What nature means for an ESG director

During this conversation, Julia and Amelia touch on:

• The roles and responsibilities of an ESG director
• Investor interest in ESG
• Challenges and opportunities in ESG
• Governance in ESG
• Biodiversity and Nature Positive initiatives
• Customer and supply chain engagement

Intro: Welcome to Mott MacDonald's podcast Nature Positive: The Inside Story. In this podcast series, our host Julia Baker will be talking to industry leaders and experts about nature-related policy, advisory law, and much more. In today's episode, Julia sits down with Amelia Woodley to discuss what nature means to an ESG Director. So don't forget to subscribe and most importantly, enjoy this episode.

Julia: Amelia, thank you so much for joining us on our podcast.

Amelia: Thank you for the invite. It's lovely to see you.

Julia: Nice to see you too. You now work for Speedy Hire. Can you describe Speedy?

Amelia: So Speedy is the UK's largest tool and equipment provider predominantly to hire to the construction infrastructure sector, but we also support regional construction companies, trade, and retail outlets as well. Think about those big infrastructure construction projects, like High Speed 2 for example, we provide all the tools and equipment to those types of projects.

Julia: So you're the ESG Director, correct?

Amelia: Yeah.

Julia: What do you do for a job?

Amelia: That's a really great question. It's very varied. My role essentially covers all of the environmental and social initiatives for the business. So if you think about climate change and net zero energy reduction, nature, water efficiency, and then we look at the social value elements, moving away from traditional charity and community engagement into inclusive recruitment and social mobility, social hiring. We support underrepresented groups in the community into employment. A big focus around the social value elements. The new part of the ESG role, which is different from your traditional sustainability director, is the governance. I look after sustainability governance for the business, including disclosures, ratings, business transparency, ethics, corporate governance, ESG-linked remuneration, data security, and privacy. There's a whole governance element to that role as well that is essentially the solid foundations that uphold the environmental and social pillars.

Julia: There's a lot of talk that investors, so people who would buy shares in your company, look at ESG equally as well as return on investment. Are you seeing that?

Amelia: Absolutely. I don't think it's probably got to the equal part yet, but it's definitely moved up the agenda. I've been in the industry for about 22 years, and even five years ago, there wasn't much interest from an investor point of view, which was always one of those struggles in sustainability of getting that kind of financial commitment. Now, investors are definitely looking at ESG. It's very dependent upon the investor and their core principles and values. At Speedy, even in the last few months, we've had investor houses reach out to us, asking about our ESG agenda, and doing their own scorecards against us. 

Julia: So they're scoring your ESG?

Amelia: Absolutely. So they'll look at our performance from an ESG perspective. They will look at all public information out in the public domain They use something called a halt database where most of the investors will use this halt database, which essentially scores you on your ESG performance as a business.

Once of the disclosures that we run is called the ISS disclosure. 84% of our investors will look at that disclosure in terms of our ESG performance. We're a prime rates status under ISS and that's really importance because if you're prime status, you go up in the fund manager listings. The conversations from the investors are significantly different to what they were years ago and we're starting to see more investors asking more questions.

We actually had a chat with one of our investors recently where their scorecard to us, which we had a look at and had a bit of a discussion and debate around it. And whilst, you know, financial performance and return will always take priority, they've definitely said that the one of the reasons why they've invested in Speedy is because of our ESG performance as an organisation. That conversation wouldn't have happened over five years ago.

Julia: So it's a fast moving space, isn't it?

Amelia: Absolutely. I think it's really interesting because you get a lead in when legislation changes, but when investors that's faster and you need to respond to that. If I reflect upon my journey over the last 3 and a half years at Speedy, what we've seen from the investor space was questions around net zero. That was huge.

Do you have a net zero commitment? Do you have science based targets? What's your carbon data for scope 1, 2 and 3?

Three years ago we started to see those question. That signals that they're interested in climate and carbon. We started to get more noise around the modern slavery and human rights movement, and we've actually seen more questions in the disclosure over the last year around that particular risk.

Now you're starting to see the trickling of biodiversity really subtly. So things like; do you have biodiversity assessments of your depot and operations? What's the biodiversity risk of your supply chain? Are you aligned to TNFT regulations? So they'll talk maybe around biodiversity, they might talk nature or natural capital. It really depends on how that investor devises that scorecard, but you're starting to get little signals from the questions that they're starting to, kind of pry into those nature impacts now.

