benefit Indigenous peoples and local communities, and deliver real impact on the ground.
Larsen was religiously committed to leading an environmentally-conscious lifestyle, and was mindful of limiting his ecological footprint while living in Singapore, where emissions and waste per person are among the highest in the world.
As he told Eco-Business in an interview in 2020, he was a vegan, he carbon-offset work travel, avoided air-conditioning and only took cold showers – except in Denmark during the winter. He declined to travel business class, even on long flights to see his family.
An ultra-marathon runner, weight lifter and martial artist, Larsen pushed his body to extremes while maintaining a relentless work ethic, according to former colleagues.
He considered himself an animal rights activist first, carbon financier second. Before he died, he was sitting on the boards of animal non-profits including BirdLife International, Wildlife Works and Wild Aid among others, and took a rigorously academic approach to finding ways to unlock finance to protect the natural world, peers said.
In a thought leadership article published two weeks before he died, Larson tackled the long-debated issue of whether the Global North should pay for forest conservation, and whether conservation is a better strategy than reforestation.
In an article last December, Larsen deliberated over the growing requirements for carbon projects to prove their validity, the additional cost that meant for project owners, and how that would affect the buyers of carbon credits.
Tributes to a carbon pioneer
Larsen’s death has prompted tributes to his work and character from all over the world. Fabian Huwyler, managing partner at Swiss green finance firm Posaidon Capital, said he first heard of Larsen when he was at DBS, where he was known as a “banker who pushes the nature agenda”.
While at CIX, Huwyler said Larsen was a “pioneer” and a “provoking thought leader” with whom he had spent time discussing market integrity and paths to growth for the nascent nature finance market.
“In the nature finance industry, we will miss your wisdom – and a loud voice for truly sustainable growth,” said Huwyler. “In a world of pretenders, you stood out as a real doer.”
Genevieve Ding, Asia Pacific head of carbon credits and nature-bases solutions at e-commerce firm Amazon, who was recruited by Larsen to join the CIX advisory board, said: “The conservation and carbon space has lost a genuine leader.”
Steve Howard, vice chairman of sustainability for Singapore state investment firm Temasek, said Larsen lived “with an incredible intensity of feeling and passion that he turned into action”.
Larsen was “not content to let our imperfect world simply be, but was committed to playing his part in making it a better fairer, kinder place. (He) combined the rare combination of a tenacious spirit with a kind and gentle soul,” Howard wrote.
Known to be a reluctant CEO, former colleagues praised Larsen’s leadership qualities, describing him as a compassionate, generous and “intensely human” boss.
Larsen’s death comes almost a decade after he took on a sustainability role in banking. He was previously Asia Pacific chief financial officer of UBS, and also worked for Citigroup in London and professional services firm KPMG in London and Denmark.