Episode 047 | March 13, 2023 | 24:47
Guest: Kristoffer Hvidsteen (Green Innovation Group, Director)
Published: March 13, 2023
Duration: 24:47
Description
The Sustainability Marathoner is back. Decarbonizing Healthcare is all we do here at Green Innovation Group. In this episode we welcome our new team member and previous podcast guest, Kristoffer Hvidsteen, who is joining the Green Innovation Group team. This episode is about his journey in sustainability and why he is so keen on decarbonizing the healthcare sector with us.
Full transcript
About this transcript
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Hello and welcome to the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast. In today’s episode we are welcoming a new team member to Green Innovation Group. It is Kristoffer Hvidsteen, joining us as a director. In this conversation I try to tease out what excites Kristoffer about being part of Green Innovation Group, what is it about decarbonizing the healthcare sector that excites him, and what has taken him to where he is today. He has a lot of experience from the consulting industry and from the financial sector. He’s been working with sustainability since basically before anyone was working with sustainability — he did his first carbon accounting in 1994.
Hello Kristoffer, welcome to the show. Thanks for taking the time to put me into the sauna before we got here. This episode is all about welcoming you to a little more than just the podcast because you have joined Green Innovation Group as a director.
I was born in 1972. That was the year of the Stockholm Convention, the first time the world gathered to decide that climate and environment broadly is an issue we need to tackle together. To me it came on the back of 1968 where you had the Earthrise photo from one of the Apollo missions. That was the first manifestation that this is a pretty unique place we are living in. The fact that no other planet looks this way means we better take care of Planet A. That has been the red thread in my career — I have always cared about how we develop as a society and how we manage these more difficult issues.
I was out being an entrepreneur for a couple of years. We were reusing large household appliances — instead of buying new, buy a reused one that we have upgraded and repaired. Which was gratifying and interesting, but also tough and rewarding in terms of lessons. There is a willingness now in the market that is very different from before.
I started out in the public sector where I did a greenhouse gas accounting in the early nineties, which was early days. Now, almost everybody is taking this on board, finally. After almost 30 years it took to just understand the impact, right? Now the next wave is going to be: how do we address it? Because what I see across the board is there’s a lot of need to understand how, even Scope 1 and 2, what on earth are we going to do? Scope 3, oh my God. We are still kind of in awareness, but we are not in literacy yet.
The preceding days, when I was in Deloitte or Accenture or the World Bank, it was a matter of just getting a place at the table. Saying: this is an issue. For sure if we move beyond that — luckily — it is not a question of if, it is more a question of how now. And that is nice.
What is different now is that it is a different kind of dialogue. We used to spend an inordinate amount of time discussing if. Right? Making the business case, just to get a seat at the table. Now the conversations are much more interesting and rewarding because we are actually moving stones. We are talking about how to, which are the most important things to address. That is a much more tangible discussion.
I’ve even seen on LinkedIn a lot of posts around what are the right qualifications for a sustainability consultant. What kind of educational background, what kind of experience should you have? What is proper consulting in sustainability and what is not? I found some affinity to that — I have been doing this for so long, and now a lot of people are coming in. But reflecting on it, it is a straw man. We are consultants. If we are good, we are good at problem solving. This problem is big and it needs all of us. It is not going to be solved with a few highly specialized folks who feel they have the only answer. The solution is making everybody a sustainability consultant — every role today is a sustainability role.
The enormous joy I have of joining Green Innovation Group is that you have given yourself and your clients the privilege of being specialized — you know this industry, you know this sector, and decarbonization. It is a very clear message. Clients are able to jump straight in without having to get to know the sector first.
What is the common challenge for decarbonization of the healthcare industry? What is especially prevalent in pharma and healthcare is that when you talk about formulations and the products that are there, they are locked in for so long. So once you have set the design principles, in life sciences there is a quite significant lock-in effect. You have to be mindful of how you manage that whole R&D process and clinical trials. Multiplied by your target group size and 30 years — it really is dramatic the difference that makes.
The second big ticket item is that life and health quality is something we as humans like — and we spend an enormous amount of our resources committing to it for obvious reasons. So health is just growing in significance. Already five percent of global emissions, and rising. Rising because it is so important for us to have life quality.
On making sustainability strategy operational: it is still early days. Defining the problem and defining the solutions feels rather new. How do we break this down into procedures, into processes, who should be doing what? You see this development where it often starts centralized and then certain functions adapt certain things. We are still not where it is massaged into every job description.
I am an economist by trade. What I tell my kids is: if you can do math, do math. I love engaging people, but I also love sitting with a spreadsheet — it feels a little bit like solving a murder mystery looking at the numbers. What is the business case about? We know the effects are these. Understanding the size of them — what is more important, how do they impact each other, what is the correlation. Putting numbers to that can be a revelation. Realization around packaging comes from sizing it up — oh my God, this was much more important than we maybe actually thought. You are much better at allocating your resources once you understand the value at stake.
Thanks for sharing a bit of yourself Kristoffer, and welcome to the team. Thanks for listening to the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast.