Sustainability Isn't a Dirty Word: A Conversation With Sustainable Business Expert Lee Stewart

If you're old enough, you might remember Cody Iron Eyes, the iconic Native American who appeared in an equally iconic TV public service announcement.

Standing by the side of the road, a car rushes by as a hand thrusts trees through its open window, landing at Cody's feet.

He looks up as the camera closes in on a single tear streaking down his cheek.

The Crying Indian, as the bit came to be known, seared its way into the console televisions racing the shag carpeted living rooms of the 1970s, reminding us not to litter and to keep America beautiful.

The message seems straightforward enough.

Indeed, for decades after its airing, I thought it was.

I took its message to heart.

People cause pollution.

People can stop it.

But all was not as it appeared.

To begin with, Cody Iron Eyes was not a Native American, though he apparently portrayed himself as one throughout his career in TV and movies.

His immigrant heritage came across the sea from Italy.

The ad presumably appealed to environmental stewardship and was produced by the non profit Keep America Beautiful and the Business Friendly Ad Council.

Keep America Beautiful is still around in its website.

It's all the right buttons.

It has its origins in the early 1950s, founded by the American Can Company, Owens Illinois Glass Company and later by Coca Cola.

With the growth of post war boomer town consumption and single use convenience, big business saw the writing on the wall.

Too much attention on the expanding effluent of their operations, means, regulations and public scrutiny.

Better to remind the bleeding heart public of their own responsibility.

People start pollution, people can stop it.

The ad worked on all levels.

We felt the pain of Cody ironize.

His tear and roadside litter did in fact decrease.

And the consumer goods sector learned to deftly shift responsibility for the ravages of unrestrained industry on individuals and consumers who face a daily barrage of advertising that entices them to consume more.

A vicious circle feeding the machine.

It was arguably the birth of greenwashing, or at least one aspect of it.

Keep America Beautiful's internal documents and industry messaging make clear that the campaign's fundamental objective was to, and I quote, generalize responsibility and universalize guilt.

Classic hallmarks of greenwashing.

All these years later, the circumstances have changed, particularly in our supercharged misinformation juggernaut.

But the song remains the same, a playbook rooted in opaque motivations, deceptions, distractions and untruths.

Ah, but we must not succumb to cynicism despite decades of misdirection.

That's the ultimate danger of modern greenwashing.

We know it's there and thus assume.

That any talk of sustainable business is.

BS and given what I've just described, it's understandable.

But it's not the whole story.

We live in a decidedly non black and white world and blame shifting feeds this us, them either or mindset to the point of Keep America Beautiful's psa.

If reducing roadside litter distracts from systemic changes, then pollution and unsustainable patterns of production and consumption continue even with less litter.

All this makes the work that much more challenging and urgent for an authentic effort to guide businesses big and small to take their environmental and social responsibility seriously and communicate that effort transparently.

If you look closely enough into the churn, you will find authentic actors fighting against the greenwashing and green hushing efforts that are so apparently prevalent in today's business world.

There are dedicated champions working in corporate sustainability and one of those committed individuals is Lee Stewart.

My guest today on Global Warming is real.

Lee is the author of how to Build Sustainability into youo Business Strategy and has been in the trenches founding, leading and pushing other business leaders to think sincerely about sustainability.

Beginning, in my opinion, by getting past that single word sustainability so often bandied about in marketing departments to the point of rendering it meaningless.

As he says, we've been talking about it for 20 years.

So much time spent touting your motivation as doing it for our children reflects a shadow of the tears streaking down the cheek of Cody Iron Ives.

Lee cringes when he hears yet another business person talk about doing it for our children.

Yeah, of course we are, he says.

That's a given.

What are you doing?

Get on with it.

It's enough talk.

Sadly, he says, I've gone to so many conferences where they'd say the same stuff 20 years ago.

The only difference is there's more people in the room.

But what are you actually going to do tomorrow?

Lee's mission is to get people from talking in rooms to taking authentic action in the real world.

His expertise in practical triple bottom line business practices spans decades and continents, working throughout Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan and New Zealand.

He's launched startups, consulted and served as head of sustainability for major corporations such as Fujitsu and Fonterra.

Lee launched ESG strategy in 2022 where he assists boards and senior leaders in developing their sustainability and ESG roadmaps.

He offers his services pro bono to the Kingdom of Tonga, a low lying island nation threatened with climate driven sea level rise, providing strategic advice on sustainability, circular economy and climate change.

Lee's insight and engaging style help us all understand how business, industry and civil society can get past the talk and the misdirection and the blame shifting to realize that sustainability and triple bottom line economics, people, planet profit, are in fact more than a marketing buzzword, but a worthwhile project in a crowded, climate changed world.

Let's join our conversation as Lee and I get acquainted and get down to business.

In California in the Monterey Bay area.

Yep.

Oh, were there fires there?

No.

So Monterey is about 120 miles south of San Francisco.

Okay.

All right.

And the LA fires are farther south, but we've had our share of.

Not, knock on wood, not so far this year, but we've had our share of fires around here.

Yeah, there was a big one here in 2019.

