Episode 001 | January 10, 2022 | Duration: 14:57
Transcript
Note: This transcript has been auto-generated and lightly edited for readability. It may contain minor errors or inaccuracies.
001 Cop 26 Frederik Van Deurs Joachim Almdal
Welcome, everybody. Welcome Frederick. Thank you.
Really looking forward to this day. I’m Joki. I’m a founding partner in Green Innovation Group.
My name is Fred. As you may know, after working together for seven years, I’m the CEO of Green Innovation Group, an anthropologist by education and a climate enthusiast for many years.
And that’s actually why I’m part of Green Innovation Group. But maybe you can share a little bit about what we do.
Yeah. Green Innovation Group is a management consulting firm. We only do green projects, projects that we believe contribute to reaching drawdown faster or increasing biodiversity, using fewer resources.
We have a specialty in pharma and the medical sector and do a range of different projects, both strategy and implementation.
You nailed the pitch, man. Great, thanks. So the next point on our agenda is actually to answer for our listeners what they’re listening to.
This is our podcast. That came about because we found out in our work that we accumulated so much knowledge and expertise, and we only have 24 hours per day. It’s just not enough time to share that knowledge. So that’s basically why we wanted to do this, to share some of the insights and experiences that we acquire on a day-to-day basis, because we have actually dedicated our lives to working with the green transition and we’re not doing enough.
So that was the point of this initiative. But Jo, why should our listeners listen?
Yeah. So first of all, I completely agree. It’s one of the best parts of my job that I get to spend so much time learning with so many different experts, and I really have a high hope that we can leverage the insights we get in this podcast to reach people we don’t do projects with and enable them to better make a difference.
You should listen to this podcast if you want to learn how to make large organizations more sustainable and also why the green transition is hard, why it doesn’t just happen by itself, and how you can unlock that. We’ll also be looking a lot into how the green transition to sustainability is often very good business.
Because once you unlock that, that’s really the key. Then things just start to happen in large organizations, especially private ones.
This is basically one of the things that we often encounter with our clients. The challenge oftentimes seems to be how might we tie this sustainability practice into our core business. How can our product or service become inherently sustainable? That’s actually sort of the way we approach any task we get from our clients: figure out how can you make sure your core business is aligned with the sustainability agenda and that you’re not causing more harm.
Your value creation in the market sense of value creation.
And it’s one of the key things to ask yourself to get it right: am I doing this for real? Is my core business sustainability? What happens every time a client buys a product from me? What happens every time a citizen gets a service from me as a public organization? That is the most important thing to get right.
There’s been a major change since we started working with this almost seven years ago. Even longer for you. Going from when it wasn’t really on most people’s mind. When we went out to large organizations, they said, well, we have a CSR department somewhere. We’re really good. We do this report once a year.
It’s called corporate social responsibility. Yeah.
And there were never two. It was always just one FTE. Now it’s in the top three of all CEOs’ strategic priorities. Almost not a single political party is not for the green transition. There are few who are very against.
The whole world is starting to give this attention and, luckily, to act more and more. Now, just as we’re speaking, the top leaders of the world are gathered in Glasgow for COP 26 to try and do something. And what is COP 26, Fred, and what are they trying to do?
Well, I thought you would never ask, Joki.
I’m cheating. We planned this. So COP 26 is a global summit where the leaders of the world gather to agree on how to address the urgent climate agenda. Back in 2015, almost all of the world’s leaders agreed on what’s known as the Paris Agreement. Those targets are also known as the 2030 targets.
The ambition is to keep the world temperature below a 2.2 degree Celsius rise. What’s going on in Glasgow right now is frankly quite depressing. On the major stage where we are hoping that world leaders would actually pick up and start demanding results and action from one another.
Not a lot has happened in the grander scheme of things. We’re not having a Glasgow agreement that could be seen as a Paris Agreement 2.0. That’s despite the fact that the IPCC, the Climate Council under the UN, has recently been giving grim portrayals of the direction in which we are heading.
One would have hoped that COP 26… Right now when we’re recording this, we’re entering the final day of COP 26. So they still have a little time. They could be in overtime. Maybe we’re going to look silly when this episode comes out, but I’d be happy to look silly like that.
Yeah, definitely. I’ll take that any day. So from a climate enthusiast perspective, there’s a lot of reason to be depressed about COP 26. It definitely hasn’t delivered on its promises. It has failed to address the very urgent agenda that we have in front of us.
