Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II mall in Milan: The city has long been a magnet for the world’s wealthy

LUX speaks with Alan Hooks, Managing Director, Head of Private Clients UK at Julius Baer, about the Swiss private bank’s 2022 report on the changing consumption and spending habits of the wealthy around the world

Alan Hooks

LUX: Are we seeing a generational change in the way high net worths (HNIs) and ultra high net worths (UHNIs) spend and invest, taking into account sustainability considerations?
Alan Hooks: Certainly we have seen that shift in approach from a next generation perspective, and that’s where the acceleration of these conversations are coming from. So when you talk about investment habits, the majority of those conversations are held with the future custodians of the wealth of the family, so we are seeing that manifesting itself quite considerably in those conversations.

When it comes to consumption habits, the report also shows that high net worths, and ultra high net worths are typically early adopters of new technology, new product design, that will have a positive impact on the environment. With that advocacy comes some responsibility because typically that early adoption will mean others will start to follow. I think that’s an important trend to observe, and we’ve seen that come out of our Global Wealth and Lifestyle Report over the last few years.

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If you look at the shifting patterns of consumer spending, you’ll see a move from possessions to experience. In particular, that can be seen from the report in terms spending on health, and travel and leisure have been quite significant in the in previous years. During the pandemic were not able to freely travel as much as they would have done, but now it’s over, that is strong. We are certainly seeing from a London perspective the leisure and tourism sector is an area where discretionary spend is high.

Heston Blumenthal’s restauarnt The Fat Duck, outside London. High net worth individuals are spending more on experiences according to the report

LUX: You rank various cities in the world in terms of their cost and desirability. Any place stand out of particular interest?
AH: What’s great about the report is that we highlight cities around the world where there is still great opportunity, Sao Paulo for example, has a significant population, high degree of a younger (wealthy) demographic signifying great opportunity.

LUX: What other elements are important for HNIs and UHNIs?
AH: What recent months have shown us is the focus on security and safety and countries and cities that can offer that level of security and stability, are important. In this demographic that becomes important as a factor in terms of where people are basing themselves or may be relocating. Other considerations such as lifestyle, education and so on are also important. The cosmopolitan nature of cities around the world, certainly for international families, is important.

Expensive but exclusive adventure experiences like Sven Lindblad Expeditions gives guests the opportunity to see sites like this iceberg in Ilulissat, Greenland

LUX: Crystal ball gazing, what do you expect to see in next year’s report?
AH: I think I would expect to see trends continuing in terms of continued focus around health and well-being. I would be interested to see whether the challenges that we’ve observed in the 2022 report will remain in the future, or whether that starts to settle. For example, if we look at some of the findings on London in leisure, we see a significant demand for leisure, tourism, hotels and restaurants. We are also hearing from hoteliers and restauranteurs about the challenge around finding staff.

Read more: Chef Heston Blumenthal: The Culinary Resurrector

It will be interesting to see and hear from respondents over the next 12 months whether this trend is continuing and how things are faring as a result of things settling down after the pandemic. It will also be interesting to observe the levels of creativity we find from businesses in product design and in servicing high net worth and ultra-high net worths. What we have learned in the pandemic is that typically there has been innovation and creativity in these areas.

Find out more: juliusbaer.com

Alex Mustard photographed healthy reefs in the Maldives

As our oceans warm up, the spectacular coral reefs of the Maldives archipelago are dying. Michael Marshall reports on the new philanthropic project aiming to make them more resilient to climate change

Beneath the glittering cerulean waters of the Maldives archipelago, trouble is brewing. The extraordinary coral reefs that encircle these islands are being damaged by climate change, threatening the country’s very survival.

Fortunately, help is at hand. A local research and conservation institute has bold plans to strengthen the reefs by breeding the most resilient corals and seeding them in the waters of the Maldives. With the help of a new philanthropic initiative, led by Deutsche Bank, the project is ready to set sail.

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The Maldives is one of the countries most affected by climate change. “You couldn’t find a place more in the front lines,” says Callum Roberts, Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Exeter.

