Transcript provided by Kensho.


Lindsey Hall: I'm Lindsey Hall, Head of thought leadership at S&P Global Sustainable1.

Esther Whieldon: And I'm Esther Whieldon, a senior writer on the Sustainable1 Thought Leadership Team

Lindsey Hall: Welcome to ESG Insider, a podcast hosted by S&P Global, where we explore environmental, social and governance issues that are shaping investor activity and company strategy.

So Esther, I'm just back from Scottsdale, Arizona, where last week, a few thousand sustainability professionals gathered in a town in the desert to talk about some of the biggest challenges and opportunities facing the space. I'm talking about the annual GreenBiz conference, which is hosted by GreenBiz Group, and S&P Global Sustainable1 is a sponsor.

Esther Whieldon: Welcome back, Lindsey. So how was the weather? And more importantly, what did you see? And what was it like? I'm guessing it was probably warmer than here?

Lindsey Hall: That was really what I was counting on. That's how I packed, but it was actually freezing in the desert and much colder than back on the East Coast.

As far as what was happening at the conference, it actually got a whole lot bigger since I covered it last year. And over the course of a few days, I sat down with more than a dozen panelists and attendees who came to the sustainability conversation really from all different angles.

In today's episode, we'll be hearing from some big established names like Deloitte, Nasdaq and UPS. I also sat down with the founder of Sustain our Future Foundation, which is focused on environmental justice. And we'll hear from some start-ups like the CEO of climate tech company, Persefoni; and the CEO of forest carbon marketplace, Natural Capital Exchange. We'll be talking about regulation, data, supply chains, environmental justice, talent, there's just a lot to cover.

But first up, let's hear from Tim Mohin. Tim is a Partner and Director at Boston Consulting Group. He's also the former CEO of GRI, that's the Global Reporting Initiative, and International Sustainability Standards organization. Tim has been attending this conference for a long time. So I'm going to let him set the scene for us.

Tim Mohin: This one is special. It's oversold, as we all know, because we have to crowd into these little rooms. But why is that? It's because all of a sudden, our world has become mainstream. We used to be sort of reputational. We're doing good. We're doing the best we can as corporations for people on the planet.

But now after many years of doing that, investors, capital markets, financial regulators have sort of tuned into the fact that this data has financial value. And that has unleashed a whole bunch of interest and a lot of confusion as well. This one is different because a lot of new people have showed up that have been sort of motivated by this coming wave of mandatory financial disclosure, and they're confused.

Lindsey Hall: A lot of that confusion, it's around forthcoming climate disclosure rules from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission or the SEC. And Esther, this pending rule is the topic I think I heard discussed more than any other at the conference. A lot of companies are trying to get to grips with how this rule impacts them.

On day 1 of the GreenBiz conference, Deloitte hosted an SEC disclosure boot camp to address that very question. And I heard from so many people that attended this 3-hour session, just hungry for information. Here's Kristen Sullivan describing the session to me. She's a Partner with Deloitte, who leads the firm's sustainability and ESG services.

Kristen Sullivan: We had, I think, almost 350 participants who had registered. It was standing room only. So I think the big takeaway is that this regulatory preparedness, this rapid shift from what has been somewhat of a voluntary landscape, as we all know, for the past many years, is very quickly moving to an authoritative or regulated landscape, and there's so many implications for companies.

And so we really had the opportunity to conduct a facilitated, a real working session versus sort of these are the headlines or these are the requirements, the how -- really getting into the how you prepare, what are the considerations, what are the trade-offs, what are the choices, how do you really map out a systematic road map in terms of really accelerating your preparedness in the face of what remains some -- there remains some uncertainty in where the requirements will land. So it's been -- it was a really exciting session.

Lindsey Hall: I had lots of conversations with people, and several of them have brought up this boot camp, like so many people, and they've had really positive things to say about it. I understand it was 3-hours long, yes?

Kristen Sullivan: It was. It was.

Lindsey Hall: I've also heard people say that it needed to be longer so that they could get more information. So I'm definitely hearing this appetite for guidance and information when it comes to regulation.

