The ecological, social, financial and geopolitical crises we are going through are often analysed separately. We speak of climate, biodiversity, debt, inflation, purchasing power, globalization, the dollar, sovereignty or growth as if they were distinct problems.
The NEMO IMS system starts from a different intuition: these crises are deeply linked to the monetary and financial architecture that orients our societies. Money is not a neutral tool. It determines what becomes financeable, solvent, profitable, desirable — and what remains invisible, abandoned or destroyed.
In this interview, Jean-Christophe Duval returns to the foundations of NEMO IMS: regenerative monetary flows, the idea of the insolvent essential, gift-money, transaction-based monetary melting, the NEMO Exchange Standard, NEMO Green SDRs, central banks, inflation, freedom, technocracy, the dollar and the international transition.
Question 1How would you explain NEMO IMS in one minute to someone who has never heard of monetary economics?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
People rarely connect the ecological crisis with the monetary and financial system. They often assume that money is neutral, purely technical, and not really part of the problem. That is a serious mistake.
Money constantly shapes what becomes possible. It indirectly decides what will be financed, produced, developed and valued — and what will remain ignored. The current system is very good at financing solvent activities, meaning activities that can generate a financial return. But many of the activities that are essential to the future of humanity are not solvent in the short term: restoring soils, cleaning oceans, protecting biodiversity, preserving forests, strengthening public services, securing food systems or supporting fundamental research.
NEMO IMS starts from this contradiction. Instead of creating money primarily through debt and expected future extraction, it proposes to create debt-free monetary flows in exchange for activities that regenerate the commons. Money would no longer be only a language of debt, profitability and extraction; it would also become an instrument of ecological and social regeneration.
NEMO IMS is not simply a monetary technique. It is a change in what society decides to make solvent.
Question 2Is creating money to finance such activities just an ecological version of the printing press?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
Expressions such as “printing money” or “magic money” need to be demystified. They are often used to disqualify any public, social or ecological form of money creation, as if creating money were absurd in itself. Yet money is already created every day, especially by commercial banks when they grant loans.
The real question is therefore not whether money should be created. It already is. The real question is: who creates it, for what purpose, under what conditions, and with what mechanisms of reflux or destruction?
NEMO IMS does not propose uncontrolled money creation. It proposes conditional money creation: money issued without debt, but in exchange for verified regenerative activities, and accompanied by mechanisms of monetary subtraction when that money circulates through degenerative market transactions.
The question is not whether we create money. The question is what we create it for.
Question 3Would debt-free gift-money not create inflation?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
We must distinguish temporary money from permanent money. Bank money created through credit is temporary: it appears when the loan is granted and disappears progressively as the loan is repaid. There is an inflow and then an outflow.
Debt-free money creates a more difficult question because it does not automatically disappear through loan repayment. If it entered the economy without rules, without measurement and without any reflux mechanism, it could indeed create inflationary pressure.
That is why NEMO IMS links emission and destruction. Regenerative money enters the economy when it finances certified ecological and social regeneration. But when it later circulates through market transactions, part of it can be destroyed through monetary demurrage or monetary subtraction, weighted according to the ecological and social impact of the transaction.
Inflation is not avoided by refusing to finance regeneration. In the long run, ecological inaction destroys real production capacities: soils, water, energy stability, supply chains, harvests and public health. That can create far more violent future inflation through scarcity and collapse of supply.
Inaction is not anti-inflationary. It prepares future shortages.
Question 4Who decides what is essential, sustainable or degenerative?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
This is one of the most important questions. NEMO IMS cannot work if the labels are vague, arbitrary or captured by private interests. The system requires institutions, scientific criteria, public deliberation, audits, counter-powers and democratic legitimacy.
The role of the GAÏA Economic Symposium would be to define and supervise the categories of regenerative, essential and degenerative activities. It would not be a world government, but a coordination and certification institution working with scientists, central banks, states, civil society, local actors and representatives of the commons.
The aim is not for a few experts to decide everything from above. The aim is to build transparent, contestable and revisable criteria: what restores ecosystems, what preserves vital infrastructures, what strengthens social resilience, what only shifts damage elsewhere, and what worsens planetary risks.
A regenerative monetary system cannot be credible without a rigorous and plural governance of value.