Julia: It's extraordinary isn't it. If you look at behavioural change, we need the toolkit and the legislation but as a hire company, it's not like you're building something. For you, the fit is with nature-related disclosures. You mentioned Mark Carney; was that a standout moment for ESG in general?

Amelia: My personal opinion is it was. It goes back to the comment I made earlier and I'm sure you'll share this view. How many times have sustainability people knocked on boardroom doors looking for money, budget, a seat at the table, a discussion point. It's been hard. 

For sustainability people, they've had to drive it through a legislative perspective or if you're in a major infrastructure project it would usually come down through planning regulations and development concern orders. We've never really had a natural 'in' and if you think about the sustainability road, you'll only really get leverage if the flow of money shifts. That flow shifted in the market when those TCFD regulations came out because they asked the investors to look at where the climate risk and opportunity was in that business, and whether they want to invest in you as an organisation.

A couple of years later you had Larry Fink at Blackrock went very big on ESG, and that's been reeled back due to what's happening in the US with the ESG movement. My opinion is if you want to include ESG into businesses, and for it to be successful that flow of money and capital needs to talk to those subject matters. You're starting to see this through the investor community. You're getting signals in the UK from the previous government and our new Labour government, they want the UK finance sector to be the biggest green finance sector in the world. Investors are saying there's trillions of capital that can be unlocked into sustainability-backed businesses and projects.

That conversation wasn't happening 10 years ago. It wasn't on the board agenda because investors weren't putting investors on the PLC board around these issues and these disclosures weren't there. I think that regulation shifted the view of investor risk. There was a great quote from an investor a few weeks ago, I've forgotten the name of the particular investor house but they say 'ESG risk is investor risk'. When they look at a business they'll do all the usual checks and balances around finance, return on investment, all that element of the due diligence but they're looking at ESG as a risk and an opportunity as well. That's a huge shift for the sustainability agenda. 

Julia: I think it related to what we're now seeing, this is nature's moment now. We've worked in this for a long time now, back in the day we were piloting biodiversity net gain on the Thameslink programme, but that was still project level whereas now nature is discussed in the executive boardroom.

What does that discussion look like? What is a discussion about nature at the executive boardroom?

Amelia: I think it's an evolving language, to speak from my perspective, it's been a huge shift in how I've had to communicate with boards as well. If you think about when we would build business cases it was looking at what is the payback? Was it going to cost additional money? Could we do it for no cost or you get some sort of payback at the end? That was really hard for sustainability because you need to be looking at long term investment and whole-life costs that could come back in 20 plus years, but your project is five or six. It was always hard to build that business case and there was always that narrative that sustainability costs money because it does short-term.

When we think about the TCFD regulations and the TNFD regulations, they talk about four things. They talk about; is that sustainability impact embedded in your business strategy? So the connection of a sustainability strategy into a business strategy is absolutely crucial. That's the holy grail for any organisation, that your business strategy is a sustainable plan. It then looks at do you have core governance structures set up to understand and communicate and manage and monitor all those risks from a sustainability perspective. This is outside of having a sustainability working group that's championed usually by the sustainability leader of a business. This is governance at a PLC and executive level.

Julia: I want to highlight the difference between the token gesture and, it was like a stepping stone back in the day, we still have them. They're the champions like the office champions for recycling, but we do need to move on. 

Amelia: Absolutely. I think that governance structure has really changed that narrative because we've all worked in working groups that are sat on the sideline and attended by really engaged, enthusiastic colleagues. You might be lucky to get an executive or senior leader to pop along a few times a year. Not it's around, is that impact embedded through a proper governance framework.

Then it talks about do you have targets, and are those targets smart? Are they embedded within your organisation? Do you have people identified from a roles and responsibilities perspective who are accountable for delivering those targets. Do you have KPIs that will monitor the performance of those targets and track continual improvement?

So you'll go from a place of, if we talk specifically about nature as that's why we're here today, you're going from a place of doing something philanthropic, like tree planting, or something's that's driven by regulation so ecology wildlife regs into embedding nature into a business. That conversations has had to shift into talking about managing business risk. So what is the risk to my organisation from nature? What's the opportunity as well? Will nature impacts open up or close revenue lines to us, which affect the commercial success of our business. Could there be any brand reputation to us in terms of greenwashing, or negative coverage that affects our brand position and our corporate name? 

They're completely different conversations to what we've had before, and we've had to think about risk management not just in the organisation but through the value change. My role is to help manage the risk to the business, it's also about creating revenue. How can I position the business in a way where we can win work, and drive revenue and growth, which then increases your share price and is a return on investment to shareholders. Those conversations are now intertwining and interlocking with each other. We've really had to reposition that whole piece to get boards to understand why nature has a place at the board table. That was so different to years ago.

