Send me a message Stanford doctoral candidate Benjamin (Ben) Franta (aka @BenFranta on Twitter) has a degree in Applied Physics from Harvard, a Law degree from Stanford, and is currently working on his Ph.D. from Stanford on the history of climate science, climate denial, and the fossil fuel industry. I came across him when I heard about his most recent paper where he and two French researchers showed how French fossil fuel company Total were aware of harmful global warming impacts since at leas...
Nov 10, 2021•36 min•Season 1Ep. 48
Send me a message I first came across the Carbon Tracker Initiative about 8-9 years ago when they posted a cool short video explaining the concept of a Carbon Budget . I follow the Carbon Tracker Initiative's Founder and Executive Chairman Mark Campanale on LinkedIn so I reached out to him to see if he'd be willing to come on the podcast to explain it. We had a fascinating conversation about what the carbon budget is, the implications of these stranded assets for pension funds and financial mark...
Nov 03, 2021•48 min•Season 1Ep. 47
Send me a message A few weeks back I had IMF Assistant Director Ralph Chami on the podcast talking about how he came up with a way to put a monetary value on the ecosystem services performed by keystone species such as whales in the wild initially and subsequently also by forest elephants. If you haven't heard that podcast, do check it out, you will not regret it. In today's episode, I invited Walid Al Saqqaf , co-founder with Ralph of Rebalance Earth , an organisation working to operationalise ...
Oct 27, 2021•52 min•Season 1Ep. 46
Send me a message With a workforce of almost 300,000 , Capgemini is one of the world's largest global IT Services and consulting companies. Curious to know what their sustainability story is, I reached out to Capgemini's Global Head of Sustainability Dr . James Robey and invited him to come on the podcast. We had a great conversation about how Capgemini are becoming more sustainable, how they are helping their clients with their sustainability journey, and where we need to go from here. I learne...
Oct 20, 2021•29 min•Season 1Ep. 45
Send me a message We in SAP held our first Sustainability Summit in April of this year and it was a resounding success. So much so, that we're holding a follow-up Sustainability Summit on October 28th. It is a virtual event and you can find more details here . To find out more about the event, and why you should attend I invited Anita Varshney , Global Vice President for SAP's Sustainability Strategy. We had a great conversation about the context behind the event, what to expect from the event, ...
Oct 13, 2021•34 min•Season 1Ep. 44
Send me a message In previous episodes of this podcast, both Prof Sir David King of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Repair and Rob Gardner of St James' Wealth Management mentioned the role of whales, elephants, and biodiversity in general in sequestering carbon. Interested to know more I came across Ralph Chami , Assistant Director at the International Monetary Fund and co-founder of Rebalance Earth whose seminal paper on placing a financial value on the carbon sequestration of whales (initiall...
Oct 06, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 43
Send me a message There's a lot of talk these days about targets - be it Net Zero targets, SDGs, or other targets, but how do we measure progress against those targets? Dedlyne is a startup based in the UK which aims to help out here by offering a dashboard with a very easy-to-understand interface - a simple date, which is articulated in a dial, which is red, Amber, or green, depending on how well an organisation is doing. I invited Dedlyne co-founder Huw Bunn to come on the podcast to explain t...
Sep 29, 2021•35 min•Season 1Ep. 42
Send me a message There is a strong appetite in the investment community right now for sustainable funds to invest in but does that investment lead to sustainable outcomes, and also important - is it a sound investment? I read a couple of fascinating articles recently by Ken Pucker which addresses these questions so I invited him to come on the podcast to talk this through. Ken is the former COO of Timberland, is an Advisory Director at Berkshire Partners, and is a Senior Lecturer at the Fletche...
Sep 22, 2021•36 min•Season 1Ep. 41
Send me a message We (in SAP) are running a webinar on September 22nd titled Building a Sustainable Supply Chain for the High Tech Industry . The idea of this webinar is to show how you can optimize both your shareholder return and your design-to-operate processes for sustainability. Given that the subject is both climate, and supply chain-related, I felt this made it an ideal episode to publish both on this podcast, and on my Digital Supply Chain podcast . I invited Joe Mulligan , the webinar h...
Sep 15, 2021•27 min•Season 1Ep. 40
Send me a message There has been a lot in the press recently about activist investors, the increasing importance of ESG, and how big money can move the needle on climate. Here on this podcast, I've had a number of episodes related to ESG and investing as well. In this week's show, I'm talking to Rob Gardner . Rob is the Director of Investments at St. James's Place Wealth Management , where he is responsible for growing and protecting the wealth of over 850,000 clients totaling over 145 billion p...