Question 5Why not simply correct market externalities with taxes, standards or ecological subsidies?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
Taxes, standards and subsidies are useful. But they remain insufficient if they are the only tools. They work after the fact, on top of a system that continues to make the most destructive activities highly profitable and the most necessary activities insolvent.
The fiscal solution also contains a paradox: if ecological repair depends only on taxes collected from a productivist and extractive economy, then repair remains financially dependent on the processes that cause the damage. We destroy through the market, collect taxes from that destruction, and then try to repair the damage with public budgets.
NEMO IMS seeks to go deeper. It does not merely correct prices after the damage has occurred. It changes the monetary origin of solvency by allowing regenerative activities to become direct counterparts of money creation.
Repair must not depend forever on the revenues of destruction.
Question 6If these activities do not produce measurable market value, how can we know whether they create real wealth?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
The first mistake is to confuse price with value. A forest may have little market value as long as it remains standing, but it can have immense ecosystemic value: water regulation, carbon storage, biodiversity, soil protection, climate stability and cultural meaning.
Many forms of real wealth do not appear correctly in market accounts because their benefits are collective, diffuse, long-term or non-monetary. Public health, education, social trust, living soils and clean rivers do not always generate immediate private profit, but they condition the possibility of any durable economy.
NEMO IMS therefore requires new accounting methods. Regeneration must be measured through indicators of robustness: what has been restored, preserved, avoided, repaired or transmitted. It is not perfect measurement, but the current system already measures the wrong things with great confidence.
What does not enter the accounts often ends up not counting at all.
Question 7Concretely, what would NEMO IMS change in everyday life?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
At first, people would not necessarily experience NEMO IMS as a spectacular monetary revolution. They would see new jobs, new projects, new public capacities and new forms of income directed toward regeneration and essential services.
Territories could be paid to restore soils, protect water, develop resilient food systems, maintain forests, repair infrastructures, strengthen health, support education or rebuild local capacities. These activities would stop being treated only as costs and would become sources of income.
Consumers and companies would also experience different price signals. Products and services with strong degenerative impacts would be penalized through monetary subtraction mechanisms, while essential and low-impact activities would be preserved. The aim is not to punish life, but to change the internal logic of economic choices.
Everyday life would change because what supports life would finally become financially visible.
Question 8Could NEMO IMS become a punitive ecology?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
That risk exists if the system is badly designed. An ecological transition that only punishes ordinary people while leaving the deepest structures untouched is socially unjust and politically doomed.
NEMO IMS must therefore distinguish between essential activities and superfluous degenerative activities. Heating a home, eating, moving, communicating, accessing care or education cannot be treated like luxury waste, planned obsolescence or speculative extraction.
The purpose of monetary melting is not to punish individuals, but to reorient systems. It must be weighted, progressive, socially just and combined with new regenerative incomes. If what destroys becomes more costly while what regenerates becomes a source of income, the transition becomes less punitive and more transformative.
The goal is not ecological punishment. It is monetary reorientation.
Question 9How can states be convinced to adopt NEMO IMS when some benefit from the current system?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
No major monetary transformation happens simply because an idea is elegant. It requires historical pressure, crises, alliances, diplomatic work and a new shared language. Some countries benefit from the current system, especially those issuing key currencies or controlling financial infrastructure. They will not spontaneously give up their privileges.
But the current system also creates vulnerabilities for everyone: debt accumulation, ecological collapse, supply shocks, geopolitical tensions, financial instability, migration pressures and legitimacy crises. Even dominant powers cannot remain indefinitely protected from a destabilized planet.
NEMO IMS could first emerge as doctrine, then as research, then through partial experiments: coalitions of states, public banks, development institutions, ecological funds, central bank studies, or international discussions on debt, climate and monetary reform.
A new monetary order begins when the old order can no longer answer the crises it produces.
Question 10Does NEMO IMS challenge the role of the dollar and reserve currencies?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
Yes. NEMO IMS challenges the structural privilege of key currencies. The dollar plays a central role as reserve asset, invoicing currency, safe asset and geopolitical instrument. This gives the United States a monetary power that extends far beyond its borders.
This arrangement also traps the rest of the world in a need for dollar liquidity and reserves. Many countries must export, borrow or attract capital simply to obtain the currency required for imports, debt servicing and financial credibility.
