Episode 14, Game Changers and Transition Makers: Season 1 wrap-up

Lorraine Johnston:

Hello and welcome to ESG Matters @ Ashurst. You're listening to an extra special episode in our Game Changers and Transition Makers series, a podcast series that highlights global entrepreneurs who are at the forefront of the sustainability agenda. This episode will reflect on the first season and examine the key takeaways and the recurring themes gleaned from our fantastic guests. My name is Lorraine Johnston. I'm a sustainable finance partner here at Ashurst in London. And joining me today is the host of season one, Elena Lambros, the ESG and sustainability partner at Ashurst Risk Advisory in Brisbane Australia. Hello and welcome, Elena.

Elena Lambros:

Hi Lorraine. It's great to be here.

Lorraine Johnston:

Well, the script has been flipped today, and for this episode, Elena, we thought it would be appropriate for you to share some of the key insights that have stuck with you in the first 13 episodes of the series.

Elena Lambros:

Thanks, Lorraine. I've been very fortunate to be in the driver's seat for the episodes recorded to date. And overwhelmingly, the conversations I've had have highlighted the amazing way of these individuals and their companies are doing in reimagining their industry by taking meaningful action against ESG issues throughout innovation.

Lorraine Johnston:

Absolutely. And with that in mind, I thought it'd be appropriate to kick off by talking about your chat with Chris Pensa, who's a founder of Pensa Events and who's created a company that is really adopting innovation at the center of everything they're doing.

Elena Lambros:

Yeah, that's right. Lorraine. Chris is a former competitive figure skater actually who carved out a career that combines his love of art and innovation with corporate events that challenge his clients to think more innovatively about their ESG strategies. Let's take a listen.

Chris Pensa:

For example, there's an amazing Rewilding project. I don't know how many of your listeners are actually familiar with the UK, but in Sussex, which is about an hour and a half south of London, there is a three and a half thousand acre estate run by an amazing couple, Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree. Isabella is a writer and I guess a climate activist of sorts. And they inherited this three and a half thousand acre estate, which had been farmed for many hundreds of years by their family. And in about 20 years ago, they decided to just let the entire estate go back to nature and not farm it. And people thought they were crazy at the time.

And fast-forward 20 years and they have the most amazingly diverse ecology there. They have species of butterflies and free roaming herbivores that have not been on that land for hundreds of years. So it's a really amazing thing. And we do Rewilding safaris there. We take a walk with Isabella and have a lunch with her and she does a book signing. And the whole point of that exercise is to get people out of London, out of their London bubble, London mindset or any inner city mindset, take them into nature and to have those conversations about how we can make an impact on the environment either personally or with our clients or with the work that we do actually in a space that is relevant to that conversation.

Lorraine Johnston:

So that was Chris Pensa from Pensa Events. So Elena, innovation was obviously a recurring theme throughout your discussions and particularly innovation in office spaces and clean tech solutions in those buildings. You had a really lively discussion with Mark Bjornsgaard from Deep Green, which really explored what was possible when it comes to using innovative technology that addresses problems for social good.

Elena Lambros:

Yes, it was a terrific conversation with Mark whose personal journey from a music industry entrepreneur to a climate tech innovator really exemplifies the kind of lateral thinking and resilience that defined a lot of the conversations I have had throughout the series. Here, Mark explained this further in this clip.

Mark Jornsgaard:

The next thing to understand is computers are brilliant electric heaters. 97% of the energy that goes into a heater to power the computer comes out as heat. We should think of computers as like wind turbines or solar panels. They are an amazing environmental asset that we've got as a species. They're just in the wrong place and we are not doing the right things with them. And the other thing about data center industry is that for every pound they spend powering the computer, they spend 50 P, another 50 P trying to keep the computer cold, trying to keep it cool. If that all makes sense, then what we are doing is exactly the opposite.

I'm a history and politics student. I'm a troublemaker by trade. And obviously if you've got this massive existential problem of 2% of the world's electricity pipe literally heating the environment more, what could you do? So instead of building big barns in the middle of nowhere, what we said is let's take smaller amounts of compute and take the computers to where the heat is required. And if you do that, then all sorts of amazing good stuff happens.

So that's what we are doing. That's what Deep Green is doing. We are building hundreds and then thousands of much smaller clusters of computers. No one really cares about that, but what we care about is the fact they generate enormous amount of heat. And so what we are doing is we're taking that heat and we are giving it away for free to people who need that heat.

Lorraine Johnston:

So that was Mark Bjornsgaard from Deep Green. When it comes to the theme of game changers, it's really no surprise at corporate responsibility and the impacts of corporate actions and sustainability kept coming up in various conversations you had.

Elena Lambros:

Absolutely. I think my conversation with Nikhil Chouguley, CEO of Sustopia, an ESG data risks and reporting platform that is focused on private market funds and real assets, really stands out to me because of the work they're doing to bridge the gap between green capital and sustainable development and navigate financial investments to facilitate sustainable decision-making. I think Nikhil explains it beautifully here.

Nikhil Chouguley:

Experience helps you identify gaps. Regulation helps you get those gaps financed and client need puts a commercial spin on it. So using these three concepts of what did I see, what did I observe in the banking space? So after the financial crisis in 2008, I was a bit disillusioned with how the markets, the banking world was working. Father of a newborn child, I decided to ... Effectively, I was a CEO of a private equity fund that invested in teak and also other agroforestry assets in Malaysia. And having actually seen the assets, I had the pleasure of flying in a helicopter over the plantation assets. This was about 12, 13 years ago in the Borneo and the Malaysian rainforest. Actually I saw a desert. I saw a desert of palm oil plantations and nothing else, millions of acres. And they're in the middle of all of this was a little oasis of tea plantations mixed with virgin rainforest mixed with an orangutan reserve and then basically a eco hotel with an established community of about 500 people living on the plantation.