Kristen Sullivan: Yes. Well, and I think one of the interesting takeaway is, which when you ponder it a bit, the -- as we were sort of wrapping up and we were trying to get a pulse on the audience in terms of just to your point, did this help you feel more prepared, this type of a session? And the answer was yes and, at the same time, I'm really scared.

Lindsey Hall: I heard similar sentiments from others at the conference. For example, when I sat down with Kentaro Kawamori, Co-Founder and CEO of climate software firm, Persefoni, here's what he had to say when I asked him about the conversations he was having at the event.

Kentaro Kawamori: A whole lot of conversation about the SEC climate rule coming out. I was just telling my team, I was actually surprised how much people are talking about it. It's pretty clear that internal audit teams and CFOs have been putting this on the agenda that the SEC is supposed to finalize the rule and publish that sometime in Q2.

It's really clear, there's a lot of concern and consternation about what that means if you're a sustainability professional who generally don't have a lot of experience with compliance and certainly not financial disclosure compliance. So that, without a doubt, has been the #1 topic.

Our path is how do we make that as easy as possible for our customers, how do we make that as trusted and as compliant as possible for our CFO customers, right? They want to reduce risk, which is a really alien concept for most sustainability professionals because risk management of the company, investor disclosure and decarbonizing your business, seemingly very disconnected things, but they're all collapsing into one.

We started seeing trends last year that internal audit teams within big companies were sort of flagging this to the CFO specifically as an enterprise risk and upcoming compliance function. I thought that kind of, I guess, it would take a couple of steps back. The SEC put out their proposed rule Q1 of last year, a whole bunch of noise and discussion about that, and then it kind of goes quiet because the rule just keeps getting delayed.

And I didn't think that we would see that conversation pick back up until the ruling gets finalized, which is looking like Q2 of this year. But as soon as that fiscal year flipped, we saw much, much more focus on that than we did in the past. And so now I'm hearing people have dedicated compliance budgets for this activity now, which is very different than the past.

Sustainability teams have always struggled to get budget. Now there's a chunk of it that's sitting in the compliance and CFO agenda, which is for the first time ever, those are really material trends because that's going to unlock a lot of capital and a lot of spend into the solution space.

Lindsey Hall: Kentaro was one of the conference's keynote speakers. And on the main stage, he talked about the fact that sustainability was woven into his upbringing in Germany. I asked him about that when we sat down.

Kentaro Kawamori: You may know Germany has long been the leader in renewable energy and sustainability practices for decades now. I always tell people, if you look at that and post-World War II, Germany was really born out of a lack of resource or scarcity. So sustainability in Germany became part of the culture over the last 50, 60 years, literally just because people didn't have enough stuff, and so you had to reuse things.

You had -- the economy was totally destroyed after World War II. And people were -- during world -- many of my family, for example, during World War II, were living with an extreme scarcity of resources. So sustainability wasn't about protecting the environment at the time. It wasn't about those things. It was literally just being able to persist as an economy and as a country.

But Germany is also a very just environmental -- environmentally oriented country and culture, right? So we literally have a word in German that doesn't -- there's no existing translation for it in English that just means to walk leisurely. And the place you do that in Germany is you do that in the forests. So you do that in the fields. So it's just an extreme -- also coming from an agrarian sort of society and then morphing into more manufacturing-based society, just a really, really critical part of the German psyche.

Lindsey Hall: Okay. What's the word?

Kentaro Kawamori: Spazieren.

Lindsey Hall: Okay. Great.

Kentaro Kawamori: The loosest translation would be like leisurely walking for pleasure.

Lindsey Hall: Esther, we talk a lot on this podcast about data. It's a big part of what S&P Global does. And Kentaro also talked to me about what's on the horizon for data.

Kentaro Kawamori: We're going to go through a period over the next 2, 3, 4 years, maybe the data estate is going to get more complex because we're introducing so many new data sets to it. So you have companies doing emissions monitoring via satellite imagery. You have infrared imagery coming from satellites. You got people putting IoT sensors on stuff. In all these things, people are going to look at and say, we can distill sustainability information out of this.

So we're going to get a lot more complex, and there's so much capital that has gone into green tech and climate tech broadly that the number of solutions is just going to increase. And so you will absolutely go through this period of increased complexity, and then you're going to go through this period of market consolidation.

