Enlightened leaders: Beverley Gower-Jones OBE
CategoriesSustainable News

Enlightened leaders: Beverley Gower-Jones OBE

Beverley Gower-Jones is Managing Partner of the Clean Growth Fund, CEO of business incubation consultancy Carbon Limiting Technologies and an independent member of the UK cross-government Net Zero Innovation Board. We talk to her about accelerating the rate of net-zero innovation.

Interview

“We have a broken investment ladder. Entrepreneurs and CEOs spend all their time trying to raise funding instead of focusing on their business plans.”  

I’m sitting down with Beverley Gower-Jones at the London Climate Technology Show, and we are surrounded by the hum of founders and attendees busy networking at the various stands in the exhibition space, looking to make connections and secure business. The Clean Growth Fund stand – where Beverley is Managing Partner – has been busy all day. Unsurprising as its focus is to empower early-stage entrepreneurs with ‘expert capital to tackle the climate crisis’.  

“What we need,” she says, “is a joined-up ‘escalator’ that connects early-stage funding and money all the way to Series E and beyond. All that time that’s wasted fundraising adds three to four years to maturation, which is time we don’t have.”  

Beverley is uniquely placed to comment on the urgency of the need to get to net zero. She received an OBE this year for services to Net Zero Innovation. A geologist by training, she started her career at Shell in the mid-80s, rising to become a founder and Vice President at Shell Technology Ventures where she was instrumental in defining Shell’s technology-venturing strategic approach. 

“I remember having a heated debate with colleagues at Shell about whether we would be known as living in the ‘age of communication’ or the ‘age of pollution’. I was so strongly on the age of pollution side, and voicing it helped me to decide that I wanted to do something about it. I’m really grateful to Shell because the things I learned in the 20-odd years I was there was all about the energy industry and that knowledge really influences the way I think about the energy transition, and it is a transition. 

“It also taught me about commercialisation.” She stresses: “An idea has to be commercial and economic for a business to be able to invest in it and for it to be successful.”  

Both the IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report, published earlier this year and the recent United Nations stocktaking report highlight the fact that we already have innovative solutions with potential, but there is a lack of financing to scale them. Earlier in the day, during her talk Beverley stated that “Return on capital and return on carbon are the same thing – we only reduce greenhouse gas emissions if these technologies scale beyond our wildest dreams.”

The struggle to scale

So where are the blockers? “One of them is in the institutional investors in the pension funds not investing in specialist fund managers like the Clean Growth Fund. They tend to do what worked the year before, so a lot of that money goes internationally to listed funds where they know there is more certainty because there is a proven track record. It’s about talking and explaining the business case for investing in specialist fund managers that are looking to do sustainability investments. 

“Other barriers are the timelines of some of these investments – they’re quite long. Nuclear fusion, wave or tidal…They need consistent funding over a long period of time. It’s not a government solution – government has a role to play but the private sector has a serious role to play as well in making that change.  

“It’s about having multiple funds, and multiple types of funding at different stages. Some companies need a hybrid fund where they need equity into the core company, but they need debt to build the factory or process line or whatever it is. If you try and build a huge plant with equity it doesn’t work, it dilutes your founders and you can’t make the returns that you need to make. But building the first of anything is a risk.”  

Beverley also has universities in her sights. “We our universities need to do more – they’ve always had teaching and research at the core of their charters, and now they need to have commercialisation at the core of their charters too, with a process in place to spin that research out.”

She’s impatient for the impact of clean technology innovation to be felt. “Being a geologist by background and a scuba diver, I can really see the deterioration of the planet and it really bothers me. I was never patient, it’s always ‘faster please!’”  

But she is optimistic. “I am optimistic, I think we have to be. We do some amazing things when everyone gets together. There’s nothing more powerful than a set of individuals who decide to march together. If you look at the Mori polls, climate is one of the top three things that people are concerned about. Consistently. So it’s risen up the agenda. 

“The fantastic innovation that I see from entrepreneurs gives me huge cause for hope. There are so many solutions and opportunities.”

And here at Springwise, we get to see these new, amazing solutions every day – take a look at them here and stay tuned to hear from more inspiring individuals like Beverley.

Words: Angela Everitt

Learn more about the Clean Growth Fund: cleangrowthfund.com

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Enlightened leaders: Eleni Myrivili – Springwise
CategoriesSustainable News

Enlightened leaders: Eleni Myrivili – Springwise

Eleni Myrivili is the Global Chief Heat Officer for UN Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, which facilitates more socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities. It is currently active in more than 90 countries to promote transformative change through knowledge, policy advice, technical assistance and collaboration.   

In addition to her role for the UN, Eleni is a senior adviser for resiliency and sustainability to the City of Athens. She was an elected official in Athens for a number of years, pioneering work on heat adaptation before becoming Chief Heat Officer for the city in 2021, a position championed by the Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation.  

