Transcript provided by Kensho.

Lindsey Hall: Hi. 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, an S&P Global podcast, where Esther and I take you inside the environmental, social and governance issues that are shaping the rapidly evolving sustainability landscape.

Esther Whieldon: In recent episodes, we've been bringing coverage of Climate Week NYC. This is one of the biggest sustainability events of the year, bringing together thousands of stakeholders for more than 900 climate events across New York City.

Lindsey Hall: If you listen to our coverage from the past 2 weeks, you know we talked to a lot of people, CEOs, standard setters, politicians, nonprofits, corporations, financial institutions and more. 

And one theme that came across loud and clear in almost every conversation I had was that in order to solve the climate crisis, you can't stay in your little echo chamber working alone. You need to work across the aisle. And we covered this idea some in the past on this podcast. It's a really nice high-level sentiment in theory, but what does it look like in practice?

Esther Whieldon: The theme of Climate Week this year was "It's Time." And that speaks to the sense of urgency to address climate change in the near term. It also speaks to the need to cut through the rhetoric and find concrete solutions. So that's what we're going to attempt in today's conversations, concrete examples of what collaboration across silos looks like.

Lindsey Hall: To do this, we'll sit down with a guest from asset manager Schroders and from one of the world's largest telecommunications companies, AT&T. First up, though, I sat down with two climate scientists who are working to break down barriers. One is Terry Thompson, Chief Science Officer at the S&P Global Climate Center of Excellence.

Terry has been one of my favorite guests on the podcast in the past, and I'll include a link to those episodes where I got to talk to him about our shared love of ballet. The other guest is Kevin Reed, and I'll let him introduce himself. By the way, I sat down with Kevin and Terry at the Nest Climate Campus, where ESG Insider was an official podcast during Climate Week NYC. Okay. Here's Kevin.

Kevin Reed: My name is Kevin Reed. I hold a variety of hats these days, which makes my day-to-day life very fun. The first and foremost is I'm a climate scientist at Stony Brook University, where I'm a professor. I'm exploring how extreme weather like hurricanes change with climate change. I also am now the Chief Climate Scientist of the New York Climate Exchange, which is a brand-new nonprofit that's based right in New York City that's helping to both ideate scale solutions related to climate for not only New York City, but really beyond.

And then I have also the great fortune of being the Associate Provost for Climate and Sustainability at Stony Brook University, where I'm helping the university think about how we can give better experiences for our students in these areas around climate sustainability because they are the ones that are super passionate about changing the world in the future and how do we give them the right skills they need, but also just to let them fly and help create the green world that we want.

Lindsey Hall: In addition to those roles he just described, Kevin also works with the World Climate Research Program, which uses international science coordination and partnerships to address the most pressing climate challenges facing society. So I asked him, what are the most pressing issues?

Kevin Reed: And what we're hearing a lot about is interactions between climate scientists and experts in the area of green energy, renewable energy, grid resilience as well as on the physical side of climate, actually discussing directly with utilities, having conversations with communities, thinking about topics like climate intervention. And so a lot of what I'm hearing is that the world is now really, really ready to start to figure this thing out. And I think that Climate Week is this great convergence of all of these different industries starting to think about what some of those pathways and solutions are.

In my own work at Stony Brook University with my research group, we focus a lot on trying to understand how extreme weather events not only will change in the future but have changed already because of climate change. The reality is the world has warmed by over a degree Celsius, right, over 2 degrees Fahrenheit. That means our weather has changed already, which means we are already dealing with the impacts of climate change.

And a lot of what my group does is try to quantify those impacts so we can better translate the changes that we're experiencing to different sectors, whether it be to help informing policy, help inform urban planning, help to inform the actual cost of climate change now, not just in the future, but what it's costing us right now. And this is a new area of science. It's referred to as typically event attribution aspects. And a lot of what we're trying to do is we're focused on hurricanes thus far, which is important right now.

Lindsey Hall: This conversation was timely because during Climate Week NYC, Hurricane Helene was bearing down on the Southeastern United States.

Kevin Reed: Every time this happens, it brings the dialogue to the forefront of did climate change impact that event. And what our group does is we try to quantify the ways in which it has.

Lindsey Hall: I pose the same question to Terry about the most pressing issues he's dealing with in his work.

Terry Thompson: I would say that the most pressing issue is to integrate across scientific and economic disciplines to create a more seamless and fault-free communication among the disciplines, sharing of data, ensuring that the models, the specialized models that are used in the different disciplines are making consistent assumptions when they're applied.