And the advice I give to everyone is don't, number one, don't expect anything different because many people kind of say, oh, I'm going to wait. It's going to get better. It's not going to get better for some time. And then others get sort of stuck in analysis paralysis. There's 4 or 5 vendors that do this, and I need to go look at all of them, and I need to spend the next 6 months evaluating this. It's just not a good practice. Like just look for the market leaders, look who has the highest-quality sort of peer-reviewed usage.

So I recommend people to use S&P data all the time because most people use it. It doesn't mean it's perfect, but it does mean it's pretty dang good and it's going to get better over time. So I think that's the big advice I always leave to people is you just got to get started. And if you're searching for perfect, you're never going to find it.

Esther Whieldon: Lindsey, I hate to interrupt here, but did my ears deceive me? Or did I hear some birds chirping in the background on that last clip?

Lindsey Hall: That was definitely a lot of birds. We were doing these interviews sitting in this room, overlooking this beautiful garden, full of lemon trees and cacti, and there were so many birds. And in fact, in one interview, which doesn't end up making it into this episode, I was sitting down with folks from global design firm, IDEO. And we had to stop in the middle because the bird noise outside was so loud, we thought it was maybe a woman screaming. So that didn't make it into the episode, but definitely a lot of birds.

Yes. Okay, so back to this idea we just heard from Kentaro that you can't wait for data to be perfect before you act. Well, we've talked about that a lot on this podcast, and it came up in discussions about supply chains at the conference as well. I sat in on one panel that had the title: Carrots, Sticks and Tech: What Works to Decarbonize Suppliers? So Esther, you know I like a bit of interactivity. And the panelists actually came around the room at the start handing out physical carrots and actual sticks at the beginning of the session.

Esther Whieldon: Do you still have any of those things?

Lindsey Hall: I do not. I did not take them home with me. I did not try to get them on the airplane back. But there were also a couple of polling questions during this panel. And one that really stood out to me asked the audience, what are your biggest roadblocks to decarbonizing supply chains? Here, the biggest result, by far, was the word data.

I sat down with one of the panelists from that session, Jared Connors. Jared is part of the regulatory team at supply chain sustainability management company, Assent, where he focuses on ESG and responsible sourcing. He told me that supply chains are getting increasing attention at sustainability events like GreenBiz.

Jared Connors: I haven't missed this conference except for when it wasn't happening during COVID. The biggest change from this event is how much talk there is on supply chain. You go back even just a few years, not even that many before COVID, and everything was talking about internal controls. What's happening in my 4 walls. What am I doing in my local community? You still hear a lot about that on presentations that happen on stage, but more and more companies get into the supply chain aspects.

What's happening that I'm not necessarily -- it's not directly underneath my direct purview, but I'm influencing in what I should be doing to address that and then what transparency I need to gain into those activities so that I can understand the risks and influence what they're going to do going forward and then how I can help shape those organizations of supply chain actors so that they do better going forward.

Lindsey Hall: Okay. What do you think is behind that change?

Jared Connors: Well, there's a lot of things behind that. I think the number one thing behind getting into the supply chain is just a call-out on it, the fact that companies weren't always doing that. You see greenwashing lawsuits that are taking place in Europe and those issues that really are born from the supply chain. You see right here in America in Alabama, just recently, labor rights infractions that are happening in companies, and it's related to some of their labor recruitment firms or their direct Tier 1 suppliers or their Tier 2.

And the number one call-out of companies is not usually what happens in their 4 walls. It's what happens within their supply chain. Companies have always had supplier days with their suppliers. And they'll talk about lead time and cost and quality and all these things at supplier days, and now almost every company that does that is also having an element of sustainability in those supplier days.

Lindsey Hall: I also talked about supply chains with Natural Capital Exchange or NCX. That's a forest carbon marketplace that connects corporations with landowners to facilitate short-term timber harvest deferrals. Here's CEO, Zack Parisa.

Zack Parisa: So my background is forestry, which is sort of a combination of ecology and economics. And I started this company about 13 years ago out of research I was doing to map forests with satellite imagery and ground measurements. Sort of always with this idea that we could use those measurements to create markets and things beyond timber because everybody knows that forests are more valuable than just what you can cut down and truck away, roll away. But we've done a pretty poor job so far as a society of measuring and paying for those.