As the Earth’s temperature warms, driven by greenhouse gas emissions, the oceans are being reshaped. Most obviously, sea levels are rising – and for low-lying islands like the Maldives that is an existential threat. But there’s more: seas are warming, the water is becoming more acidic and low-oxygen zones are spreading. These changes threaten all marine life.

Climate change poses a particular threat to corals. These tiny animals live in huge colonies underwater, and over thousands of years the skeletons of dead corals build up to make vast structures called reefs. The Maldives themselves are coral reefs that grew until they reached the surface, and the country’s islands are ringed by underwater reefs. These are home to an extraordinary range of animals, from sharks to starfish.

More photography by Alex Mustard of healthy reefs in the Maldives

“Your first experience of a coral reef is completely unforgettable,” says Roberts. “You dive over the reef crest and into that area where it’s just a huge blaze of fish of all varieties and colours.” It’s utterly immersive, he adds; you can “feel yourself being completely consumed by an ecosystem”.

Corals are particularly vulnerable to warming. “It doesn’t take more than a rise of about 1°C above their normal thermal maximum for corals to get into deep trouble,” says Roberts. “That’s what’s been happening.”

Callum Roberts

In 1997-98 and 2015-16, spikes in ocean temperature caused mass coral bleaching events. The corals expelled the algae that live inside them and that they depend upon for nutrients. As a result, the corals turned ghostly white. The first bleaching event killed an estimated 95 per cent of shallow corals. They then underwent a partial recovery, before the second mass bleaching event caused about 65 per cent mortality. “That level of coral death is extremely worrying,” says Roberts.

In a 2018 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that “coral reefs would decline by 70-90 per cent with global warming of 1.5°C, whereas virtually all would be lost with 2°C.” So far, the Earth has warmed by an estimated 1.1°C.

To save the corals, and by extension the Maldives, the country’s former president Mohamed Nasheed founded the Maldives Coral Institute (MCI). The MCI aims “to help coral reefs to survive and adapt to the changing climate”. Roberts is one of its scientific advisers.

Alex Mustard also photographed bleached, dead corals highlighting the abundance of sea life at risk if corals are left to decline

The MCI is now being financially supported by Deutsche Bank. In November 2021, the bank launched its Ocean Resilience Philanthropy Fund, which is intended to support nature-based solutions to marine conservation problems. Deutsche Bank committed an initial $300,000 and hopes to raise $5 million over the next five years. The MCI was brought to the bank’s attention by Karen Sack, Executive Director and Co-Chair of the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance.

Jacqueline Valouch

“The lack of funding is one of the big recognised barriers to nature-based solutions,” says Jacqueline Valouch, Head of Philanthropy at Deutsche Bank Wealth Management in New York, who was involved in setting up the fund.

“We’ve got this massive problem, the Maldives Coral Institute has a mission, and Deutsche Bank is funding a really important piece of work to begin with,” adds Roberts.

The funding will enable the MCI to launch a project called the Future Climate Coral Bank (FCCB). The idea is to find corals that have proven resistant to climate change and breed them in a controlled environment, creating more resilient strains. “We’re going to have a living propagated coral farm underwater in which the idea is to explore and test ways of assisting evolution,” says Roberts. These resilient corals can then be reintroduced to the ocean, particularly to reefs with a poor supply of coral larvae. In the long run, this will hopefully mean the Maldivian corals become more resilient.

The MCI works on conservation projects including this one at Fulhadhoo, where divers installed a silt screen to prevent sediment from nearby construction from damaging the corals

“The magnitude of that impact to us was unmatched in many ways,” says Valouch. She says the FCCB “could last for many generations,” which is crucial, because her philanthropic clients want “to make an impact on the causes they care about”. “They’re multigenerational families coming from many different regions of the world and they have their family members living in different parts of the globe.”

Valouch and her colleagues plan to spend much of 2022 talking to donors. “We are looking to kick all that off now,” she says. A key element will be introducing prospective donors to the project team, so they can appreciate the talent and passion of all involved. Deutsche Bank is also recruiting a panel of experts who will advise on which projects to fund. “To be able to have that kind of innovation and creativity sit at the table with us is just extraordinary,” Valouch says.

