Episode 12, Game Changers and Transition Makers: Empowering corporates to boost biodiversity

Elena:

Hello and welcome to ESG Matters at Ashurst. I'm Elena Lambros, the Ashurst Risk Advisory, Climate Change and Sustainability Partner. Welcome to the latest episode of Game Changers and Transition Makers. In this series, I'll be speaking to entrepreneurs around the globe who are at the forefront of driving the sustainability agenda through innovative business ideas and company startups.

In this episode, I'll be joined by Camille Goldstone-Henry, the founder and CEO of Xylo Systems, a company on a mission to preserve biodiversity globally. Well, welcome to the podcast, Camille. We're so lucky to have you join us today.

Camille:

Thank you so much for having me. Super excited for this chat.

Elena:

Yeah, no, it should be a really interesting one. So I thought I might just start with you just telling us a little bit about yourself and your business so the listeners get to understand you and what your business is all about?

Camille:

Sure. So I'm Camille. I am a Kamilaroi woman, a wildlife scientist, and the CEO and co-founder of Xylo Systems. So Xylo Systems is a biodiversity intelligence platform for businesses to measure and manage their biodiversity footprints. So in a nutshell, we aggregate lots of very complicated biodiversity information and help businesses understand what their biodiversity footprint is, what impacts they're having on the ecosystems that they're operating in, also along their supply chains, but more importantly, how to mitigate that impact within their operations and actually start to regenerate biodiversity.

So the reason why we do this is because 44 trillion of our global domestic product is reliant on healthy ecosystems. Yet, over a million species are currently threatened with extinction, a million. It's huge, right? Add on top of that, we've lost 70% of wildlife populations in the last 50 years. So we're trying to fight global warming, but we can't actually achieve net zero without also addressing the devastating biodiversity loss that we're seeing all around the world. So essentially, we have built a software platform to help businesses do just that; Fight biodiversity loss, but also achieve business outcomes as a result.

Elena:

Yeah, no, that's fantastic because I've noticed in the conversation recently, there has been so much focus on climate and reaching net zero by certain targets and everyone's just been talking about this. There's been a lot of reporting coming out around that. But finally, we're having the conversation around how do you balance that outcome with really maintaining our biodiversity in nature? So it's incredibly important. It might be interesting as well, if you could talk to people about some of the impacts that you see and mitigants that people can think about putting in place to really address some of those issues and the one million species being threatened at the moment? That would be great if could.

Camille:

If we look at the main drivers of extinctions, some of the biggest ones are natural resource extraction and land use change. We predominantly work with a lot of property development clients. So, right off the bat, you can see that the number one driver of extinction that they're contributing to is land clearing. So land use change. We're seeing a lot of land clearing for housing developments, which are very important economically and socially, but they do definitely have a huge impact on biodiversity, and we've seen that over and over again in Australia in particular, land clearing of habitat that is really important for the endangered koala, for example.

And businesses can mitigate that by using information on what the health of ecosystems are and where endangered species are located within those ecosystems to decide where they should be building or where they shouldn't be building. And then on top of that, we can also say, okay, what do these ecosystems look like and what species are there and how can we build in a more biodiversity positive way?

For example, in CBD or urban areas, we can implement things like native green roofs that have native plants that then attract native bees, butterflies and birds, therefore supporting the local ecosystem.
In large infrastructure projects, say railways or roadways, we can implement things like wildlife bridges to ensure the safe passage of koalas across highways, for example. So there are a range of ways in which businesses can mitigate their impact, but the first step is understanding the ecosystems in which they're operating, and that's what we help them do.

Elena:

Excellent, thank you. I love some of those ideas, particularly around how you put native trees or native plants on top of our CBD buildings. I actually think that would make the CBD look a lot nicer as well, so probably visually appealing. So you've given us a bit about your background on how you would have a strong affinity with the country, but how did this idea really come about? How did you think, "This is exactly what I'll do," and what were you looking to do by starting this business?

Camille:

I've always had a very strong affinity for nature. Growing up, I grew up in Newcastle, New South Wales, and was very much a beach girl. My parents were very into sustainability. So from a young age, caring for country and caring for nature was very much a part of me and who I was. So I always knew I wanted to work with wildlife and save wildlife. So eventually, I became a wildlife scientist and went on to work with conservation, not-for-profits in recovering endangered species. So some of the big ones I've worked on here in Australia include koalas. I've worked on Tasmanian devil recovery. Overseas, I've done a lot of work on sea turtles and Sumatran tigers.