Julia: What's really interesting about the reputation piece is there's a reputation risk of being silent, like not being part of the nature movement as well. Sometimes people think I'm going to wait, it's too risky, but not being part of the nature voice means you might have missed that investor or the customer sales. It's finding that place where it's a careful talk about nature in terms of your business, not putting yourself at risk by promising too much but you're not missing the boat.

Amelia: It's a balance, isn't it. There's the whole debate of greenwashing and greenhushing and there's so many terms now. As an organisation if you want to continue to be commercially successful and drive revenue, you have to stay ahead of those topics. For us as a business, we use the investor voice and the disclosures as signals as to where we think the market is moving. If they're asking something around nature, we know that conversation is going to come so it wouldn't make commercial sense to sit on that conversation and not move forward, we have to be building it behind the scenes.

There's always the debate around how public do you go? If you've got robust frameworks and you've got your metaphorical house set up then there shouldn't be any worry in going public but I do understand why organisation are concerned because you have the whole movement around over promising and under delivering, greenwashing etc. I think it's a delicate balance of what's your company's appetite for being vocal and visible. It's very different to actually, maybe you build quietly behind the scenes, and that's something for example Speedy Hire have been doing for a very long time. If I think about our net zero strategy, we quietly built for two, two and a half years behind the scenes, getting our house in order before we went public with any statement or any early adopter commitment. When we went public, we were confident that we had those solid foundations. 

It goes back to that conversations around what's ESG. The governance bit is so important right? Investors are interested in governance, and governance is around getting the basics right. Being brilliant at the basics, and getting your foundations in place because that's what gives you the security. If you do go out with a public statement, you know you've got all of our frameworks in place behind the scenes. There's nothing wrong with building quietly behind the scenes and going out when you're ready. 

Julia: When you say governance, what exactly do you mean?

Amelia: Governance for Speedy means different things. For example, do we understand what regulations and disclosures and policies are on the horizon for us? There's so much change in the regulatory and financial markets and the investor markets, even government policy. As a business we have a responsibility to ensure we understand what's coming on the horizon to us because we can't get caught out and that's why things like being an early adopter to TNFD, yes it's because we want to make our statement on nature, but what the early adopter view does for us is allow us time to prepare rather than getting caught in the change. That's very reactive and costly and you don't want to be in the place where you need to do a complier statement. You want to be in a place where you can go, I've got my disclosure and I've been building it for two years.

It's about that horizon scanning and once you've got that, you've got solid compliance to all those regulations and policies. You know what they are, the impact they have on your business, and how you'll respond to it.  We've done an ESG double materiality assessment which looks at what's your ESG risks and opportunities? So your impacts as a business on the outside world, and the impact of the outside world on your business. That's really key for investors and if we think about the CSRD regulations coming in, they want double materiality assessments so we've done that. We know our 15 ESG risks, we know our top five. By having our top five risks we're able to focus effort and if you think about the sustainability arena, one of the things people say is there's so much. I've got to look at nature and water and energy and climate and social value and communities, I don't know where to start. 

What the materiality assessment does is enable you to laser focus where your ESG issues are. Once you laser focus, you can put you time resource and budget into that. If you can get your top five ESG risks aligned and have appropriate controls in place, most organisations are going to be successful. What we found with the assessment is our risks were the same as our stakeholders so we had complete alignment. The things they were worried about where the same things we needed to be worried about. If we can go through and manage those risks for ourselves, and by default our customer, it makes us more commercially attractive. 

That flows down into the value chain, and how you managed that through the value chain, and the output of that is having robust KPIs that you report on and that you're transparent about, and investors are looking for more around transparency of risk, as apposed to a disclosure that says everything is fine. Transparency and trust is key. People are frightened to be fully transparent sometimes. 

Julia: I'm so glad you made that point because I was, we're doing a number of presentations to executive boards, and I was chatting away to someone and she said always tell the board what the risks are. Never tell them everything is perfect because they won't believe you. And that's the same with investors?

Amelia: Absolutely. They would rather know than not know and it you say no, then it's because it's there but you're not fully declaring or you're not looking. That's a real mind shift of going from a place of I shouldn't say anything, to how much do I say that gives them confidence we're managing the risk. All they're looking for is are you managing the risk.