For her, philanthropy can provide the seed funding for ambitious projects such as the FCCB. “It allows other donors to come in,” she says, and enables organisations like the MCI to recruit enough staff to become sustainable.

“I think the private sector has a greater appetite for risk,” says Roberts. That’s especially true for projects such as the FCCB. “This is not research that ends when you publish a study. This is something that has to make a difference on the ground and in the water.”

The hope is that, with the right investment, the corals of the Maldives will thrive for decades to come.

Five approaches to regenerating the world’s coral reefs

1. Reducing agricultural runoff into the sea improves water quality and coral health.
2. Coral IVF grows baby corals in the lab and seeds them on damaged reefs.
3. Artificial reefs can be sunk in oceans to provide homes for corals and other sea life.
4. Corals can even be given ‘probiotics’ to help boost their health.
5. Most importantly of all, limiting climate warming to a maximum of 1.5°C and lowering global greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero will minimise the threat to the world’s coral reefs.

— Michael Marshall

Former President of the Maldives and environmental activist Mohamed Nasheed discusses climate change with children at the Maldives Coral Institute’s Coral Festival in 2020

A partnership of positive steps

The Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA) is helping to drive a global response to ocean-derived risks. Backed by organisations ranging from the World Wildlife Fund to Deutsche Bank as global lead banking partner, it wants to save the oceans by deploying the power of the financial world.

Read More: Jean-Michel Cousteau: Choose Life

Its mission is “to pioneer new and innovative financial products” that will tackle climate change, protect ocean biodiversity and help coastal communities become resilient, says Karen Sack, Executive Director and Co-Chair of ORRAA.

Karen Sack

“We aim to drive at least $500 million of investment into coastal and marine natural capital, or ‘blue nature’,” says Sack. She argues that this is in everyone’s interest. The global ocean economy has a total asset value estimated at $24 trillion, but in the past decade only $13 billion has been invested in sustainable marine projects. “We need to change that,” says Sack. “And we need to act quickly.”

Hence the Maldives project. Deutsche Bank were looking for ways to have a positive impact quickly, as well as over the long term, and Sack suggested supporting the MCI. “Lessons learned in the Maldives will help heal and strengthen coral reefs around the world.”

Michael Marshall is a renowned science journalist specialising in the environment and life sciences

Find out more: deutschewealth.com/oceanfund

This article appears in the Deutsche Bank Supplement of the Summer 2022 issue of LUX

‘Meat Fruit (c.1430)’ is a signature dish of chicken-liver parfait set in mandarin gel, by Heston Blumenthal. Photo by John Scott Blackwell

As one of the world’s most recognised chefs, it’s easy to forget that Heston Blumenthal is the proprietor of two three-Michelin-star restaurants. He is a leader in resurrecting historic culinary dishes, and his equally famous approach to scientific cooking has led him to become an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry

LUX: How did you become interested in historic cuisine?
Heston Blumenthal: I went to Books for Cooks, the cookbook shop in Portobello in west London, to look at kids books, when I noticed a yellow paperback called The Vivendier. It was by Taillevent, who was the chef to the Palais-Royal in Paris in the 14th century; I only picked it off the shelf because Taillevent was the name of a three Michelin-star restaurant in Paris. The book fell open to a recipe on how to roast a chicken and bring it back to life.

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You take the chicken, you pluck it while it’s alive, then you pack it with wheat, German saffron and dripping, and apparently it makes it look like it’s cooked. You then put his head under its belly and rock it to sleep. Then you put it on a roasting platter with two roasted chickens and bring it into the great hall of your master – maybe a court jester’s jumping around – and you start carving the roasted chicken. Then you kill this poor thing and before you roast it, you stuff sulphur and mercury down its neck and – according to the recipe – when you roast it, it makes a clucking noise. So, you’d bring it back to life. I thought, “Well, my God, this is brilliant.” But I later learned that it was fake. The chefs in the châteaux were showing off to each other, so they’d just make up these recipes – there’s no evidence that anyone ever did them.

