NEW PODCAST: On this latest episode of How to Build a Better World, I talked to Mathew Nelson – the Oceania chief sustainability officer at EY – about what’s getting big Fortune 500 companies ticking on the climate question.
The conversation was full of surprises.
For someone at the big end of town, leading the sustainability team at a company that’s 300,000 strong globally, Mat was remarkably down to earth and happy to share practical insights into the big questions around our transition to low or zero carbon and what’s getting in the way.
Clients are larger businesses – ASX200 listed, NZ 50 listed or globally, fortune 500s – all big household names like BHP, Santos, Origin Energy, Mirvac, Stockland, and CSL.
That larger reach – coupled with the fact he’s been at the company for 20 years – means Mat’s able to see the broader trends in the ESG and climate space.
And he sees the needle starting to move in the right direction.
“We’re at a tipping point, and things are about to happen,” he says in this laid back podcast that – warning – lasts for around an hour.
“In 2020 we hit a point where there was a significant momentum shift… we started seeing real traction globally, traction locally, that this is a topic that needed to get focus. Even despite Covid that momentum has continued.”
He says we have all the technology now, right this minute, to make sure we limit warming to1.5 degrees Celsius, but what we don’t have yet is the commercialisation.
That old commercialisation thing. How many times do we hear Australia is the most brilliant at some technology or other only to see this country unable to fund whatever is needed for the invention or innovation to reach scale?
Mat says things will change.
He likens acceptance of the deep work we need to do in climate with the five stages of grief model; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. We’re finally at acceptance, he says.
“There is globally now acceptance between governments and businesses as well as the community more broadly – that we have a problem that needs to be resolved, and the next step in the journey for us is that we need to mobilise around the actions that will enable us to respond to those challenges.
“There is quite a lot of appetite for the investor community to jump on board with that process… but it’s nowhere near the pace that we need at the moment to minimise the impact of the challenge that is facing us.”
To give the finance world the confidence to make the investment happen, we need strong policy and framework that provides certainty for capital, he says.
That and the will and determination of us all, which is there in abundance.
We can see it in the massive take up rate of electric vehicles.
We can see it in the phenomenal way that Australians adopted solar power – with gusto – and led the world in that technology.
We need to both underpin the demand and elect the governments we need everywhere, so that they have the confidence to take on the challenges and not hold back in trepidation, wallowing in the mire of uncertainty and insecurity.
Have a listen. You’ll get a lot out of this podcast.
The Fifth Estate’s podcast How to Build a Better World is available on all streaming platforms. Click here to listen.