Julia: I think that's important because something like, modern slavery is systematic. You know, we're just operating in a system. I love the work you've been doing on it, I think it's fantastic, so it's about progressing as a society but the risk is there. You're working within a system where that risk is apparent.

Amelia: And there's always a risk in an organisation. And it's about knowing what it is, where it is and how you manage it. You can't eradicate these issues overnight. We've always said with sustainability, there's always a trade off, and we've spoken about that many times over our work together. You think about the biodiversity world, there's always a trade off and it's about working out what the risk of that trade off in to the business. There's no right answer. That's why it goes back to ESG is investor risk. It's all about risk management but the opportunity side then is around how you can unlock revenue. What I'm seeing in my tenure as a sustainability expert is for the first time ever ESG is unlocking revenue. It's always been a bit of this unknown quantum, does it actually dive sales? Will it win you work, it might contribute it might not. It's never been the driving force. I've always said it's the thing
that might tip a decision over the edge, But what we're seeing through public procurement, for example, is that ESG is moving the dial between a business winning work and not winning work. 

One of the key elements for a business being successful of winning work is governance. Confidence in the governance framework.

Julia: To bring this specifically for nature though, if you ask me about the value of nature years ago I would have talked about bees and pollinators and that conversation was so great. I loved that because it brought it home to us as a community that we're so connected to the bees and the pollinators and the food systems and everything. But now the conversation about nature, if you ask me right now, the conversation about the value of nature is one of materiality. 

You know, nature's material to a business, it's material to our economy. It's material to us as a society. How do we answer that question specifically for nature?

Amelia: That's a good one. It's material to the business. Businesses can't survive without understanding what their impacts on nature are. If you think about the climate debate, years ago people didn't believe in it. Now, most people do and there's frameworks in place to manage it. The nature journey is the same, it's moving it from a place of being a nice tree planting activity with a community engagement photo under my CSR banner, into actually making business decision-making.

Businesses can't commercially survive in the future unless they understand the risk and opportunity that they present towards nature as equally as towards climate. What's interesting about the debate is the two not interconnecting just yet. I think we get the climate debate, we get the TCFD regulations, everyone's looking at climate risk. We've got the transition plan task force, lots of investors now and even recently at our half year AGM. One of the questions that we had pre the AGM was do you have a climate transition plan aligned to a 1.5? Wasn't asked that two years ago. 

No one is asking for the nature plans just yet because they're being dealt with in silos. Maybe that's because it's easier to manage conversations separately. When you start to intertwine these topics, they've become quite convoluted and complicated for people to unpack. But the two can't exist without each other and they go hand in hand. That's what we're trying to do around our work at Speedy is, we've done a lot of work around net zero and carbon change, our compliance and regulation and setting our industry leading targets and really pushing the boundaries on that, shifting all of our kits, all our investment now in clean technology. There's been a huge amount of work done on that and it's the right thing to do and supporting all these projects out there with net zero objective, but we need to have the nature conversation. 

Julia: We published the nature positive plan and you are signed up to the TNFT early adopters. Are your customers asking about nature?

Amelia: Absolutely. It's quite interesting because I did a little analysis last week around our customer's net zero commitments. Not surprisingly, all of our top 10 customers have a net zero commitment, but they've also got nature ones, every single one of them in different guises. So it might be a 10% biodiversity net gain, it might be nature positive, it might be nature science based targets, it might be nature in design but they've all got something in there. That's really interesting because it's always been in the background, a rumbling, but no one had any solid targets or objectives around it. We all knew we had to do something with nature but we never had any real mandate to do it. Now our top 10 customers all require some form of nature or biodiversity commitment to their organisations. That also trickles down to us because we sit in their value chain. 

Julia: We talked about biodiversity net gain and then nature positive. How do you describe the differences?

Amelia: They're quite different in the sense of, if I talk from a Speedy Hire perspective, we really had to find our way in this nature journey. Obviously, when I reached out to you to help us on it, my question was, well, we don't really have an impact. We can't contribute to the biodiversity net gain conversation. We can't give 10% back because we're providing equipment. And obviously through the work that we've done together, it's been that evolution of actually understanding that our impact was more around the nature positive movement. So the decisions that we were making as a business and what impact that had on nature. 

If we go back to things like eco kit for net zero, is there an unintended consequence from a nature perspective? We've looked at things like sustainable battery alliance and how we expand that out into the nature movement, looking at then our supply chain, what's their impact into that nature journey and how to they align?