Sep 08, 2021•42 min•Season 1Ep. 39
Send me a message One of the stakeholders in the climate crisis with the most exposure is the insurance industry, and yet to date, I hadn't invited anyone from that industry to come on the podcast, so this episode corrects that! After reading an article by Zurich Insurance's Global Chief Risk Officer Peter Giger in the World Economic Forum titled " Climate change will be sudden and cataclysmic. We need to act fast ", I decided to invite him to come on the podcast to talk about climate change fro...
Sep 01, 2021•28 min•Season 1Ep. 38
Send me a message Aaaand we're back! Rejuvenated after a couple of week's vacation, in this week's episode of the Climate 21 podcast I talk to Watershed co-founder Taylor Francis . If you're not familiar with Watershed, they have developed a platform to help organisations measure out to their scope 3 emissions, build a carbon reduction plan, and source lower-carbon supplies. In our chat, Taylor spoke about the genesis of Watershed, Watershed's capabilities, and why this is becoming increasingly ...
Aug 25, 2021•39 min•Season 1Ep. 37
Send me a message Keeping it short and sweet - I'm headed off on vacation for the next few weeks so the podcast is going on a brief break too. I will be back publishing the podcast at its normal weekly (every Wednesday at 6 am CET) cadence resuming with a cool episode on August 25th. If you get lonely for the podcast, there are 36 episodes in the back catalog you can check out if you haven't listened to all of them. And if you have (kudos to you!), many of them can stand a second (or third!) lis...
Aug 04, 2021•2 min•Season 1Ep. 36
Send me a message One of the most difficult industries to reduce emissions in is the chemicals industry. I recently came across Carbon Minds , a company focused on emissions data specifically for the chemicals industry. I was intrigued to know more so, I invited Arne Kätelhön , Carbon Minds co-founder and Managing Director to come on the podcast to tell me all about the industry, and how they're helping clean it up. We had a fascinating conversation and as always, I learned loads, I hope you do ...
Jul 28, 2021•27 min•Season 1Ep. 35
Send me a message I first came across today's podcast guest Tariq Fancy when I read an interview he gave to Peter McKillop on Greenbiz where he argued that sustainable investments and the current focus on ESGs won't achieve anything and may distract from what is really needed - a carbon tax and systemic change. Given Tariq was recruited by Larry Fink's Blackrock to be its first Chief Investment Officer for Sustainable Investing, it's likely he knows what he's talking about. I was intrigued to kn...
Jul 21, 2021•42 min•Season 1Ep. 34
Send me a message One of the issues we have today is that we're using far too many virgin resources in our supply chains. These virgin resources then mostly end up in landfill, or worse are incinerated and the end of a products useful life. The fix for this is to use circular economy principles, but these are still very early in their development and so can be challenging to implement. Circular IQ is a pioneer in this space, and their software platform is helping around 1,200 organisations in 84...
Jul 14, 2021•31 min•Season 1Ep. 33
Send me a message Change is hard. We know this. However, however hard change is, systemic change is by definition orders of magnitude harder. But that is what is needed if we're to come to terms with climate change. And that is precisely the mission of North Star Transition - to accelerate systemic change. How does any single company take on this mission, and why? To answer those questions I invited North Star Transition co-founder Jyoti Banerjee to come on the podcast to talk me through their t...
Jul 07, 2021•42 min•Season 1Ep. 32
Send me a message A couple of episodes of this podcast have featured guests from the financial space, but we've never had someone from the startup/VC industry so I felt it was time to address that. Plug and Play calls itself an innovation platform. They help around 2,000 startups a year, and they are committed to working with startups in reducing plastic waste, and decarbonising. Their CEO is Saeed Amidi , and he very graciously agreed to come on the podcast to talk about their plans - what they...
Jun 30, 2021•32 min•Season 1Ep. 31
Send me a message On this 30th episode of the podcast, I'm honoured to be joined by renowned climate scientist Professor Maureen Raymo . Maureen is Co-Founding Dean of Columbia Climate School , and Director at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory , Columbia University. Here is a sample paragraph from her bio on the Columbia Climate School Leadership page : Prof. Raymo is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geoph...
Jun 23, 2021•36 min•Season 1Ep. 30
Send me a message It has been a while since I had anyone from SAP on the podcast, and since SAP recently held its SAP Sustainability Summit , I wanted to catch up with the team to see how things are progressing. For this episode I invited Gunther Rothermel to come on the show. Gunther leads the Sustainability Engineering teams at SAP, so he's the perfect guy to let us know how things are shaping up. And given most of the world's business transactions use an SAP system, enabling SAP customers to ...