I absolutely love that work and really important work being on the front lines, understanding why these species were going endangered and what we needed to do to save them. But a lot of that work was very manual. I would spend weeks out in the field, often with a pencil and paper, pen if I was lucky sometimes, recording where these animals were, how healthy they were, how many of them there were, and then I'd have to go back to the office and put it all into a spreadsheet. And that whole process to understand what is happening across landscapes with endangered species would take a really long time. And by the time I did enough field trips and got enough information to make a decision on what we need to do to save them, it can often be a year or two down the road. And when we're trying to save species, that is far, far too long. Especially in the dire state, we're finding the world in now in terms of biodiversity loss.

So I became quite frustrated , we weren't moving fast enough, and so I wanted to find a way to automate a lot of that manual work that I was doing as a wildlife scientist. So I went and skilled up in technology to say, what is out there? I knew AI was on the rise. I thought, could we apply some of these technological advancements to conservation? And really, the reason why it wasn't already being applied was because we're so resource constrained in conservation, that we don't have time to do this ourselves.

So on top of that, I also decided to scale up in business and out of that, really the idea of Xylo Systems formed and I founded the company in 2020. It initially started out as a data management solution for wildlife scientists. So solving what was not only my own problem, but a lot of conservation scientists' problem. And along the journey, we noticed a huge shift in the corporate mindset around sustainability. We know that a lot of companies were developing net zero strategies and engaging in carbon offsetting activities. In that, they also started to realise when they were offsetting, there wasn't just carbon capture there. There were also ecosystems and species there, and they wanted to understand what was happening in that type of activity.

At the same time, the global effort to reverse declining biodiversity compelled not only the adoption, but also the enforcement of new regulation and policy around companies impacting environments. So companies are now being forced to quantify and mitigate the impacts on biodiversity, but they just had no idea where to start. Sustainability teams in business were already very focused on carbon reduction and trying to wrap their heads around that, and now they're being expected to account for their impacts on ecosystem and they didn't know where to start. So we started shifting the product because we already had a lot of the data aggregated to help them understand what their impact is at the ecosystem level. So yeah, we essentially just did a major pivot about two years ago to focus on the corporate sector as well.

Elena:

Oh, fascinating. Because it is really hard for people to understand when you talk about biodiversity, talk about nature, actually understanding those impacts. It's so complicated and so interrelated, it can be really difficult to understand that. So sounds like a great business idea.

What does success look like for you then? So you did a pivot two years ago, you've been up and running for about four years. What do you really think would be successful for you thinking forward?

Camille:

We want world domination essentially. Just small ambition. If I compare some other incredible Australian businesses that have gone on to achieve global success, and that's really success for us, it's being a global company, we want to be the Canva of biodiversity. We want to go on that trajectory that Canva has been on, and we want to be that global go-to solution for any business measuring and managing biodiversity. Our number one goal and our North Star that we apply to every single task we do in the business is to enable any business anywhere to achieve a biodiversity net gain in that business. So not only are they mitigating their impacts, they're actually actively contributing to the regeneration of our ecosystems. So I think if we can achieve that by 2030, and 2030 is really the absolute goal for what the corporate space has termed nature positive, that means regenerating ecosystems, I think that we could definitely be defined as a success.

We're very much focused on the property and energy sectors right now because they account for 35% of all human drivers of biodiversity loss. I think if we can capture a good chunk of that market, that will also be success for us in the next two to five years.

Elena:

Yeah, perfect. And obviously they're so involved, those two sectors in terms of the energy transition, so definitely ones to focus on in terms of mitigating biodiversity impacts. So then if you think about that and you think about that kind of real focus on 2030, which is actually really not that far away, what do you think is really key to reimagining what the current system looks like? And as I always say on this podcast, changing the game around biodiversity impacts?

Camille:

How I think about changing systems, and it's all systems level change and systems understanding, I think that's the first key to changing the game. It's understanding those fundamentals, really crucial to deeply understand the existing systems you're looking to innovate. So this means not just knowing how they work, but also, why they were designed in a particular way, what their limitations are, where the pain points exist for users? So I think by grasping those elements, you can identify opportunities for meaningful change that isn't just incremental but also transformative.