Where.

That's right, you guys have gotten.

Where it just felt like Sydney was under siege.

You could just.

You're watching this app and you're seeing the fires pop up and it was a ring of fire around Sydney.

It was for like a month.

There was one day In September of 2020, right before we moved.

We lived in San Francisco for nearly 30 years.

And right before we moved down, we woke up one morning and the sky was orange.

Yeah.

And it stayed that.

It was like midnight.

It's not eerie, isn't it?

Yeah, it's pretty strange.

Yeah.

Anyway, yeah, it's good to talk to you.

You have quite a resume.

Sustainable business.

Yes.

Yeah, thanks.

Do you want to walk us through just kind of a brief synopsis of your work and career?

I grew up in New Zealand, so love for the outdoors.

Environmental protection is part of who you are.

Growing up as a Kiwi, especially in the countryside a bit and, and most Kiwis, by the time you get 20, 21, you need to travel, you need to get out of the place.

Because we're quite small and traveling, you know, brought me to Australia, but also brought me around Southeast Asia.

And I got to see firsthand how what humans are doing to the place.

It really, it wasn't good.

And so I was sort of thinking, I had a good job in finance and telecommunications.

I was thinking, oh, how do I re engineer myself to try and do good but still get paid well?

Because I still want to live well and I love travel and I've crafted my resume and to look at working in sustainability and corporate sustainability.

I did startups for a number of years in the early 2000s where I develop online education around sustainability, e learning courses and so forth.

And that sort of got me into all the conferences and I learned off so many great people.

There weren't any courses around then of what sustainability is.

And I was very fortunate enough to land a corporate job.

I had to swap my T shirt and jeans for the suit again because I got married and had a young family.

So the sort of lumpy cash flow of a start startup wasn't ideal.

So I had to suck it up.

But I was so fortunate.

I got a role at Fujitsu, which is a global IT company, and was head of sustainability for New South Wales, and then got Oceania six months later.

Really.

And that was a lot of work around energy efficiency and data centers, but also looking at technology enablement.

What could technology do to help reduce emissions, create better environmental outcomes?

And really worked on some great projects where I helped environmental organizations find endangered species in the bush using early stages of AI and drones and things.

That was really cool.

Then was in the global team, helped them get set net zero targets and renewable energy things and introduce all the frameworks and reporting and so forth and dealt with customers.

That was a real key issue where I was very different to other sustainability people I'd work with.

Our key clients, such as you might know, Qantas was one Australia post.

We all delivered big IT equipment to them.

But I would go in there and say, well, if you move to us, we'll reduce your emissions because our IT equipment's more efficient.

Plus, here's your biggest emission sources say Qantas was jet fuel.

If you move away from pilots carrying all these 30 kg of flight manuals and they carry an iPad, what would that save you?

And we worked out that 1kg of less weight on a plane was equivalent to $5,000 worth of jet fuel throughout the year.

Really?

Really?

That's so 30 kg of a pilot you stole days apart.

We're running with their manuals because they had.

Which plane am I on?

We all put that on an iPad.

We've got all the CASA approval, the aviation approval, so they could use it in the cockpit.

And that saves them a few million dollars a year in fuel costs.

So it's those types of things which were really, really cool to work on.

Where you look at what's your customer's biggest problem?

Where can technology play a role?

Where can greater conversations happen around that?

So that was really cool.

And then I worked in consulting for a bit that was really, really interesting.

Cause I really love the diversity of consulting.

You're jumping around different industries and things.

And then sort of recently, just over five years ago, got tapped on the shoulder to go back to New Zealand to take up a role with Fonterra, which is big dairy, which is the largest.

Yeah, the largest company in New Zealand responsible roughly about half the emissions and methane cow methane was the big issue.

So, yeah, fortunate enough to work with some very smart people and help set up cross government industry fund to help with methane mitigation.

Worked on some global bids and Nestle is a major customer and so forth.

Really, really cool.

Great to go back to New Zealand for a few years, but then I decided it's time to go out of my own and I needed the headspace.

So I went and started my own consultancy, ESG Strategy, but set aside the year to finish my book, which I've just completed late last year.

So it's been quite good.

I'm out on my own now.

I'm sort of the chief virtual sustainment officer for three companies at the moment, like a large utility, a hotel chain in the PAC and a retailer.

So it's keeping me very interested and I'm looking to build a small team that does good things.

Really.

When you first started, was there a lot of pushback toward this?

Yeah, especially in Australia.

There's some analogies with the States.

There's sort of climate politics and stuff is just toxic.

Australia's coming out of what's almost 10 to 15 years of climate wars between opposition parties and so forth.

So the work I've had to do in the early stages and still sometimes now is disguised as energy efficiency, cost production and I don't really care what you call it, we're trying to make businesses do better.

The outcome is the same.

It's how you frame it.

And how you frame it to the CFO is very different to the head of marketing, to the head of sales.

So it's those sort of things.

So we've had to disguise it quite well.

When I look back on my career, I think one of my greatest achievements was keeping the title sustainability throughout those big climate wars and still dealing with large government clients.

And it was quite hard at times.