Jun 16, 2021•27 min•Season 1Ep. 29
Send me a message A couple of week's back on this podcast we chatted with Alejandro Agag , the founder of the Formula E World Championship - the electric motorsport racing series. This week I managed to convince Ian James , the Team Lead and Managing Director for the Mercedes-EQ Formula E Team ! We had a fascinating conversation around electric cars, the Formula E championship, the benefits to Mercedes of participating n the championship, and the importance of data to the Mercedes EQ Formula E t...
Jun 09, 2021•44 min•Season 1Ep. 28
Send me a message Bavarian agtech company BayWa AG was recognised recently as one of the Top 50 Global Sustainability and Climate Leaders for all the work they do not just reducing their own emissions, but crucially helping their customers in the agriculture space to reduce their emissions too. I reached out to their CIO, Tobias Fausch to invite him to come on the podcast to talk about some of their many extremely innovative initiatives aimed squarely at emissions reductions. He readily agreed a...
Jun 02, 2021•22 min•Season 1Ep. 27
Send me a message A few months back I hosted Rodi Basso on the podcast where he talked about the E1 Electric Powerboat racing series and it was an excellent episode so, I decided to invite his co-founder Alejandro Agag to come on the podcast to talk about Formula E , and the new extreme off-road electric racing motorsport series Extreme E . Formula E, if you are not familiar with it is a zero carbon motorsport series, akin to Formula 1 except the cars are 100% electric. There are some more diffe...
May 26, 2021•26 min•Season 1Ep. 26
Send me a message Deloitte , one of the largest professional services companies in the world announced recently its World Climate Commitment . Given who Deloitte are, I was keen to know more, so I invited Marc Van Caeneghem to come on the podcast. Marc is a member of Deloitte's Executive Committee and is their Global Climate and Sustainability Leader . Marc and I had a fascinating conversation, where we talked about Deloitte's aims to reduce its own emissions, and crucially how it helps clients ...
May 19, 2021•36 min•Season 1Ep. 25
Send me a message My guest on the podcast this week is Prof Sir David King . An incredibly accomplished scientist with over 500 papers to his name, he has also been Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK government, the UK Government's Special Representative for Climate Change, and in May 2020 he formed and led Independent SAGE amongst other accomplishments. You can see more about his life's work on his Wikipedia page . More recently he founded and Chairs the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge w...
May 12, 2021•45 min•Season 1Ep. 24
Send me a message The world of finance is a black box to me. I don't have that money gene. But it is an area that is starting to play an increasing role in the world of climate. The podcast I published two weeks ago with David Harris about how the investment world is shifting towards sustainable finance, went down really well, so I decided to have a follow-up In this episode I talked to Shrey Kohli , Head of Debt Capital Markets and Funds at London Stock Exchange Group and we discussed Green Bon...
May 05, 2021•32 min•Season 1Ep. 23
Send me a message Over on the Climate 21 Forums I created for discussions about this podcast a user called Siobhán commented that "I would love to hear how design can help in the fight against Climate Change..." When you think of design and sustainability one name stands out - William (Bill) McDonough . Bill is an internationally renowned architect, designer, and co-author of the book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things . I reached out to Bill and he graciously agreed to join me on...
Apr 28, 2021•46 min•Season 1Ep. 22
Send me a message The investment world is changing. Investors are realising that regulations are increasingly mandating for lower carbon products and services which has a knock on effect on organisations with higher emissions, and consequent risks for any money invested in those companies. I invited David Harris , the Group Head of Sustainable Business at London Stock Exchange Group & FTSE Russell to come on the podcast to dig into this in more detail. I warned David in advance that finance ...
Apr 21, 2021•32 min•Season 1Ep. 21
Send me a message Last week's episode of the podcast with Sandra Pallier and Hannah Smith from ClimateAction.tech looked at the issue of reducing IT's carbon footprint taking a bottom up approach so, I wanted to have a follow-up episode looking at reducing IT's emissions issue with a more top-down perspective. With that in mind I invited Michael Terrell , Director of Energy at Google to come on the podcast to talk about some of Google's initiatives in this space. Google have long been leaders in...
Apr 14, 2021•31 min•Season 1Ep. 20
Send me a message Technology has a large and growing carbon footprint. Everything from when you open Google on your phone, to browsing your Instagram feed, to sending an email has climate emissions implications (by the way, speaking of Google, next week's episode features a senior Google exec sharing what they're doing to reduce their emissions!). How can we address that issue? That is the challenge being taken up by Climate Action Tech (CAT for short). Climate Action Tech is a grassroots organi...
Apr 07, 2021•31 min•Season 1Ep. 19
