Speaker 1: In my 25 years in industry as an environmental engineer and a sustainability consultant, I have seen sustainability and ESG, environmental, social and governance issues, become basically nothing more than a sales and marketing tool. I came out into industry as an environmental engineer, one of the first environmental managers in the UK construction industry, and we started making really meaningful change on waste, on energy, on pollution. But gradually over those years, I have seen sustainability just used like the way it was used at COP26. I was in Glasgow for the two weeks, I was in the conferences, and I was absolutely horrified to see CEOs sitting up in conference sessions, talking about how they were the solution to the climate crisis. And that we could avert planetary disaster simply by buying more of their stuff. In fact, I stood up in three of those separate sessions and disrupted the meetings to challenge them because I was so horrified by what I was hearing. And the complicity of these organizations in our environmental destruction that we're struggling with today. ESG reporting is a massive problem. The FTSE 100 earlier this year reported that five of their top ESG rated companies included the world's top plastic polluter, a coal mining giant, and a tobacco company. These enormous polluters are investing huge amounts of money in responsible initiatives, but these are not touching the genuine impact of their business. They're simply navel-gazing token projects that create a polish, a kind of green sheen that obliterates the view of their genuine negative impact on the environment and society. Another report this year also showed that the highest rated ESG companies pay significantly less tax than their lower rated peers. There is something fundamentally wrong with the way in which we are assessing, measuring and reporting on ESG. So, what can we do about it? As I say, I've been in this industry for 25 years and become hugely dispirited. My epiphany came in 2018 when Amazon was on fire. The Blue Planet series was showing us the impact of humans on the oceans. We were looking at the IPCC report of 1.5 degrees, which told us we had only 12 years before we hit catastrophic tipping points in the environment. And I realized that my profession had failed, that in the time since I was born climate change has entered a catastrophic point. I needed to do something completely different. And so my business now is founded on the principles of disruptive sustainability and I'd like to share some of those principles with you today. So the first one, change only matters if it's meaningful. Now we find in corporates this obsession with change, reporting on incremental changes. We saved 5% of our resources. We reduced our emissions by 10% last year. To which the answer is, so what? Is it meaningful or is it just change? We need to look at our past performance, that's true, to really understand our impacts. But the climate and ecological emergency demands that we look at the global context of what we're doing and assess ourselves against that standard. So how do we do that? You'll probably be familiar with these sustainable development goals. These were created and published by the United Nations in 2015. Their aim was to be achieved by 2030. A very ambitious aim, but we shouldn't be afraid of ambition at this point. You can see there are 17 goals there. Now, businesses love this. You'll see in all sorts of ESG reports reference to the SDGs. But the way that we like to use them is to say to businesses, look, this is not something that is separate from your business. This is your business. Every single thing that you do as an organisation is represented in this chart. HR, accounts, training, operations, procurement and so on, all fits within this structure. In fact, there was a beautiful moment last year when I was working with a really big client who previously had thought sustainability really wasn't for them and they just wanted a little workshop. We went along and talked to them, to their leadership team, and I saw the moment when the penny dropped and they suddenly realised and said that they were going to rip up their business plan and completely rewrite it on the basis of the SDGs. And that for me is like solid gold. That's what I live for is that moment. Because they got it. And this is another thing about disruptive sustainability. So often we have an individual sustainability manager or a volunteer committee in an organisation who are unpaid, they meet in their lunch breaks and they come up with suggestions. Or a sole sustainability manager who is charged with coming up with a plan to change that business's impact. That is absolute nonsense. It is not possible. We must take the leadership of the organisation and we must ground ourselves in financial reality because a business that cannot be financially sustainable will go bust and it does not matter how much good they do in the world, they will not be able to succeed. Which brings me on to my next point. Normally the way when we talk about sustainability is organisations say, yeah, yeah, that's all very nice, it's all very noble, we all agree we should do it. Now let's just get back to our normal jobs and you get on with doing the sustainability plan. Now there is something in here about money. But what we need to explore as an organisation is the difference between financial sustainability, which is covering our costs, and we enter this exercise understanding what the costs are that we have to cover in order to keep our business going and separate that from our desire for growth and profit. They are two completely different things. Growth and profit are important for our organisation, but they sit as a single goal alongside the other goals dealing with health, poverty, equity and so on. Now once we've taken a look at economic growth, we can then dive into the other SDGs. So if we take for example climate action, clearly the most pressing issue of our time. The traditional way to look at improvements would be to look at past performance and then set maybe a 10% improvement on last year's performance. As I mentioned before though, we need to look at the global context and there is a mechanism for doing this across all of the SDGs. Looking at science based targets, so what is our impact, what is our contribution towards the global issue of climate change and what must we achieve in order to be aligned with the Paris Agreement and keep global warming below 1.5 degrees centigrade. That's a really unusual question for a business to ask because that might present quite a scary answer. But again we shouldn't be afraid of ambition because research shows us that ambitious targets deliver better results, especially when people have no idea how to achieve them. It drives creative problem solving and innovation and it helps us identify and reward those people who go above and beyond and are able to pull in their colleagues to collaborate on delivering those goals. And this is something that we desperately need. We're struggling as well with a mental health crisis in our workplaces. These SDGs can help us to deliver a shared sense of purpose, a deep collaboration across our businesses and move away from function based jobs like accounts, HR, health and safety into purpose driven outcomes, like really looking at how our work impacts on the climate, what impact we have on poverty, perpetuating and creating poverty in our communities and so on. My next point is something that I feel most corporates seem to have forgotten. We are not used to now in the corporate world telling the truth. Now I'm an Extinction Rebellion activist and this is one of our three core demands, tell the truth. We're so used to justifying, minimising and keeping the boundaries of what we observe and measure within our office walls, we're not looking out into the communities about the greater issues that our business has on our communities and on our environments. And it is really essential that we and our leaders act with humility to really understand our place in the economy and wider. We must be honest about our true impact, but we also need to be honest about the things that prevent us from achieving our goals. Because I think this is where a lot of greenwash comes from. We live in a system now that makes sustainability more expensive and so businesses are struggling with a lack of good environmental regulation, of good social policy that means that they can all compete on a level playing field. We're asking businesses to voluntarily do the right thing and thereby increase their costs and essentially cut their own throats being uncompetitive in this financial marketplace. So it might be easy to throw up our hands and say well there's nothing we can do about that. But that's not what we do with disruptive sustainability. We say no, change the system. If the system does not allow you to run a financially sustainable business and do the right thing, then you need to identify those barriers and you need to take them to the decision makers. Because those people sitting in our councils and sitting in Westminster, they're not engineers, they're not people in industry, they don't understand the issues that you're facing and they don't necessarily understand the complex web of regulations that prevent you from doing the right thing. So we need to come together with our trade associations, with our professional institutions, with our colleagues in different organizations, potentially even our competitors, to identify what those blockers are that stop us from doing the right thing and being able to run a financially sustainable business. Which brings me to my final point. I've learnt through my legal action against the UK government last year on the point of climate change. Our leaders are not really leaders and it's easy for us to sit here and think they will lead us out of trouble. The truth is our leaders are followers and we need to step up and show them what it will take to get our vote. What it will take for us to support them. We all need to step up and make sure that our leaders lead us out of trouble. Thank you. Thank you.