One of my roles is to support the customer because by supporting the customer, I help the business to be commercially successful. And if the customer is signalling I have a commitment on biodiversity and I have a commitment on nature positive, then where doe Speedy Hire fit into that jigsaw puzzle? That's the journey we're exploring at the moment. We've launched our Nature Positive road map by 2030. We've set our principles out again very much aligned around TNFD, around baseline in governance initiatives, metrics, etc. It's really exploring where do we fit within that journey. We may not have a massive direct impact in terms of the type of organisation that we are, but we have some form of impact and it's figuring out what that is. 

We also have a requirement as a business to make sure that we're climate resilient. You only have to look at the news last week around all the flooding that's been happening in the UK, and the detrimental impact that has on people's lives. 

Julia: I was thinking about you because what happens? The roads stop, your business can't run you distribute.

Amelia: We are in some respects a logistic operation. So if we think about extreme weather, it's massively impacted distribution, huge, and to unpick that a little bit more, when you think about climate, a lot of people think about transition risk. So, what's your risk from a transition perspective in terms of the assets we hold? So fossil fuel assets is a transition risk, which is why we invest in clean tech to drive revenue for the customer, but also to manage that transition risk. 

What's probably not as well explored is the physical risk. If you think about heat waves, two years ago, I think we had a 40 degree heat wave in London. It was incredibly uncomfortable. I had to work in my bathroom because it was so hot. These thing affect people's ability to work. If you think about properties, you have to design a property to have optimum heating and cooling, so that heat waves don't affect people's ability to work in the operational aspect. 

And it's the same with vehicles. Cool electric vehicles that people can continue to move around in that heat wave. So there's a whole well-being thing around it. But if you look at the flooding, you've got a whole business continuity risk there. So then how can nature in the design of our physical assets help us be more resilient to climate change in the future? We don't know the answer yet. In this journey its important to be honest and we're trying to explore it. We know it's getting hotter, we know it's getting wetter. We know that's a risk to our ability to operate as a business. How do we look at nature through an operational lens of keeping the business running but also that impact through the value chain?

Julia: What was really interesting for me, when were looking at that conversation, and you've got over 200 depots across the UK and there were some depots that were doing fantastic work about biodiversity and they want to increase biodiversity on their land. If we increase biodiversity in and around your depots, can we do so in a way that helps strengthen the resilience on the depots of climate change? And that was the magic spot in the middle where you move from the initiatives from some of your staff who were really into biodiversity, and brilliantly so, to make that enhancement of nature valuable to our business. That's a big thing to do, it's not a couple of trees around the corner.

Amelia: Not just from a climate perspective, but from a people perspective as well. If I reflect back on our Milton Keynes Innovation Centre, we launched that centre and we essentially put three properties into one. So these were three properties that come to their age in life in terms of building perspective. We wanted to create a really sustainable innovation centre which would be the blueprint of what the Speedy property estate would look like. We put a well-being garden at Milton Keynes, So wildflower planting, nothing fancy. There were bird boxes and there was habitats, the squirrels and one of the depot gentlemen has built a fish pond. So that kind of wildlife garden has taken on its own growth over the last few years. 

But it's so important from a well-being perspective because you think these depots are operational depots. They're in industrial estates that are traditionally lots of concrete and hard standing. They're not in the centre of London with lots of facilities and you know, Canary Wharf, natural spaces, natural gardens now. So it's their little bit of wildlife and their little sanctuary in an industrial estate. 

When we ran a survey of people at Milton Keynes, we did a socio psychological sort of survey where we asked five really basic questions. Are you happier at work? Do you feel you have more purpose? Do you get on better with your colleagues? Yeah, 95% of the responses were yes because they were working in a nicer depot that was clean, optimal heat and cooling. They had a place to go have lunch in the summer that had wildlife. You know, there's a lot of jokes in Milton Keynes around all of our squirrels. We have resident squirrels, and a woodpecker and all sorted, but that's become their little haven. I believe that having a better place to work, which includes nature and it doesn't have to be hugely expensive, just makes the working environment a little bit nicer for people. 

Now if you link that back to what investors are looking at, one of the things that investors are particularly interested at the minute is people's mental well-being in the workplace. And this falls under the whole workers rights elements, right? So how are businesses managing mental well-being in the workplace? Because it's a risk to investors, those subtle little projects, nature projects, just doesn't have to be big.

Julia: The magic of Milton Keynes though, it was the staff who initiated it. They had such ownership of it. We've had a couple of conversations with them and it wasn't like head office came down and built it for them, and that was part of it. It's their nature. 