There is an improvement in the silo situation. There is erosion in the barriers, but there's a lot of work that needs to be done to actually reach at a working level, a collaborative level, intimate interactions between a climate scientist who specializes in tropical cyclones and an econometrician who specializes in creating regression analysis that links economic indicators like GDP to underlying climate variables. I'll leave it at that. That's an example where we need more communication.

And also an exciting front, which both Kevin and I are hearing about here at Climate Week is, of course, the integration or the linkage, I should say, of physical climate and natural systems and bringing what we know about the physical climate to bear upon impacts on natural systems, on ecosystems and possibly on ecosystem services as an instantiation of what ecosystems are from a human perspective, which is not to exclude the rest of the natural world.

But there are ways of including in ecosystem services, the value that we place on wildlife, the value that we place on experiencing other species, there are ways of valuing that as well. In any case, this linkage is a new frontier, which has its own very interesting intellectual, scientific and ethical components. So that's a new thing and exciting.

Lindsey Hall: I asked Kevin and Terry to explain further the links between climate and nature. Here's Terry up first.

Terry Thompson: In a certain sense, the link between physical climate and nature has been apparent to us when we think about what's the impact of increasing temperatures on crop production in a particular region. I view the further linkage of physical climate and the natural world as to deepening, I mean broadening those relationships. When we talk about the ecological behavior of a particular system that filters water, we may be talking about microorganisms or actually a food web of organisms. So this is not unlike thinking about impact on crop production. It's just that a greater level of awareness and detail, breadth and depth.

Kevin Reed: Yes. Maybe just to add to what Terry was saying is that I think a lot of the experience thus far at Climate Week is a little bit of this cross-pollination, right, between the financial industry, between kind of start-ups that are focused on tech solutions and a little bit of science. And even within the science community, when we think about climate system science, earth system science, there's already silos amongst those that study the physical climate like myself, and those that are focused more on kind of the biodiversity and ecosystem aspects.

And that when we start to think about the -- I think, the connection or the link between climate change and health, we really need to think about -- it's not just human health, it's planetary health. And part of that is the health of all of these type of ecosystems because there -- a lot of these ecosystems are the nature-based solutions to climate adaptation, to climate resilience that we need. And so trying to bring that more to the forefront, I think, is critical when we start thinking about a greener world in the future.

Lindsey Hall: During Climate Week NYC, I got to moderate a panel at IBM with the CEO of the New York Climate Exchange. That's, again, the nonprofit where Kevin is Chief Climate Scientist. And the idea of collaboration and partnerships was a big focus in that conversation as well. I asked Kevin to elaborate.

Kevin Reed: Very much our mission at the New York Climate Exchange is focused on breaking down those silos that exist. So the New York Climate Exchange is a really unique partnership between academia, industry and community-based groups, whether that be environmental justice groups that are focused at the neighborhood level, all the way up to larger nonprofits, let's say, that are focused on different types of solutions or workforce development or labor unions or chambers of commerce.

And it's really ensuring that everybody has a voice at the table when we start to think about what are the solutions that New York City needs, what are the solutions that the world needs. And they can't just be academic and industry constructs and partnerships that way, that you really need to co-develop the solutions with the community groups that are going to need to use the solutions.

Because the worst thing we can do at this stage as now the climate scientist in me, again, I'll say we're over a degree warmer already, right? The worst thing we can do is develop solutions in academia and industry, that community groups that doesn't meet their values, doesn't meet their cultural needs or their community needs. And so we will have wasted a little bit of time on the development of solutions if they're not going to be able to be used. And so it's really important to have everybody at the table. And that's a big part of what the New York Climate Exchange is trying to do.

Of course, these things take time, right? When you are building relationships with different sectors, when you're trying to break down those silos, this isn't, hey, let's have a workshop and then we're all going to come out of it with the same opinion of things, right? It's about fostering and developing relationships that won't just last years but will last decades. And so that's a big part as well of what the New York Climate Exchange is trying to do is to foster those partnerships in a very real way.

And ultimately, a few years down the line, we're going to open a net-zero campus right on Governors Island, 5 minutes south of Wall Street on a ferry that's going to be this global and city hub for all types of things when we talk about solutions to climate, but also when we talk about climate science or the impact on the financial sector or the energy sector and to really be a go-to place for these type of conversations and provide it a home in the long term.

Terry Thompson: I'd just like to follow up, Kevin. The way I view the world, communities have, in addition to the need for solutions, they have fears. And so my question really is, will your organization or your activities also help address the fears. People fear change. They fear change, particularly when it may have an economic impact on them personally.