So really simply, we map forests, and we provide the opportunity for landowners to assess how much carbon they could potentially create by choosing to do different management on their property, to cut less, to grow their forest longer. And through those choices to grow their forest longer, we measure the carbon and climate benefit that, that creates, and we help translate that to a credit that a company that wants to incentivize that kind of behavior for them to pay for that. And so it's connecting the dots between the landscape and these companies that want to effect a positive change in the world.

Lindsey Hall: I asked Zack, what are the main challenges facing the space where NCX operates?

Zack Parisa: For most of these companies, they're trying to understand what their impact is. They've worked on their supply chains for a long time to create the products and services that they do. But when they start thinking about something like carbon, where are those emissions coming from? And how can they, first and foremost, reduce those from within their supply chain? How can they change the way that they work to reduce emissions? And after that, when they look at what is not easily prevented, what emissions they can't easily cut down or exists further out in their supply chain so they can't change it, then they start to look for things like offsets. Who -- like where else can they source reduction or removal of carbon to zero out their carbon emission to create less damage to society.

And so that's -- for us here, it's a conversation around, A) how can they work with offsets effectively; and B) how can they make sure that the offsets they're working with are high quality, that they actually are making the kind of change for the period of time or with like the magnitude of effect that they need to balance these things out.

Esther Whieldon: So you're hearing a big focus on regulation and specifically the SEC's climate disclosure rule. And we’ll include a link in our show, that's the episode we did on this topic. We also had a rising focus on managing and measuring supply chains. And Lindsey, you mentioned some others at the start of this episode. What else did you hear?

Lindsey Hall: Well, I got to sit down with one of our recurring guests, Evan Harvey. Evan is Managing Director at Deloitte, where he specializes in ESG and sustainability. And before that, he worked for many years in the capital markets at Nasdaq. So he comes to the conference from really an investor engagement, stakeholder engagement point of view. I've talked to Evan in the past about some of the ESG backlash we've seen in the U.S. And I asked him at GreenBiz, given that pushback, is he surprised to see the sold-out crowds at the sustainability-focused event? Here's Evan.

Evan Harvey: It doesn't surprise me. We've had a decade or more of time to look at the financial and the organizational advantages of an ESG-positive mindset. So the people who run businesses who use data to drive the decision-making, they see the value of this as a business idea. 

The political aspect of it, the PR aspect of it is a bit of a diversion, but it has not really diverted companies who are into this. It hasn't really diverted the people who are into this deep because this conference, as we have seen, is overloaded with people who are doing this work for companies all across the country and around the world.

So yes, I think there's a bit of a backlash in terms of some of the thematics around ESG, but the underlying business value of using data signals in an innovative way, using a new data to actually manage your company in a smarter, more resilient way, that's an idea that doesn't really require a lot of convincing for people to understand.

There is a stronger connection at this conference between ESG, especially ESG data and people, the impact on people, which is sort of, I won't call it dehumanizing, but in the past, thinking about ESG or sustainability or even the climate as a data problem, whereas a problem that we can manage our way out of it if we just have the right tools.

It somewhat disconnects us from the human impact of these things that we're talking about. And I think this conference is either by way of design or just the people who are here, the large number of people here, everybody is making a direct connection between human impact and what we're doing in terms of climate and ESG performance.

Lindsey Hall: This idea of making a direct connection between human and climate, between the intersection of “E” and “S” in ESG, that was a through line in many conference discussions. And to hear more about this topic, I sat down with Yinka Bode-George. Yinka is Founder and CEO of Sustain our Future Foundation. That's a nonprofit that works to transform sustainability to advance environmental justice and maximize community impact.

She led a special 2-hour session on the topic of integrating climate justice into business transformation. That session was split into 2 parts. Part 1 was all about building the business case internally. And the second part was about what authentic community involvement looks like and how critical it is to achieve climate justice initiatives. First off, let's hear some important scene-setting. Here's Yinka describing what environmental justice and injustice actually means.