Amelia: They own it, they manage it, they've built their own fish pond. It's theirs and it's that ownership side of things. 

Julia: To come back to the supply chain, something when we think about nature positive and tracing the impacts on nature back to the supply chain. I'm worried we're going to ask them and they're like, it might be like you're kidding me. You're asking about carbon, modern slavery now nature. It's a way of making sure if you do good things for net zero it can be positive for nature, so it's a way on linking it. Where do you see your supply chain with this, and with Speedy, you're leading the conversation with nature. Is it a gentle introduction?

Amelia: I would say so, we've started the conversation about net zero and carbon. That's a big conversation we've unlocked with 300 suppliers. Nature can be quite complicated. So, I think it's a conversation that will come very slowly for us. We've got a number of priorities with the supply chain. The first is around the net zero and carbon space. We've done a lot of work as a business to make sure we're in a leadership position. We now have a responsibility to understand where the supply chain is and to guide them through that process. It's really important to note 60% of our supply chains are SMEs. They are not geared up for this. Some of them are brilliant, so we really have to think about how we tackle it. 

So our first priority is net zero and carbon. Our second priority is modern slavery and human rights. And our third is nature. What we're trying to do is intertwine conversations where they fit. If we think about the kit, we are investing in a lot of battery technology which is really great for net zero. So now what we're starting to do is saying OK, we know that has a really positive impact on net zero. What's the impact on modern slavery and human rights, how much transparency do we have in that global supply chain where we procure those pieces of kit from? Is there a nature impact? So we're not intending to go out and say you must be nature positive by 2030 like us. What we're saying is, is there something there that we don't know that we should know? And if there is, then what is it and how to we work together to manage that risk?

Julia: There's a couple of things to touch on. You're so right to ask those questions because the risk is we think we're making progress when we're not. We see emissions coming down but down the line the switch to a different technology has an impact on nature. So we're chipping away at the natural environment. I think it comes back to your point about what are the trade-offs and let's make that informed decision making. Secondly, working with SMEs is so important, but they don't have the resources and balancing that and just being mindful of that careful conversation, but we also don't have time to wait.

Amelia: Absolutely and that's an important point you've raised. Yes, it's a careful conversation and we're not in the market to make things difficult for the value chain, it won't work. However, there is a point in time where that conversation has to be less voluntary. There's a lot of noise at the moment around supply chains and SMEs and there is noise in the right places. But my view, I think the supply chain have two years tops to adapt. The reason I say this is because if we are getting this downstream pressure from investors, from government, from customers, but if the supply chain doesn't adapt with us, it affects our ability to work with those asset owners. 

We have a responsibility to make sure that the supply chain adapts quick enough for us to continue to work with our customers and delivery our velocity growth plan, which is doubling the size of our business. The supply chain is absolutely critical to us, and is a risk. We're starting now because I do believe there's about two years to get people aligned. 

Julia: Amelia, thank you. Is there anything important we've not yet discussed?

Amelia: I think through this conversation, it's when we think about climate and nature it's the marrying up of those two topics, how do we deliver net zero and nature positive together rather than what can feel at times two very separate distinct work streams. So for me, I'm really keen to see where this conversation goes, and how we can deliver a nature positive project that also helps us achieve our net zero goals at the same time. 

Julia: Before we go into our final questions, there's something I'd like to ask you. Back in the day, you said yes. You were working on Thameslink and I was trying to pilot biodiversity net gain and I went to see so many people and you were the one that said yes. I've always wondered, why did you say yes?

Amelia: I think that's just my personality more than anything. I've been in sustainability for such a long time and for me, the thing that is joyous to my job is pushing the boundaries. I've always been really open that businesses are here to make money and we should never shy away from that honest fact. And that can be really hard sometimes in the sustainability world. But how we can help businesses be commercially successful through being better in terms of better for the planet, better for society, better for business. And I love that journey of working with organisations where you start off with very little and you go through that whole growth curve of let's do it, push the boundaries, have the difficult conversations. 

When you get to that place where you can look at an organisation, I look at Speedy - Echovadis Platinum, CPDS Minus, Financial Times European Climate Leader 2023-2024 in 3 and a half years, that's because we said yes. 

Julia: From your personal perspective, what is your greatest fear about this time for nature?

Amelia: Because it feels like we can really make ground. I think there are two things which I've vaguely touched on. I think the disconnects So you have climate, you have nature, and now you have it as a disclosure coming our around people, inequalities, they're all interconnected. My fear is that these subject matters stay siloed.