So to me, this is how we can make money from nature. This was an eye-opener for me as a 30-year-old. Now since then, I've been involved in more investment banking and capital market side of things looking at the big tier one banks. Unfortunately, here as well there are gaps in how they classify and manufacture products. I've seen instances of greenwashing. I've had to deal with the regulators in Hong Kong and in Malaysia to explain why this has happened and how this would not happen again. Thankfully that was addressed without any reprimand.

The reality is organizations are still learning, especially the bigger financial organizations are still learning how to use data risk and understand what the client is doing. So there have been instances of greenwashing, there have been instances where financial risks ... There's a coal related company. I won't tell their name, but effectively I was in a position to use the product governance process to ensure that the financial risks associated with the climate impact of this company meant that I could remove this company from the investment list.

Lorraine Johnston:

That was Nikhil Chouguley from Sustopia. Of course, sustainable investment was just one of a host of recurring themes throughout the podcast series to date. But I also wanted to explore another crucial element that really forms the backbone of everything discussed to date. And that is data.

Elena Lambros:

Data really has come up a lot. And if I go back to one of the first episodes of the season, I spoke with Jessica Christian-Franks about her company Neighbourlytics. And that company is using data and social analytics to transform and shape the communities of tomorrow. This quick soundbite explores the work Neighbourlytics is doing in regards to social and environmental sustainability in the property sector and highlights data's pivotal role in creating these thriving communities of tomorrow.

Jessica Christian Franks:

We want to demystify data. There's been a lot of evangelizing about data in the property sector and a lot of the big companies have got a data person and tried to do some data. And the problem with that is that they don't necessarily get much value from it. And we liken it a little bit to the Emperor's new clothes where the property sector are all talking about data and everyone's kind of going, "I don't really know what that means. What does that mean? Everyone else seems to know what it means. I'll just pretend I do."

And that's a big problem because they then do something data, don't get value from it, and then go back to the old ways of asking their mate what he thinks and taking that action. So what we are really actively looking at is how to educate the market, help themselves on board, and really feel that data and insights are very, very accessible rather than data being something that a company has to invest millions of dollars in and really intentionally get a data team. And that's just not a great way to make great evidence-based decisions because it's siloing data into one part of a company. Whereas we hope that the property sector can really start using it as just right across all of their stuff, become data literate and think about platforms like ours as part of their daily work.

Lorraine Johnston:

So that was Jessica Christian-Franks, the founder and CEO of Neighbourlytics. Finally, Elena, I wanted to bring up the theme of the circular economy and this virtuous circle that can be seen in organizations adopting really innovative ESG principles and putting them into practice.

Elena Lambros:

While a lot of these episodes touched on the theme, the episode that really stands out for me in particular is with Cameron Mackenzie from Aspire. This is a digital circular economy platform that is empowering around three and a half thousand businesses to reuse and recycle over 2 million tons of resources. In this episode, Cameron discussed the concept of a circular economy and how Aspire's algorithm promotes sustainable waste-free environment. Let's hear from Cameron on how Aspire works.

Cameron Mackenzie:

When it comes, like the fundamentals of the circular economy is actually not sending the items to landfill, end of life or breaking them down so they can be reused or repurposed or pull the components apart, but also rebuilding those products in such a way that it can be reused or repurposed. Doesn't go into landfills. That's the main thing. There's several sort of terminologies around that, but reuse, repurpose. There's a myth in everyone's mind that recycling is a part of the circular economy and it's like the last thing you need to do. But anyway, it's a bit of a myth. The penny will drop hopefully soon.

But basically how Aspire works and the matching algorithm in it is there's basically, if you think of the desk that you're sitting at for an instance, probably 80% timber, 15% maybe steel or something for the legs, maybe 1% plastic and maybe 3% paint. And how the platform works is when someone uploads that desk, the customer or the user can actually go down to that granular level or they can put it on the desk. It's up to them. And basically when they list it, it goes through the network. And anyone that in the industry is looking for the timber or the steel legs or elements of plastics, they'll going to match and they'll see, "Hey, is this something I'm interested in?" Being the 80% of timber, the timber will probably be the best match for it. But also with that, the algorithm in the platform we geared a little while ago to be reused, repurposed. So some will actually use it as a desk rather than recycle it. So yeah, that's how we've got, got the algorithm sort of geared for that.

Lorraine Johnston:

That was Cameron Mackenzie from Aspire. Well, Elena, we might leave it there. Thank you so much for revisiting and sharing your insights into season one.

Elena Lambros:

Thank you, Lorraine. It was a pleasure and I'm really looking forward to season two.

Lorraine Johnston:

That's right. We have so much more planned for season two, including myself as a new co-host who will join the series with Elena and with some already great guests locked in. So make sure you stay tuned and subscribe with our second season kicking off in September this year. Thank you for listening to ESG Matters at Ashurst.

This episode featured highlights of season one of our Game Changers and Transition Makers series where we speak with innovators and disruptors who are effectively harnessing disruption to create opportunities to evolve, grow, and pivot business operations to bolster performance and drive a sustainable agenda. To listen back to any or all of our previous podcasts, search for ESG Matters @ Ashurst on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, feel free to catch up on our 30 for net-zero 30 series where we spoke with 30 leaders from around the globe on actions to take now to deliver on 2030 goals.

In September, we'll be bringing you more episodes in our Game Changers and Transition Makers series. So to hear those, make sure you subscribe to ESG Matters @ Ashurst on your favourite podcast platform. Until next time, thanks again for listening and goodbye for now.