And for us at Xylo Systems, and for me, that is actually twofold. So not only are we trying to understand biodiversity systems, so looking at biodiversity at the ecosystem level, the species level and the genetic level, but also understanding the business systems in how do we get here and how did we build business systems in a way that is having this major impact on environments and how can we start to address that using technology?

So I guess number one is understanding the fundamentals, and two, which is obviously I'm a very big fan of, is embracing interdisciplinary approaches. So innovation really happens at the intersection of different fields and by integrating ideas from those diverse disciplines, in our case technology and conservation biology, you can really uncover very unique solutions that a single field perspective might miss. And I think it's that interdisciplinary approach that allows us to really think outside conventional frameworks and apply novel concepts to existing problems. And that's how I think about game changing. It's understanding the fundamentals and then applying an interdisciplinary approach on top of that.

Elena:

Yeah, no, fantastic. And I really loved your comment around technology and environmental conservation. I think that's two things that you don't really hear a lot of focus on, so I think it's really great to see. So then just moving focuses somewhat, I always ask this question, but what is your own personal commitment to net zero in the next 12 months?

Camille:

I'll answer that twofold, at the business level and then at the personal level. But when it comes to net zero and looking at our carbon emissions at Xylo Systems, we're currently actively exploring innovative ways to reduce the emissions that we produce through cloud computing operations. So cloud computing is a huge aspect of building a software product and operating in the SaaS space right now. Some of our activities include investing in more efficient data management and storage solutions. Very boring. The more exciting part-

Elena:

Very important though, very important.

Camille:

Sorry to my data science team, I love you. But more excitingly, we're exploring new green cloud providers and there's a new startup based in Tassie here in Australia that have developed a way to have much more greener cloud computing services. So we're looking how can we divest from really the big cloud providers that aren't doing a lot in terms of the emissions they're creating from their data centres and looking to invest in smaller operators that are operating more greenly.

And then at the personal level, I'm currently in the process of trying to convince my entire apartment building. I'm in an apartment building, one of 32 apartments to install solar panels on our rooftops. So this is not only reducing my own carbon footprint, but also serves as a model for other apartment tenants and owners to invest in solar panels on their own apartment buildings. So we're really looking to how can we leverage that renewable energy sources that benefit an entire apartment building? I'm not going to lie, it's not easy trying to convince 32 different owners that we need to invest in this type of thing, but I'm playing the long game here. I'm expecting we'll get this done in 12 months, but maybe we'll loop back in 12 months' time and see where I'm at.

Elena:

Well, good luck with that. I get the sense though that if anyone's going to convince 32 people in the next year to do that, that will be you. So I feel very positive you'll get there. And then final question would be if you want to provide our listeners with just one takeaway from this conversation, what would that be?

Camille:

I think I mentioned in the beginning that biodiversity is complex and a lot of sustainability professionals are not only trying to grapple with carbon, but also biodiversity. And while understanding biodiversity and its systems can be complex, saving it doesn't have to be. Whether you're a business or you're an individual, every little bit counts. And I often have this conversation with a lot of the companies that we work with or a lot of the companies that are looking to use our solution at Xylo Systems. They say, "Is planting a tree, a native tree, just one, really going to change anything?" And the answer is yes, absolutely. Every little bit counts here.

So I think if you're an individual, focusing on not only your net zero strategies in the home, but also your nature positive strategies can be very simple, like planting native plants in your garden or even on your balcony if you're in an apartment like me. It directly supports native bees, butterflies and birds. And if you're a company, the same applies for your physical offices. For example, we know that Google recently implemented a no lawn policy across their campuses in the US and they're planting native habitat for butterflies over there. So every little step counts and every little step really helps to support our ecosystems, even if you're planting one tree.

Elena:

Well, that's been a really great conversation and I've loved hearing even more about your business. So thank you for joining. We've really appreciated it.

Camille:

Thanks so much for having me.

Elena:

Thank you for listening. I hope you found this episode both worthwhile and insightful. To learn more about our podcast, visit ashhurst.com/podcast.
This Game Changers and Transition Makers mini-series follows on from our 30 for Net-Zero 30 series, and I would encourage you to click on the link in the show notes to find out more. To ensure you don't miss any future episodes, subscribe now via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And while you're there, please feel free to leave a rating or a review. In the meantime, thanks again for listening and goodbye for now.