We spoke to Eleni two weeks into the devastating heatwave affecting Greece and other countries around the world, and ahead of a weekend where temperatures in Athens could reach 45 C…

Interview

“It doesn’t seem to be ending and we are talking about 40 degrees, 41 degrees, 44 degrees…And I hate air conditioning, I don’t have it in my home – and I work from home.” Eleni is talking to us via video call from her home in Athens, and while the white walls and comfortable looking white sofa suggests a cool environment, her face tells a different story. “It’s just unbearable.”  

In her TED talk from last year, she signs off by saying, “Cranking up the air conditioner is just not going to cut it.” Indeed, air conditioning and fans account for around 20 per cent of global electricity consumption, and contribute around 1.95 million tonnes of carbon emissions annually.  

“I’m working together with the Cool Coalition led by UNEP to put together a pledge on a national level that has to do with active cooling and how can we make sure we don’t end up with thousands of air conditioning units throwing our mitigation goals out of the window,” she says.  

Eleni is a passionate advocate for the need to reintroduce green spaces, planting, and areas of surface water to our urban environments, which all promote passive cooling. “Landscape architecture I think will change the world,” she laughs. It’s a moment of light relief. The conversation is taking place while wildfires continue to devastate the countryside surrounding Athens and the heat indoors is clearly debilitating.

The strategy

To try and cope, the city is implementing strategy that Eleni put in place. “There are three different pillars with actions that have to do with awareness, preparedness, and redesigning the city.”  

A big part of the awareness pillar centres around categorisation of heatwaves. “It is an important thing and an initiative that we have tried in a couple of cities, but it’s something that all cities should try to do,” she says.  

The categories are not set by a central body, such as the World Meteorological Organisation, rather each city categorises its own heat. “What you do is gather data from decades prior to now – temperature and other parameters such as humidity, winds, and atmospheric pressure to create the typologies that usually form the air masses that sit on top of your cities. You then check mortality rate data and see which typologies make the mortality rate peak. It allows you to create an algorithm that is very specific to your city.  

“So now we are doing five or six cities in Greece – they each have their own algorithm because they all have their own relationship between heat and health. I hope the formula we use will soon be open IP – The Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation is exploring how the IP can be opened up so that different universities can use it.” 

The different categories from one to three offer an estimated number of excess deaths that would be likely due to the extreme heat. Human health can be affected by heat in a number of ways, both physical and mental. In the vulnerable, it can be fatal.   

As part of the preparedness pillar, categorisation allows people who work with vulnerable groups: the elderly, the very young or the homeless, to share information with them that will keep them safer in the heat, to ensure that they are being checked on, or taken to cooling centres.  

It’s ultimately the third pillar, redesign, that will have a longer-term impact on how people are able to live and work in cities in a world where temperatures continue to rise. But the challenge there is a financial one. Eleni is clearly frustrated: “The budgets countries have for cities is miniscule. The maximum amount a country can get from the climate change Adaptation Fund is around $20 million and how many cities does a single country have?”  

She sighs “Who knows? Maybe these crazy heat waves, now that the whole northern hemisphere is under extraordinary heat conditions… Maybe this will create the momentum we need to have something move forward fast in terms of adaption funding?”

Let’s hope so. Funding will be on the agenda at the upcoming COP28 conference in Dubai (30 Nov to 12 Dec). We will be publishing more on how cities and societies are innovating to mitigate for and adapt to extreme heat, and the role Chief Heat Officers are playing, over the coming months in the run up to COP28.

Words: Angela Everitt

Reference

Enlightened leaders: Simon Mundy – Springwise
CategoriesSustainable News

Enlightened leaders: Simon Mundy – Springwise

“Why don’t people want to read books about climate change?” That was what Financial Times journalist Simon Mundy found himself wondering a couple of years ago. “People have this impression of it being very heavy, abstract, and difficult to engage with,” he explains. “But I knew that behind the headlines must be some incredibly powerful and compelling human stories.”

So, taking a leave of absence from his job, Mundy started travelling all over the world to find these stories. Two years, 26 countries, and many COVID-related quarantines later, he published Race for Tomorrow – a book about the global fight against climate change.

During his travels, he met not only with those suffering the consequences of environmental decline, but also with innovators working to tackle the problem.

For his book, Race for Tomorrow, Mundy visited 26 countries to meet those suffering from environmental impacts

When did you first become interested in sustainability?

One of the first stories I covered as the Financial Times Mumbai correspondent in 2016 was the droughts in Marathwada, India. When I met the farmers and saw the empty reservoirs and cracked floors, it hit me for the first time how severe the impacts of climate change already are. Before that point, I’d viewed it as more of a slow burn that would come home to roost in a serious way decades from now. In that moment I could see that wasn’t the case.

How does innovation hold the key to halting the climate crisis?