The NEMO Exchange Standard, or NES, proposes a common accounting reference for national currencies. It is not a world currency and not a new imperial currency. It is a conversion standard designed to reduce the need for key currencies and make monetary hegemony unnecessary.
NEMO IMS does not seek to replace one hegemony with another. It seeks to make monetary hegemony unnecessary.
Question 11How would NEMO IMS deal with persistent trade imbalances?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
Persistent trade imbalances are not only accounting problems. They express differences in productive structures, currencies, energy dependence, wages, environmental standards and geopolitical power.
In the current system, countries with deficits are often pushed toward austerity, wage compression, devaluation, export strategies or deeper extraction of natural resources. The adjustment burden falls on people and ecosystems.
With the NES, international trade could be organized through a shared accounting reference. National currencies would be connected through the same standard rather than mediated by a dominant key currency. This would not magically eliminate imbalances, but it would allow them to be discussed and adjusted within a more cooperative monetary architecture.
Trade imbalances should not be solved by forcing nations to extract more from people and nature.
Question 12How can fraud, greenwashing or false ecological services be prevented?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
This is a decisive point. A system that pays for regeneration will attract opportunists. If the certification mechanisms are weak, NEMO IMS could be captured by greenwashing, fraudulent reporting or symbolic projects with little real impact.
The answer is institutional: independent audits, open data, scientific verification, field controls, sanctions, transparency, citizen oversight and the possibility of revising labels. No activity should be permanently certified without proof and monitoring.
The current economy already accepts massive ecological accounting fraud by ignoring externalities. NEMO IMS must not reproduce that blindness under a green vocabulary. It must be more demanding than the system it seeks to transform.
A regenerative currency is only credible if its proofs of regeneration are credible.
Question 13How can NEMO IMS avoid becoming a global technocracy beyond democratic control?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
The danger is real. Any international architecture dealing with money, ecology and certification could become technocratic if it is removed from democratic debate and public accountability.
NEMO IMS must therefore include counter-powers from the start: parliamentary oversight, public reporting, independent science, civil society representation, local knowledge, indigenous perspectives, whistleblower protections and transparent procedures.
The point is not to replace democracy with expertise. The point is to give democracy the tools to deliberate about planetary limits and monetary choices with better information and stronger institutions.
There is no regenerative monetary system without democratic safeguards.
Question 14What is the relationship between national currencies, NEMO Green SDRs and the NEMO Exchange Standard?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
National currencies would continue to exist. NEMO IMS is not a project for a single world currency. States and central banks would keep their currencies, their institutions and their monetary sovereignty.
NEMO Green SDRs would be international units of account issued in relation to certified regenerative activities. They would recognize a regenerative contribution and allow it to be converted into national currency through central banks.
The NEMO Exchange Standard, or NES, would be the common reference connecting national currencies. It would allow conversions without relying on a key currency such as the dollar. In short: national currencies remain, NEMO Green SDRs account for regeneration, and the NES organizes international conversion.
National currencies remain sovereign, but they are connected through a regenerative and cooperative architecture.
Question 15Would central banks become mere executors of a global ecological program?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
No. Central banks would remain essential. In fact, their role would become more complex and more important. They would not simply execute orders; they would help maintain the stability of a system where money creation, credit, reserves, monetary melting and inflation risks must be carefully managed.
NEMO IMS expands the horizon of central banking. Price stability would still matter, but it would no longer be separated from financial stability, ecological robustness and the quality of monetary flows.
Central banks would have to manage reserve requirements, observe the circulation of regenerative money, control credit expansion and coordinate with the GAÏA Economic Symposium. Their mandate would evolve from narrow monetary neutrality toward systemic responsibility.
Central banks would not disappear. They would become guardians of a broader form of stability.
Question 16Why not simply create green money within the existing system?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
Because the existing system would absorb and neutralize it. If green money is created inside an architecture still dominated by debt, profitability, key currencies and short-term financial return, it risks becoming another green label on the same old machine.
The problem is not only the quantity of money. It is the architecture of money: its origin, its counterpart, its destination, its reflux, its relation to banks, trade, reserves and ecological criteria.