Lindsey Hall: So it's bringing together financial institutions and companies and the academic community and the scientific community, the different parts of the scientific community, and also the citizens who make up our communities, it's a lot. It's a kind of a daunting challenge. We don't want our listeners to feel overwhelmed or discouraged. So maybe you can give an example of if you've seen this work well anywhere? Like anything you can point to where you're like, yes, this is good, effective collaboration. We want more of that.

Kevin Reed: Well, let me start, and it's going to be a totally different topic, but I think it will exemplify, I think, what the New York Climate Exchange is trying to do. And I think it will put it into a context that connects, right? So first and foremost, I'm a professor. And so one of the New York Climate Exchange first programs was the launch of a climate solutions internship experience for undergraduates.

And so just this past summer, in 2024, we launched the first cohort. And what we did is we brought students from different academic partners within the Exchange to New York City. And once they were here, we partnered them with some of these community-based nonprofits. And so the students got this experience all summer where they brought their skills that they've learned at their home institution, whether that be -- some was accounting, engineering, architecture, environmental science, and they've learned how they could apply those skills directly with a nonprofit that might be focused on arts and culture around climate or focused on workforce development around climate solutions and needs.

And so it was an opportunity to show you can take a very technical background like accounting, and you can bring that to New York City, and you can work with a nonprofit that's really focused on enabling climate communication, for example. And so this is an example, I think, though, of how you can break down these silos, very modest, right? We had 11 students but imagine if we could scale that to hundreds every year. And then you'll have those people that when they start their careers, they already know how to talk across disciplines, and they can actually activate earlier in their careers about helping solve the climate crisis.

Terry Thompson: So on my side, part of the charter of the Climate Center of Excellence inside S&P is to foster collaborations externally and internally. So a good example of success is that we've established a very good relationship with the World Climate Research Program. We are mutually attending conferences and forging ongoing research and development relationships, as Kevin mentioned, that we hope will last years.

Lindsey Hall: Terry also noted S&P Global is collaborating with the World Climate Research Program to jointly sponsor a research workshop in November 2024, and that will seek to address the linkage of physical, economic and financial models and data. In our interview, Kevin also pointed out that siloing can be a challenge within organizations, too.

Kevin Reed: When you think about breaking down silos to have these type of collaborations, it's not just breaking down silos between institutions. It's many of our institutions have the siloed nature within them. It won't surprise maybe any listeners of podcast that universities are extremely siloed, right? And so a big part of what we're trying to do is that at Stony Brook is to acknowledge that, yes, you have folks that are working on climate in environmental science, atmospheric science departments, but you also have people working on climate in the college of business, in engineering, in the humanities.

And how do you also help to foster those type of collaborations because that is one of the first keys in order to actually effectively work with other institutions around some of these topics as well. And ultimately, right, I think it's because climate and the impacts of climate just are cross-cutting against all disciplines at a university, all sectors within large corporations. And that's a big part of the challenge around really kind of advancing the solutions that we know already are out there.

Lindsey Hall: Honestly, I think that's part of why we've seen our podcast audience grow so much. It started off with just people with ESG or climate or sustainability in their job title. And now everyone is thinking about sustainability in some way, shape or form. Climate change impacts every business, whether or not you've got it in your title or not.

So you're touching on some really important points, and I really appreciate you sharing your perspective with our audience today. We heard from Kevin and Terry about some of the ways climate scientists are working to break out of their silos and work across disciplines. We heard a lot at Climate Week NYC that this kind of collaboration also needs to take place in other settings, for example, between the public and private sector.

Esther Whieldon: That was one takeaway from my conversation with Marina Severinovsky. Marina is Head of Sustainability North America at asset manager Schroders. When we sat down at the Nest Climate Campus, she highlighted just how much she had been hearing about the need to engage policymakers.

Marina Severinovsky: The biggest thing that's blown me away entirely is the amount of discussion about policy advocacy and engagement with policymakers. Like literally in every session I've been to, like everywhere there's a panel, what do we need from governments?

And it's interesting because last year here at Nest, I hosted an event, which was about the nexus of climate and nature, and we had intentionally invited people from kind of government or kind of quasi-government entities in Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. And that was my message is you have to go first. We need the policymaking in place, and then that's where private capital can really thrive behind that. I wasn't hearing it as broadly last year, but this year, again, at every event, it's this kind of like ask the policymakers.

Esther Whieldon: We'll be hearing more from Marina in an upcoming episode about climate finance.

Lindsey Hall: The role of policy and enabling the energy transition, it came up in a lot of my conversations. This is a big focus of a mainstage panel I moderated with two speakers. One was Dr. Vanessa Chan, Chief Development Officer for the U.S. Department of Energy. She's also Director of the Office of Technology Transitions.