Chef Heston Blumenthal. Photo by John Scott Blackwell

So wouldn’t it be amazing if a modern chef with modern techniques didn’t actually replicate these recipes but took ideas from them? We started working with historians at Hampton Court Palace. The food historian Marc Meltonville said to me, “You might be interested in this: it’s called ‘Pommes d’Or’.” It was minced pork and veal formed into a ball, put on a spit, then basted with a parsley custard so it looked like an apple. That was where my inspiration for ‘meat fruit’ came from.

Eggs in Verjuice, after an 18th-century recipe

LUX: With so many options, can chefs be more creative now than in the past?
HB: I think our creativity is actually in danger. We live in a world where we’re so distracted and the paradox is that we invent things like the iPhone to make our lives easier, then we become slaves to them. They are incredible but they’re not as incredible as human beings. We’re in danger of losing the very essence of being human – and that’s imagination.

The dining-room at The Fat Duck

LUX: How does sustainability figure in your businesses?
HB: We go to see every farm and we make sure we’re carbon neutral. Everything gets used. All of the bits that we don’t serve goes to staff food.

Read more: Chef Yannick Alléno: The Innovator

We were one of the first restaurants ever to use day boats, because a couple of blokes on a fishing boat with a rod and line are not going to do any harm to the sea, unlike a big trawler with a net destroying the ocean floor. But the solution is not to stop eating fish.

The chef’s Botrytis Cinerea dessert. Photo by Jose Luis Lopez de Zubiria

LUX: Who do you cook for?
HB: Who am I cooking for? Me. The big-me to cook for the mini-me and the mini-me to cook for the big-me, both at the same time.

Heston Blumenthal is proprietor of two three-star restaurants, The Fat Duck, in the Berkshire village of Bray, and Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, in London. His other restaurants include The Hind’s Head, in Bray, and The Perfectionists’ Café, at Heathrow Terminal 2

Find out more: dinnerbyheston.co.uk

This article appears in the Summer 2022 issue of LUX

A grassy terrace overlooking Lake Garda at Lefay Resort

In the fourth part of our luxury travel views column from the Spring 2022 issue, LUX’s Editor-in-Chief Darius Sanai checks in at the Lefay Resort in Lake Garda

Infinity pool? Haven’t we seen enough of those to stop being impressed? The pool stops, the sea beyond it starts, pretty and pleasant, and every villa on every island has one. End of story.

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Except, the pool at Lefay Lake Garda is different. It’s true that when you are swimming in it, you can’t tell where the pool ends and Lake Garda starts. The difference is that the lake is about 600m (2,000ft) below you, down a steeply forested mountainside. Look across the lake, and you are at the same height as the top of the Alps lining the other shore. Look up, and you are just below the peaks of the Italian Alps at the point at which they drop into the northern Italian plain. It’s like being in an infinity pool in a hot air balloon.

The infinity pool

Everything here is about the views. Our balcony terrace looked at yet another peak, behind the hotel, and the surroundings were pure Alps: meadows, wildflowers, forests and rocks. No hint at all that the biggest and most touristic of the Italian lakes was immediately below on the other side. The room was contemporary cool, all peaceful light colours, and absolute silence on the terrace at night, barring the cry of some or other mountain bird.

There is plenty of space to spread out here – no cramped pool terraces like you get at many hotels on the edge of the Italian lakes, which are constrained by the steep mountain sides rising up above. You can stroll from one garden to the main pool terrace to another garden and lawn, all with a different aspect of the view. The clientele when I went was mainly couples, who would stroll into the spa (just inside from the pool terrace) and emerge glowing from treatments.

Trattoria la Vigna

For lunch, up a level (of mountain and hotel) there was a broad, informal terrace serving osteria-style food: salads, cured meat, pastas.

Read more: Luxury Travel Views: Hotel Costes, Paris

Once you are here, it is tempting not to leave (during your stay, or ever). But venture out for a day trip and within 20 minutes you will be on the shore of one of Italy’s most celebrated lakes, with ochre-hued villages teeming with gelaterias (and tourists: Lake Garda is nothing if not discovered). A little further round the lake is Verona, the city of Romeo and Juliet, and its summer opera in the Roman amphitheatre a perfectly feasible evening out from Lefay. Dinner at the opera and breakfast on a mountaintop: that’s infinite variety for you.