We’re fortunate to have seen incredible innovation already over the last 20 years – from electric cars to renewal energy sources. It means we now don’t have the horrific choice between shutting down the economy or heading for planetary disaster. Innovation has enabled a miraculous third option, which is to develop a greener economy using technology. And the latest advances in innovation are making solutions even more feasible.

Which area of innovation do you think is most promising for making a real difference?

Carbon sequestration is very exciting, particularly what Reykjavik-based Carbfix is doing. For millions of years, the basalt under Iceland has been sequestering carbon dioxide dissolved in water, turning it to limestone through a natural chemical reaction. And while scientists had assumed this took place over centuries, Carbfix has discovered that when carbon dioxide-rich water was injected into underground rock formations, 95 per cent of it became stone within just two years.

To get the carbon, Carbfix works with Climeworks, which was set up by two young, German engineers based in Switzerland. They’ve built machines that can suck carbon dioxide out of the air. Taken together, these technologies could make it possible to put the carbon cycle into reverse at an industrial scale.

What’s the craziest innovation you’ve come across?

Lab grown meat is such an interesting area. In 2021, Israeli company, Aleph Farms, raised $105 million in a Series B funding round. It grew out of scientific research by Shulamit Levenberg, a leading academic in the field of cardiac-related research. After she figured out a way to grow human cardiac cells to treat people with heart disease, someone suggested to her: ‘what if you could do the same with animal cells to make meat?’

While other companies in the field are producing a sort of minced meat, Aleph is trying to create muscle – an actual whole steak. And they’ve done it – albeit at a very small scale and at a very high cost. There may be people who find the idea of this ‘frankenfood’ uncomfortable, but it’s hard to deny it’s better for the environment. We don’t need to worry about methane emissions from cows, or the rainforest being cut down to make more room for farming. It’s also healthier because your ‘meat’ isn’t full of antibiotics. Plus, you don’t need to worry about animal welfare.

What other solutions do you think could be gamechangers?

People aren’t paying enough attention to fusion power – and it’s coming more quickly than we thought. Did you know: one kilogramme of fusion fuel can provide as much energy as 10 million kilogrammes of fossil fuel?

To find out more, I met with a company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is based at MIT in the USA and has recently raised $1.8 billion from investors. I had a tour of their operations and was amazed by their fusion reactor. The temperature within that reactor when it was switched on was 100 million degrees Celsius – which made it the hottest point in the solar system. I found it extraordinary that this technology is being developed and raising $1.8 billion in funding – clearly it’s now reaching the point where serious investors are getting really excited about the potential of this stuff.

What’s currently holding back sustainable innovation in the business world

There’s lack of a sense of urgency, and a certain distance from the impacts of climate change. Fundamentally, the people making the decisions at a high level for big companies tend not to be personally exposed in a very meaningful way to the impacts of climate change.

Now, having said that, I do think that they have other sorts of pressures on them – from investors, from customers, from the wider public, and from regulators. Business leaders feel under pressure to show some progress when it comes to their climate footprint. But it’s still not fast enough. And I think if we all had a greater connection with some of the sorts of stories that are featured in the earlier parts of my book, I do think that would help to give a greater sense of urgency.

What advice do you have for business leaders about innovation and sustainability?

First, businesses can be very powerful voices, for good or bad, in influencing the direction of policy and the evolution of the wider economic system. Secondly, long-dated targets are not enough. Business leaders need to provide detail on what their plans are for the near term, for the next year, and the next five years – and have their focus there. Otherwise, businesses can rely on vague and long-term targets.

What advice would you give to innovators about making an impact?

Of the companies I visited, the ones who seemed to me to be doing best were those that had spotted a gap in the market and created something truly original. I was also struck by the scale of their ambitions. They all talked in very grand terms about the potential size of their business and the impact they could have. And I think that’s appropriate. Because when you look at the scale of the disruption that’s happening, and consider the epochal shift in the global economic system, it’s right to talk in terms of unprecedented growth.

Innovators in this space should think big because this is a historic moment. We’re talking about the end of the fossil fuel age of human history. It’s an unprecedented point in human disruption. Companies that find the opportunity and the right space can achieve something extraordinary.

What can Springwise readers do about climate change?

While it’s important to keep thinking about how to address your personal carbon footprint, I think we emphasise that a little bit too much. We should also look at what contribution we might be able to make to change the wider system. Because that system level change is what will be so important.

Do you feel optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

Both is the answer. I’m much more keenly aware of the scale of the problems, which are profound and wide-ranging. But I’ve also been blown away by the ambition and the brilliance of the innovators I’ve met, and the work that’s been done to tackle these problems. While I’m deeply concerned about the path that we’re on, there’s no space for resignation. There is so much that we can still do to improve the situation.

Simon Mundy is the author of Race For Tomorrow (William Collins). He has also reported for the Financial Times since 2010, most recently as Moral Money Editor – covering the push for a cleaner and more sustainable world economy. To find out more about Simon and to buy the book, visit simonmundy.com/book

Interview: Hannah Hudson

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