Yinka Bode-George: When you think about environmental injustice, you have to first think about environmental health factors. So where you eat, sleep, play, pray, how you access those things, your built environment, your homes, transportation systems, food access, those are what we call environmental health factors. And we know that because of systems of oppression and inequity, communities just aren't developed equally. We know that there exists communities that face so many different challenges, and so their environmental health factors exist in these unhealthy sort of fashions, right?

Environmental justice is really, say, regardless of your social identity, everyone deserves access to healthy environmental health factors. That's the justice piece. So as you can imagine, there's a lot of different things that you need to solve for and innovate around.

Lindsey Hall: The panels Yinka hosted at the conference talked about some of those solutions. We heard big companies like Nike and Microsoft talk about how they partnered with community organizations to integrate environmental and climate justice into their business transformation.

I sat in on that second panel. And one thing that I wrote down, an audience member made the point, when you're talking about engagement, authentic engagement with the community, the time that it takes to build that trust, and she had a point about how the speed of trust is much slower than the typical speed of corporate action. And so bridging that gap and even in time lines, I think, is a really big challenge.

Yinka Bode-George: Yes. And I think one really important thing in addition to that is when you're thinking about doing these programs in the context of this legacy of environmental racism, of oppression, I think a lot of corporations who want to do this work forget that there's this huge context, right, this huge legacy of harm and think they can just walk into a community and say, well, we want to provide a service and we won't even charge you well for the service or we have this great program, it's going to be to your benefit. And community members are just going to trust that, right? I feel like that's not the reality. So it's really important to recognize that you got to do the trust-building work. You have to build relationships. And one of the -- another really great point that was highlighted during the first part is when you have the established relationships, it's so much easier to just mobilize people.

Once an idea comes or a pool of funding comes, if people are already sort of networked, it's so much easier to get work done. So there's sort of like the work that exists outside of a specific initiative, a specific project. That relationship building has to happen just all the time so that people can be ready to mobilize.

Lindsey Hall: Yinka said she saw this undercurrent of environmental justice throughout the conference.

Yinka Bode-George: I have to first say how amazing it is that, at a conference like this, there's like, I think, 2,000 attendees, right? First, we had, I think, 200 attendees for that session, which is amazing. The idea that we can fill up a room of sustainability professionals who are all really concerned about environmental justice and trying to figure out how to operationalize all of these like climate justice principles, I mean that's just a powerful premise.

So that's like, for me, that was a very humbling experience. And I think it speaks to what I've been calling the sustainability renaissance. I think people are getting the idea that environmental justice is not just like this nice to have. It's actually a really central component of winning on the climate crisis and putting forward the most effective solutions to the climate crisis. I think people are really getting that and really seeking the solutions that are environmental justice oriented to make this a reality.

Lindsey Hall: In addition to conversations about climate justice, the intersection of the “E” and the “S”, we also heard a lot of discussion about the “S” in ESG in another way. There was a lot of emphasis on well-being, wellness and also the risk of burnout in the industry. The sustainability world is changing rapidly. ESG is facing some backlash. And with this fast pace of change, a lot of people were talking about how to keep employees engaged and how to deal with burnout. This came up in my interview with Randall Hopkins, Vice President at Nasdaq, when I asked him about what conversations he's having on the sidelines of the event.

Randall Hopkins: Some of the ones that really are also, I'd say, very impactful to me are the ones that are, frankly, tinged with great emotion. People are frustrated or people are overwhelmed or people are -- they have a problem also that they're solving, but they care so deeply to be successful in their role. But they also are really sort of emotionally engaged. And so those are some of the ones that are going to be most memorable for me walking away.

Lindsey Hall: Where are you seeing those kinds of things pop up? Where is that frustration? Where does it sit?

Randall Hopkins: Yes. So I'd say things that have been really prominent are things like the number of regulatory and sort of third-party requests just pile on and pile on and pile on. So it used to be a couple of handfuls, now it's a couple of dozen. And also corresponding to that are the number of stakeholders inside the enterprise that companies are having to keep tabs on to consult, to make sure I'm part of the dialogue, right? So when we think about our workflow solutions, for example, just being able to bring together 10, 20, 40, 60 different views on a question and making sure that all stakeholders are heard and have a chance to contribute to both editorial and approval and sort of content creation, that could be pretty frustrating. A lot of times, the sustainability professional is a very small -- a band inside of the organization, but they may be sort of trying to herd kittens that are in many apartments, many silos, many countries represented. So that's one.