NEMO IMS is not merely a proposal for more green finance. It is a proposal to reorganize the monetary cycle itself: creation for regeneration, circulation through the economy, selective destruction through transaction-based monetary melting, and international conversion through the NES.
Green money is not enough if the monetary system remains structurally degenerative.
Question 17Can NEMO IMS be tested at a small scale before international adoption?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
Yes, and it probably should be. A global system cannot be improvised. Partial experiments would allow the mechanisms to be tested, criticized, measured and improved.
Pilot projects could focus on territories, watersheds, forests, soil restoration programs, public health infrastructures or local food resilience. The objective would not be to simulate the entire international architecture at once, but to test specific components: certification, regenerative accounting, monetary allocation, impact measurement and social effects.
Such experiments would also reveal political and technical difficulties. That is necessary. A serious utopia must accept testing, correction and contradiction.
NEMO IMS should be built as an open doctrine, not imposed as a closed dogma.
Question 18How would NEMO IMS coexist with the old system: dollar, debts, IMF, financial markets?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
During a transition, NEMO IMS would necessarily coexist with the existing system. The dollar, sovereign debts, the IMF, financial markets and current central bank frameworks would not vanish overnight.
The first step would be to create a parallel regenerative circuit: certified activities, NEMO Green SDRs, central bank conversion and carefully controlled monetary reflux. This circuit could grow gradually while proving its usefulness and credibility.
Over time, if it worked, it could reduce dependence on debt, on key currencies and on extractive growth. The aim is not immediate rupture, but a structural shift in the center of gravity of the monetary system.
The transition would not abolish the old world in one gesture. It would create the conditions for the new one to become stronger.
Question 19Why create a new institution such as the GAÏA Economic Symposium rather than entrust this mission to the UN, the IMF or the World Bank?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
Existing institutions are important, but they were not designed for this task. The IMF was built around balance of payments, financial stability and the international monetary order. The World Bank was built around development finance. The UN has broad legitimacy but limited monetary power.
NEMO IMS requires an institution whose purpose is explicitly to connect money creation, ecological regeneration, social robustness, scientific certification and the governance of the commons.
Existing institutions could participate, advise, audit or cooperate. But the core institution should be new, pluralist and designed from the start around the limits of the living world.
We cannot ask the institutions of the old paradigm to guarantee alone the birth of the new one.
Question 20If NEMO IMS actually worked, what would the world look like in twenty or thirty years?
Jean-Christophe Duval answers
We must be cautious. NEMO IMS is not a guarantee of paradise. It is a monetary, institutional and political tool. It could be misused, poorly governed or captured if safeguards are weak.
But if it worked, society would no longer be organized around the quantitative maximization of production and consumption. It would be organized around robustness: resilient food systems, living soils, restored ecosystems, strengthened public services, useful production, social cohesion and lower dependence on destructive growth.
Many activities now treated as marginal would become central: care, education, culture, repair, ecological restoration, preservation of the commons, social contribution and organized benevolence. Prestige would shift from what one accumulates to what one helps preserve.
The productive economy would not disappear. We would still produce, trade, invent and create. But we would do so with a far greater concern for the real impacts of what we produce and consume.
NEMO IMS does not promise heaven. It seeks to prevent the economy from continuing to manufacture hell.
Conclusion
NEMO IMS is not only a technical proposal. It is not merely a system of international compensation, a money-creation mechanism or a reform of central banks. It is an attempt to reconnect money with reality.
For too long, we believed that money was neutral, that markets could finance everything, that taxation could repair the damage caused by growth, that prices told the truth, that profit measured value, that debt could carry the future indefinitely, and that the commons could remain invisible without consequence.
We are now discovering that this vision was incomplete. The visible economy rests on invisible foundations. When those foundations collapse, prices, profits, balance sheets and growth models become powerless.
NEMO IMS proposes another orientation: a finance of the common good, debt-free money with reflux, an international system without a key currency, an architecture capable of remunerating regeneration rather than extraction, and an economy in which essential activities would no longer be condemned to insolvency.
Market finance funds what pays. NEMO IMS seeks to fund what sustains.
The question is therefore not only monetary. It is civilizational. What do we want to make solvent? What do we want to make desirable? What do we want to preserve? And what idea of wealth do we want to transmit to future generations?