This Climate Business

Imagine being able to bring climate into long-term financial forecasts - not just this year but 100-years ahead. Canopi is the latest climate tool to come from the climate powerhouse The Lever Room. Rebecca Mills is the founder of The Lever Room, a strategy and technology company working across carbon, climate and nature. Rebecca helped build The B Team, the global initiative founded by Richard Br...

Vincent attended the Sustainability Business Live conference in Melbourne recently and met an impressive array of experts and entrepreneurs from Australia and New Zealand - all chasing what one speaker called the triumph of the transition. In the next few episodes we'll meet some of these transition trumpeters. First up, Ben Symons, a senior natural capital advisor with Climate Friendly, one of Au...

Biodiversity credits remain somewhat the holy grail in conservation. Imagine being paid to manage nature - not for farming or mining or fishing - but simply for being , nature. Yet like the holy grail, the promise outshines the reality. Carbon credits have struggled to meet expectations. Various attempts like He Waka Eke Noa and the ETS have failed to link markets to nature. But a new report by th...

Jack Bobo is a food futurist and keynote speaker at E Tipu New Zealand Future Food and Fibre Summit . He argues the food system’s hardest problem after climate is social. We all disagree about what food is, how it should be grown and how it should be distributed. It doesn’t have to be this way. In a wide-ranging conversation, Vincent asks Jack to reflect on the future of food to 2100. Jack Bobo is...

Sustainable transport advocate Kirsten Corson tells Ross Inglis that the war on Iran both exposes our dependence on imported oils and offers an opportunity to move away from them.

Wondering how well we are doing with cutting emissions? London-based climate communicator John Lang runs the ruler over NZ's performance and offers Ross Inglis a take on the maturity of the climate debate here, why institutions matter more when governments duck their climate responsibilities, and quick answers to three top climate whataboutisms.

The outgoing chair of major NZ insurer Tower says climate change is costing lives and money but there are bigger fish to fry before we cut emissions. Ross Inglis asks him to explain.

 What does October's energy policy announcement mean for the future of NZ's electricity market and the climate? Law professor Barry Barton steps Ross Inglis through a package big on fossil fuels and very quiet about renewables. 

Earlier this year New Zealand's first and largest big storage battery began selling into the grid; there are signs that it is already softening prices. So, are we on the cusp of a low-emissions electricity transformation? Climate and energy modeller Dr Jen Purdie tells Ross Inglis that we are...to a point.

Every year the fashion industry produces over 24 billion shoes made largely of synthetics, with little regard for the materials sourced, the wellbeing of the people involved or impact after disposal. Orba shoes are different. Designed in NZ, made from entirely natural materials every part of every shoe Orba makes for the next 100 years will be gone before any synthetic sneakers discarded yesterday...

Auckland builder Paul Webster-Young is turning a new home for his sister into a case study for construction that sends less waste to landfill and costs less over time. The key, he tells Ross Inglis, is careful selection of materials and a new kind of collaboration with architects.

New Zealand's houses have come a long way since the '70s but there's plenty we can do to make them more sustainable. Auckland architect Mike Hartley is designing for less building waste and that, he tells Ross Inglis, starts by talking with the builder. 

Ken Webster is one of the world’s leading thinkers in the circular economy. For eight years, he led innovation at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the world’s leading circular economy network. Visiting Professor, Cranfield University, UK; Fellow, Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. He is the author of The Circular Economy: A Wealth of Flows (2017) and co-author of The Wonderful Circl...

A chubby feline is the star of an awareness campaign for the B Corp certification that says your business is getting real about sustainability. B Lab's Australia and NZ CEO Andrew Davies tells Ross Inglis about fat cats and how B Corps are making progress even in difficult times.

Think Like a Forest is a beautiful short film about NZ’s ngahere or native forest and is now showing on TVNZ On Demand, PureAdvantage.org and soon Air NZ In Flight Entertainment. Produced by Pure Advantage as part of its Recloaking Papatuanuku programme, the film is fronted by Sam Gibson aka Sam the Trapman. Pure Advantage’s Simon Millar joined Vincent for a chat about the film, pines and thinking...

The annual Climate Change and Business Conference is the biggest corporate meet-up on the climate agenda, attracting delegates from industry, politics and NGOs as well as overseas high-noters. This year’s event featured Lord Adair Turner, of UK Energy Transmissions Commission, Wang Xiaolong, the China ambassador to NZ and Cynthia Houniuhi, who led an historic delegation of Pacific youth to the Int...

What would a journalist from outside New Zealand find if they ran the ruler over our current climate policies? Australian writer Royce Kurmelovs has done just that, and he tells Ross Inglis that the answer can be rendered in two words: quiet quitting.

Why is it so hard to invest in nature - not for extraction but for nature itself? We invest in human health. Why don’t we invest in nature health? Well, increasingly we are trying. Nature Based Solutions are embedded in our National Emissions Reduction Plan and in the Climate Adaption Plan - but adoption and action are slow. Just ask anyone trying raise money for conservation, predator control or...

If you reckon our national strategy for reducing emissions is short on ambition, Jessica Palairet agrees. Jessica heads Lawyers for Climate Action which, together with the Environmental Law Initiative, is taking the government to the High Court for a judicial review of the plan. She tells Ross Inglis what's wrong with the plan and how the law can help fix it.

What does it take to build a globally significant clean tech or sustainability innovation from New Zealand? To answer that, you’d be best to talk those already doing it right? That’s exactly what the Next Wave report has done. It talked to 44 leaders of breakthrough innovations to establish the barriers, the rewards and the opportunities for more innovation in cleantech, climate tech, nature and c...

New Zealand's dairy sector has an awful environmental record, but what if we decided to do dairy differently? Iwi-owned Miraka is figuring out how to produce lower-emissions export dairy based on the principles of kaitiakitanga. Miraka's Brendan Haigh explains.

In June, the government announced nine pilots to trial a voluntary nature credits scheme - the closest so far to a biodiversity credit. Led by Act MP and Associate Minister for the Environment Andrew Hoggard, the government says it wants to establish ‘a market that is durable, measurable and transparent to help farmers, landowners, iwi, and conservation groups unlock new income streams for looking...

Everyone’s got an idea for a business at some point in their life. Laura Nixon did something about it. A hygienist, troubled by the volume of plastic waste in the dental sector, Laura founded Solid, which replaces unrecyclable plastic tubes with toothpaste tablets and powder in glass jars. Solid’s product lineup includes the world’s first in-store toothpaste dispenser, and teeth whitener. Solid wa...

Biochar is a much-touted but rarely used carbon-rich material derived from organic waste, great for soil health. Kind of like charcoal it’s the result of slow, anaerobic burning.  But it has not yet been widely tested in perennial tree or vine crops. Until now. Zespri has been trailing biochar as part of new innovation programme. This project aims to assess the impact of biochar application i...

Lee Stewart has written the book on sustainable business...No, actually, he really has! He’s written the e handbook ‘How to build sustainability into your business strategy’ for managers across Australasia. A Kiwi with experience in the UK, Australia and the Pacific, Lee has worked for Fujitsu and Fonterra and now heads ESG Strategies, a consulting company to corporations, and he joins me from a g...