And Shannon Thomas Carroll was the other guest. He is Assistant Vice President of Global Environmental Sustainability at telecommunications giant, AT&T. And this was a really interesting discussion to me because AT&T has teamed up with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, and the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory to launch a climate risk and resilience portal for U.S. communities. I sat down with Shannon for an interview right after that panel to hear more about AT&T's approach to partnerships as well as climate and data.

Shannon Thomas Carroll: I lead our global environmental sustainability program. What that means, practically speaking, is some of the traditional environmental stuff you think of water, waste, circular economy. But I spent a lot of my time developing and executing our climate change strategy. So particular focus on mitigation and adaptation. When we talk about adaptation at AT&T, we're really thinking about network resiliency. We have a large network, physical network in the ground that is susceptible to extreme weather events.

So we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how do we use climate data, be smart, integrate it and protect our network against the future impacts of climate change so we can ultimately serve our customers. We are very committed on the mitigation side as well in terms of reducing our emissions. There's a lot of work that we do there. At a high level, we're obviously trying to take care of our own emissions first. We have a carbon-neutral goal by 2035, which is really important to us. We also do a lot of work within our supply chain to help our suppliers reduce their environmental impact and their emissions specifically.

Lindsey Hall: A lot of our listeners will know the name AT&T, but a lot of them won't necessarily have thought, oh, yes, this is why you would think AT&T and you would think climate. Like what's the connection? Can you just draw that a little more clearly for us?

Shannon Thomas Carroll: Absolutely. I like to say with some regret that our environmental sustainability program is a best kept secret. And we do a lot of work. On the climate side, again, it's really about the two sides of the coin, mitigation and adaptation. On the mitigation side, it's reducing the emissions from AT&T. When you think about AT&T as a network provider, ultimately, what we do is provide connectivity. It takes a lot of electricity to do that. So making sure that we have good, reliable energy, including renewable energy.

AT&T is actually the fifth largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the United States. That's really important for us. So making sure we have access to energy period, but also renewable energy is really important. We also spend a lot of time thinking about how do we transition our fleet, right, to low and no emission vehicles. I say low and no emission vehicles because I think we need to be ready to take advantage of whatever technology is out there, whether it's EV, hydrogen or whatever it is, and we're prepared to do that, and we put a lot of time thinking about that.

On the resiliency side, there's really two things, two major things we do from that perspective. One of it is just internally, right, is how do we keep our network, the physical parts of our network. So think of a big central office, the square building in the middle of a neighborhood or all those little green boxes you might see in a neighborhood, how do we keep those when they're not going to be impacted by extreme weather. So think flood, think wildfire, things of that nature.

So we actually use climate data to make climate informed decisions. So when our engineers on both -- for both our fiber and wireless side, when they're going through determining where they're going to put new parts of the network, they actually get a climate risk score now, really simple, really easy for them to use, and that helps them make determinations either to site somewhere else or if you're going to site there, make sure that we prepare the site for those weather events.

So imagine that they go in there, they get a high climate risk score. They do a little more research. It says there's going to be 2 feet of flooding. We have to have something there because that's where our customers are, but we can now build around that to prepare for that flooding. And that's a lot of what we do.

We've done so much of that internally that we quickly realized we need to share this data. And so we do a lot of external climate resiliency work as well. We work with the DOE, Argonne National Labs as well as FEMA. We've launched a public climate portal we call ClimRR. Right now, the main target audience is really city planners, hazard mitigation planners for local municipalities, but we really want to get the word out. So anybody who wants access to good climate data can have that access.

Lindsey Hall: I asked Shannon to describe AT&T's work with the government. By the way, Argonne National is a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory.

Shannon Thomas Carroll: We knew that we needed to get the best available climate data to make climate informed decisions. And 6, 7 years ago, there wasn't a lot of climate data, usable climate data publicly available. What I mean by that is you would get a climate data that would cover 100 kilometers or a region. You get one point and that piece of data covered a large geographic area. Well, that's not really any good for a network engineer. A network engineer needs to know at a neighborhood level. So we had to go out there and figure out how do we get access to neighborhood level data.

And so we did our research. We ended up working with Argonne National Labs. They have some of the best climate data available. They're able to get it to what we call neighborhood resolution data points. And now we use that and integrate that in a few different ways. One of the most simple ways is we just integrate it into one of our mapping systems that a lot of our employees have access to so they can just see visually how the climate is going to impact us in the future.

I say in the future, how climate is going to impact us, really now and into the future because it's not just a future event. And then the other thing we've done is just more practically, we've put that data into all the different workflows that make sense for the different people that do different jobs. So again, think of a wireless network planning and designer. They need to figure out where they're going to put that new tower, where they're going to put that new node.