Find out more: lagodigarda.lefayresorts.com

This article appears in the Summer 2022 issue of LUX

Marine biologist Matt Sharp was awarded the Ocean Conservation Photographer of the Year in 2020 for his incredible images, such as this one of a wave breaking in the Maldives in 2019

Marine life is threatened by climate change, pollution and overfishing. And depleted oceans risk collapsing the whole global ecosystem. A new generation of business startups is aiming to reshape the ocean economy, making it both truly sustainable and profitable. Michael Marshall reports

The blue economy is gaining momentum. Hundreds of startup companies around the world are aiming to protect, and even restore, the oceans, while making a profit. They want to get food and other essential resources from the sea in ways that benefit marine life – or at least don’t harm it. What’s more, there are plenty of organisations that aim to support these startups, whether with money or expertise or both.

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“We are not going to save the oceans if we don’t change the economy,” says Tiago Pitta e Cunha, the CEO of the Oceano Azul Foundation, a Portuguese non-profit that supports a variety of initiatives designed to stimulate the growth of the sustainable blue economy. The good news is that the business case for ocean conservation is real and growing. “There’s a wonderful opportunity for startups and new companies to develop business models,” says John Virdin, director of the Oceans & Coastal Policy Programme at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment in Durham, North Carolina.

The ocean certainly needs our help. It faces three big problems – overfishing, pollution and climate change – that “tend to make each other worse”, says Nancy Knowlton, a professor of marine biology and Sant Chair in Marine Sciences at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. However, she adds, there have been some real success stories for ocean conservationists in recent years. Take Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), for example. These are regions of the ocean in which extractive industries are either banned or tightly regulated, and they have proven highly beneficial when implemented fully. In 2020, fully implemented MPAs covered 5.3 per cent of the ocean, and this area is growing every year. As a result, some animals that were once considered on the brink of extinction have increased in numbers, including many whale species.

At the moment, the blue economy is dominated by “a few really big fish”, Virdin points out. In 2021, he co-authored a study that found 60 per cent of all revenues obtained from the ocean came from just 100 companies, almost half of which were from the oil and gas industry. Such companies have “rigid processes in place, for good reasons”, says Alexis Grosskopf, the founder and CEO of OceanHub Africa in Cape Town, South Africa, an accelerator for ocean impact startups. Those processes “could not be disrupted smoothly and quickly enough, without blowing up or imploding”.

This is where startup companies come in. Small outfits with radical technologies and new ways of doing things can overthrow existing practices, if they’re successful enough. And in the blue economy there are now hundreds aiming to disrupt a variety of industries, from fishing and aquaculture to renewable energy, pharmaceuticals and waste management. Some want to take an existing industry, such as fishing, and do it better, causing less harm to the ocean ecosystem. Others are aiming to restore and repair, actively improving the marine environment while also making a profit.

As with all startups, the challenge is to survive long enough to build a customer base and break even. A startup company may attract an initial burst of funding on the basis of a good idea, which enables it to start operations. But they then face ‘death valley’, when they risk running out of money before they start earning any.

Intertidal seaweed beds on the west coast of Jersey, UK, in 2020

To address this challenge, a number of incubators and accelerators have been established in recent years to help ocean startups become profitable. These include Katapult Ocean in Oslo, Norway and OceanHub Africa in Cape Town, South Africa. Another is Blue Bio Value, which was set up by the Oceano Azul Foundation and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 2018 to “help entrepreneurs create commercially viable and sustainable businesses” and thereby “accelerate the transition to a global and sustainable blue bioeconomy”. It is now on its fish set of startups.

Previously, the Oceano Azul Foundation – which owns the Lisbon Oceanarium – had focused on ocean education, but its leaders decided this was not enough. “We thought that, as a credible foundation, we need to also put our money where our mouth is,” says Pitta e Cunha. “We only accept startups that, through their production, will ease decarbonisation of the planet or high consumption of natural resources.” Many of these startups are led by scientists, he explains, who have essential specialist knowledge but little experience of markets or running businesses.

Alongside the accelerator, the team has also created an ideation programme to link academic researchers and business leaders, to encourage the formation of new businesses. “We are trying to manufacture new startups, because they are needed,” Pitta e Cunha says.