I'd say the other area that we hear a lot about is just the uncertainty of the future, right? We know that there's a lot of big moments in the not-distant future for the industry. And making decisions in an environment of uncertainty can be frustrating, can be challenging when your stakeholders are looking for guidance and leadership.

Lindsey Hall: So I definitely heard about some of the challenges, frustration, uncertainty the sustainability space is facing. And this really extends across sectors. Here's my interview with Elba Pareja-Gallagher. Elba is Sustainability Director of Stakeholder Engagement at international shipping and logistics company, UPS. She described some of the biggest challenges for UPS, and you'll hear her use the term gut-wrenching.

Elba Pareja-Gallagher: I think the hardest challenge is to achieve our financial goals when the technology is still nascent and developing, but we have a lot of pressure from our customers who want to move faster. And so it's just gut-wrenching, right? You want to buy all this cool stuff, but it doesn't fit in the model just yet. And so it really forces us to be innovative and creative and try to find the solutions that we can leverage now while we wait for these technologies to catch up.

Lindsey Hall: And when you say customers want to go faster, do you mean faster on -- like they just want things to move faster, like the trucks on the road, the packages delivered or...

Elba Pareja-Gallagher: They want us to transition faster.

Lindsey Hall: Okay.

Elba Pareja-Gallagher: The customers would love us to have an electric fleet right now. But the challenge is that the current technology doesn't meet our duty requirements. We've got to have vehicles that can go in all kinds of terrain under all kinds of circumstances, and it's just not there at the price that's fiscally responsible.

Lindsey Hall: That's tough. You -- because you have all these ambitious goals and you have, it sounds like, the will from customers and -- but technology is not there, so...

Elba Pareja-Gallagher: That's right. So we're going to get there, right? We're...

Lindsey Hall: Yes.

Elba Pareja-Gallagher: It forces you to be more creative and to find those win-win solutions. For example, partnerships, how can we work with customers who can help us get involved in the technology that we might not otherwise be able to do, but they're willing to partner with us and help us sort of split the bill.

Lindsey Hall: Okay. Can you give any like kinds of examples? Or can you give some more detail about what a partnership might look like for our listeners?

Elba Pareja-Gallagher: Absolutely. So for example, sustainable aviation fuel is one of the areas where we can work with the customers and try to identify some supply of sustainable aviation fuel and then partner together. And we fly the plane with the fuel that they help us purchase, and we share in the carbon emission benefits.

Esther Whieldon: So Lindsey, it sounds like there's a lot of discussion about the challenges facing sustainability professionals.

Lindsey Hall: Yes, but I don't want to end on a pessimistic point and neither did the people I spoke to at the conference. Despite these challenges, there was a lot of enthusiasm and optimism. Here's Tim Mohin, the former GRI CEO, who we heard at the beginning of the episode, one more time.

Tim Mohin: I'm very optimistic. I've been doing this a very long time. I haven't retired yet because I see this as actually the time, the moment that we get to add the financial sector to what we're doing, and we could actually align capital to sustainable business practices in a meaningful way. So that's the moment I think we're at, and I'm super excited about it.

Esther Whieldon: Okay. So Lindsey, this is our last episode this month. And next month, it's sure to be even busier for us here. For starters, I'm taking this podcast on the road in early March to attend CERAWeek in Houston, Texas. This is a massive annual energy conference hosted by S&P Global, and it typically features more than 1,000 speakers, including CEOs, government officials, and it's jampacked this year with sustainability-focused panels. So if you're listening and you're going to CERAWeek, I hope to see you there.

Lindsey Hall: Also, March means International Women's Day. Next week, we're kicking off a special series of episodes where we'll be interviewing women CEOs from around the world and across industries. So please stay tuned. 

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ESG Insider and a special thanks to our producer, Kyle Cangialosi. Please be sure to subscribe to our podcast and sign up for our weekly newsletter, ESG Insider. See you next time.   

Copyright ©2023 by S&P Global  


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