And there's lots of factors that they have to look at, including reliability. Well, now one of those factors is a climate risk score. So they get a climate risk score on wildfire, on drought, on inland flooding, on coastal flooding. So now we're able to make those informed decisions. And our belief is that doing that work now will allow us to have a more resilient network in the future.

Lindsey Hall: This question of how do you get different stakeholders collaborating is really important. You talked about the work you're doing with DOE and Argonne. What are some of the other collaborations that you're involved with?

Shannon Thomas Carroll: This is an important one because our Chief Sustainability Officer, Charlene Lake, often says, this is an area we need to collaborate, not compete when it comes to climate change in particular. As you've heard me say, it doesn't do us any good to be climate resilient in a vacuum. We need everybody to do that. So collaboration is key.

I think there's lots of ways to collaborate. One of the simple ways for us is through industry groups. These industry groups are really important because you're bringing what would be competitors otherwise into kind of this safe environment to talk about these really important issues. I think just individual collaboration with other companies is really important. Obviously, public-private partnerships are going to be really important. I mean, essentially, that's what we're doing with the DOE and Argonne National Labs. We talked a little bit on stage the importance of also working through incubator type facilities.

So Rocky Mountain Institute, Third Derivative, where they're bringing these small businesses that are looking for funding, but they have cutting-edge climate technology, they're connecting them with corporate investors and others to try to foster that technology so you can get it to scale because, again, one of the things we talked about on stage is the big challenge is getting new innovative climate solutions that you can scale. And that's a really, really big challenge.

Lindsey Hall: Okay. So we're talking about this question of scalability, some of the challenges with that. And I thought it was really interesting what we heard on stage from both you and Dr. Chan, this idea that nobody wants to be the first mover. Nobody wants to raise their hand and say, yes, I'll try out and invest in this new unproven technology first. Tell me more about how AT&T thinks about that.

Shannon Thomas Carroll: So the challenge with that is there's -- regardless of the entity that you're looking at, there's a finite amount of capital right? And there's lots of folks competing for that capital so they can invest that money into different things. And just look at a company like AT&T. So our sustainability team, for all the right reasons, right, we're going through the same business case planning. We're going through the same arguments for ROI that everybody else in the company is going to finance or the treasury because we all want to get that money and to invest.

Part of how I solve for that is there's occasionally what I would call a common sense business case to be made. And I think that's a very powerful thing. I think what has been around for a long time is risk management, right? So again, I'll just point to the climate resiliency work. And how we did that when we talk to leadership, we obviously informed them of what we're trying to do. But it's really hard to get an ROI to say, hey, if we invest in this climate data now, we're going to get exactly this much money back, but we can make some estimates, right, some common sense kind of estimates and present that in a risk management, risk mitigation kind of format, and it makes sense to leaders.

I think the other challenge is, again, that competition for capital is you may have five really good things to do, even on the sustainability side, and eventually, you have to pick. If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. One of the things that we've done again is collaborate with industry groups, collaborate with different kind of incubators. I think that helps because if you invest a little and hopefully get a lot in return on that, that's ultimately the way that you want to go.

I think there's other ways to be a first mover as well. And one thing that I want to mention and the work that we do on the mitigation side, the emission reduction side is we are going all in on what we call Smart Climate Solutions. We have a public goal to reduce our business customers' emissions by 1 gigaton. AT&T has a carbon-neutral goal by 2035. And you know what, a lot of other people have carbon-neutral and net-zero goals as well.

So we're determined to prove out transparently in the public domain that using our network and our services will actually reduce your emissions. So we do a lot of, again, what we call Smart Climate Solutions work. And so we -- that sometimes can be easier because you're investing internally and it's sometimes people hours and person hours as opposed to the capital. But so I think there's lots of different ways to invest. It doesn't always have to be capital intensive. You just have to get creative.

Lindsey Hall: So we heard today quite a few examples of working across disciplines. Climate scientists are quantifying the impacts of climate change and then the crucial next step is to translate that information and communicate it in a way that can help impacted sectors make better decisions or help inform smart policy.

Esther Whieldon: We also heard about the importance of thinking creatively to find solutions to the climate crisis and the need to scale those solutions. These are both topics we'll be covering again in upcoming episodes about technology, AI and climate finance. So please stay tuned.

Lindsey Hall: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ESG Insider. If you like what you heard today, please subscribe, share and leave us a review wherever you get your podcast.

Esther Whieldon: And a special thanks to our agency partner, The 199. See you next time.

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