With so many funders, incubators and accelerators entering the ocean economy, the challenge for the owners of a new startup is how to navigate this business world. Several organisations have now been set up to organise everything and help startups find their way.

At Investable Oceans, in New York, the co-founder and principle, Ted Janulis, likes to say he was “born with an ocean gene”, which means he “can’t walk past a body of water of any type without jumping in and splashing around”. Several decades in finance convinced him that there were market-based opportunities all over the ocean economy. But the investors were scattered and disconnected. “The people who invested in plastic mitigation weren’t necessarily the people investing in better fisheries or aquaculture,” he says. So he set out to create a single platform where people could come and learn about investment opportunities in the blue economy across all asset classes and sectors. “We’re not an incubator, we’re not an accelerator, we’re not a fund and we’re not a broker dealer,” he says. “Our goal is to connect people.”

Plastic pollution along the beach– knee-deep in some places – in the Maldives in 2019

More recently, an umbrella organisation called 1000 Ocean Startups was launched in May 2021 to accelerate ocean impact innovation by bringing together “incubators, accelerators, competitions, matching platforms and VCs supporting startups for ocean impact”. Its members include Katapult Ocean, OceanHub Africa and Investable Oceans and so far it has backed 168 startups: 115 focused on sustainable use of ocean resources, 33 addressing pollution and 20 tackling climate change. “We’re still in the infancy stage,” says Grosskopf. The aim is to back 1,000 startups by 2030.

The challenge for all these companies will be to compete against existing ocean businesses that are not making efforts to be sustainable, and therefore have lower operating costs. Some consumers are prepared to pay extra for sustainable products, but many will not or cannot, so the startups must compete on price to attract mass-market consumers.

Fortunately, there are many routes to success, says Janulis. “Some of it might be that it’s a standalone company that becomes really big,” he says, but startups can also be absorbed by larger companies that see their methods as an opportunity.

Janulis says there is also “a rising sensibility and more awareness”, a point echoed by many. “I was born as a digital native,” says Grosskopf. People from the generation below, he says, are “sustainable natives”. “The consumers of tomorrow, the employers of tomorrow… they have sustainability in their DNA.”

It will soon be impossible for companies to behave unsustainably, Virdin suggests. “These issues of sustainability of ocean ecosystems and communities, they’re not luxury issues,” he says. “These are core issues to the future of the business model, whether it’s social licence to operate or whether it’s risks to your operating environment in the coming decades.”

Duncansby Stacks last year, on the exposed north- east coast of Scotland, where seals and seabirds thrive

Knowlton cautions that it’s unlikely startups alone can fix the marine environmental crisis. “The problem is that we’re kind of in a race against time,” she says, so there will need to be top-down action as well. “The role of government is really important because it can motivate change quickly.” However, she acknowledges, startups are where creative ideas can be brought to fruition quickly. “I think you have to encourage entrepreneurship – and much of it will fail, but some of it will work.”

Read More: Kering’s Marie-Claire Daveu on benefits of the blue economy

In other words, it’s not a choice between buccaneering startups and rules-based government. To save our ocean, both will have to work together.

Savvy Ocean Startups

Pesky Fish: Many of the fish that are caught at sea, particularly by trawlers, are wasted. Because they aren’t fashionable, they are discarded as ‘bycatch’. The British company Pesky Fish aims to change that by allowing fishers to sell directly to consumers. It has a rapidly updated online shop and overnight delivery service.

Recyglo: Plastic waste is one of the biggest problems facing the ocean ecosystem. Today most plastic enters the ocean from east Asia, where waste management systems are poor. Recyglo is aiming to change that by bringing modern recycling to the region. It already has branches in Myanmar, Singapore and Malaysia.

Cascadia Seaweed: Farming seaweed has enormous potential to feed the growing human population, remove carbon dioxide from the air, and restore the ocean by providing habitat for marine animals. Canadian firm Cascadia Seaweed is turning kelp into food for people and farm animals. It is working in partnership with First Nations groups.

This article appears in the Deutsche Bank Supplement of the Summer 2022 issue of LUX