What it has actually succeeded with is making a myriad of very small deals. The strategy from the United Kingdom, the host of COP 26, has been to try and gather as many small deals as possible. There’s been deals on stopping deforestation by 2030.
There’s been deals on protecting biodiversity and enhancing biodiversity measures. There’s been deals on anti-acidification of oceans and all kinds of things, but they have been without binding commitment. That’s the major issue.
What does that mean, without binding?
It basically means it’s a lot of empty promises, or potentially empty promises. I’m not saying that Bolsonaro of Brazil is not going to stop deforestation. I’m just looking at his track record and concluding that it doesn’t seem very probable that because he made a non-binding commitment to stop those efforts before 2030, that it’s going to happen at all. I think it would be very silly to place your money on that bet.
Historically he’s been very focused on cutting down the Amazon.
I would advise very strongly against making that bet. And I say that only in friendly terms.
That’s what gives me a grim feeling about COP 26 and the perspectives of these international collaborations. The IPCC has established and cemented that time is in fact running out. We are reaching crucial tipping points and the politicians of the world are failing to address that issue in a way that feels serious enough.
In a Danish context, we’re being faced with the hockey stick, a promise that future technology will solve the problems. In the rest of the world, we are seeing climate targets that are just not ambitious enough.
The IPCC is just restating, even louder, that time is an issue and that we are running out of time. It wasn’t news at all. The IPCC was trying to shout louder, trying to say, this is serious guys.
It’s kind of like 30-year-old news in a sense, that it’s been coming out year after year basically since we were born. We’re messing with something where we might not understand the consequences, or we will not understand the consequences except that it’s going to be grim.
One thing that’s really interesting for us, especially with the focus that we have in our work, is how might we set better targets?
When we’re looking at the 25 biggest listed companies in Denmark and we look at their sustainability strategies, we ask ourselves: if you could place the bet, do you believe that the 25 biggest listed companies in Denmark will reach their sustainability targets?
All in all, yes or no?
Unfortunately no.
You don’t believe that. Okay, so we’re going to operate with a small margin of error, assuming not all of them are going to reach their targets. Okay. However, if all of them would reach those targets and we could scale that out across the entire global society, we would still be on a four-degree temperature rise path. And mind you, we were trying with the Paris Agreement to stay well below two degrees. So we need better targets, not just on a national level, but also on a corporate level.
A lot of this has to do with the way we are setting the targets. That’s what you were talking about in the intro, that we need to make sure that every time we make business, we are making it in a way that is not harmful. So when we are looking at harm reduction strategies, we cannot have climate neutral as the gold standard.
We need significantly better targets, especially if we are not factoring in the entire value chain. That’s one of the major sticking points of the frameworks we have right now. If we’re looking at ESG measurements, SBTI, or any of these other frameworks for setting sustainability targets, they’re actually not addressing: how do we make money? What are the consequences every time you sell a product? Are you actively contributing or deducting from our global mission of staying well below two degrees?
That’s a problem we see with our clients as well. They have projected growth, often in consumer products or something that will reach a patient, and if they reach their targets, they’re going to increase their emissions, even though they’re reducing the emission per product or per Euro generated.
So how might we actually design better targets? I think that’s one of the questions we’re going to work a lot with. We can also set this forth as a teaser about the next episode. What is it we are going to share with our listeners?
For the next episode, we will be looking into what the solutions are, the areas that we know work and that have secure CO2 reduction potential. Where do we need to put our efforts? Where do we need to invest? It’s an investment framework we created for the Danish Green Future Fund, which has approximately 4 billion US dollars in assets under management.
It’s a framework I really like. What we try to do there is act precisely on what you said: most frameworks look backwards. We try to look forward as well. What happens if you have to invest? What happens if you want to grow your business? It wasn’t easy, but I think we came up with something pretty good.
I’m very proud of it, and a lot of people purchased the book. We actually have it right here: Green Future. It’s only published in Danish, of course, Cradle to Cradle. Someone purchased it. That was my mom. And a lot of professional investment folks are actually looking into it and using it as a go-to resource when they encounter difficult questions within the green transition. For that, I’m super proud.
If you’re curious about learning more about what we did here, how we designed the strategic framework for conducting these investments, you should definitely listen.
And I look forward to recording it with you.
Thank you for a good first episode. If you like what you heard, you can definitely listen again. If you want to make it easier to listen again, you can subscribe to the podcast on whichever service you’re using.
Yes, and please feel free to contact either me or Joki on LinkedIn.
We’ll make sure in the show notes that there are links to get in touch with us. We are very curious about your feedback.