Cause soon as you walk in the room, everyone knows your position, they know who you are.

Yeah, you've got a target.

I feel like I got a target on my back.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

They all know, oh, here's the guy that's gonna.

Here comes that sustainability guy.

Yeah, everyone here's a tree hugger.

I'll make sure you recycle.

Here's Lee.

You know all that stuff, it's just like, oh, cringy.

Yeah, but, but yeah, it's.

Yeah, it has been difficult.

You had to be a chameleon.

I suppose that's probably why I describe it at certain Times, but keep your eye on the outcome, right?

Yes, eye on the outcome.

Right.

That's the main thing.

Yeah, like, like you say, it's how you frame it.

And you know, my thing is climate change, global warming.

And I've, Yeah.

Learned, I guess the hard way is if you can talk about it without even mentioning climate change, the C word.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because you mentioned that, you know, here in the United States.

Yeah.

Especially now, we, we could talk about that, but let's not.

Yeah, yeah.

We've got better things to do, haven't we?

Yeah, right.

Maybe.

So what's been the evolution of the sustainability, space and corporate adaptation?

Yeah, yeah.

I think the evolutions come from the early stages of corporate social responsibility.

Let's just make sure that we're not wrecking the planet.

Or if we are, let's try put some positive spin on it or get some NGO to help us, sort of send some money somewhere else to sort of COVID up the blackness and we can only disclose what we want to.

We can get away with it.

You've seen that evolution come to more standardized reporting.

The frameworks have helped really.

Well, I think sometimes they go a bit too far because you end up reporting, you don't actually end up doing.

So that's one of the things where I think it needs some retraction back or it needs more investment because I talked to some of my colleagues in industry and all their budgets are on reporting and working with the finance teams to report.

So you've got the glossy sustainability report.

And I've been in these organizations where I'm coming on 10 months later, I go, guys, what have you done?

Nothing.

And I've got to scramble for a case study or something to, you know, I frame it as putting lipstick on a pig for another year, you know, trying to make it look good.

So that's a problem.

But the good thing I've seen is I was going to conferences where there might be 20 or 50 people.

There's now 800.

Oh, yeah, that's good.

That's a great thing in itself.

I do have to bite my tongue a little bit when these people our age are suddenly going, oh, we should be doing this now.

And I said, well, where were you 20, 30 years ago?

Exactly.

But I'm happy to.

They're encouraging and I'm sort of very encouragement of that.

And that sort of one of the drivers for writing the book was to help those sort of people, you know, not make the same mistakes I did and go harder, faster.

Yeah, the evolution.

I'm seeing now, unfortunately, I think we're going to an era of green hushing a little bit from what you mentioned in the States and even here in Australia.

But I'm confident that companies are getting on with it and are doing things.

They're going to miss out on some of the value because they're not going to be talking about it as openly and shouting from the rooftops a bit.

But I think that pause is actually going to be quite a good thing.

I think in a year or two's time they'll be in a better position to start talking more openly about it and have confidence because they know they've been doing stuff.

Yeah.

And that gives me a strong encouragement.

Do you think that green hushing might help, as you just described, help to mitigate greenwashing?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And the other sort of, when I look at that timeline, the good thing about social media has been we shine, but sunlight shines on it.

You can't get away with that photo, is that photo, that degradation of what you're doing, it becomes more transparent.

So you're going to have to front up to some of these issues that say, especially if your business is a large polluter, you're going to have to front up to it and say, yes, we know we are, but we're working on these things.

We're not perfect, but we're going to be working towards these things and we'll be reporting to you at least annually on our progress and our challenges.

So that's where the honesty and transparency is coming through and that helps with those GRI type frameworks and reporting and mandatory disclosure of climate risks and opportunities.

All that sort of legislation that's popping up all around the world is helping with that.

What frameworks do you rely on?

Or the best, I suppose the big.

One that's coming across all around the world and I think even California's got something.

It's each individual country's interpretation of the Task Force for Climate Change.

TCFD Task Force of Climate Change Financial Disclosures.

There's a whole lot of acronyms and I really hate them all.

But you can have a conversation with a Stalin person and just speak in acronyms and then you mix that with my IT background, you have total Alphabet soup, right?

Yeah.

In Australia and in New Zealand they've adapted that to their framework and it's called Australian Sustainability Reporting Standards or Climate Related Disclosures.

But essentially what that means is if countries around the world and the EU are adopting, this is where companies need to disclose their climate Risks and opportunities and a generic kind of way with a process and it needs to go to the board level.

And then in Australia you need to know what your carbon emissions are.

So I've just quickly.

Scope one is generally what you burn and fuel coal and so forth.

Scope two is the electricity that you use and like in Australia's a lot of coal fired power stations and stuff.

So there's a carbon element to every kilowatt of energy you use.

So that's what we need to report on now coming in this financial year, for next financial year and in the subsequent years, you're going to have to report on scope three, which is the emissions in your supply chain up and downstream.

So I've had to do some of that work as where you open up a whole Pandora's box where how many suppliers do you have?

Do they have climate targets of their own?

Do we get our targets?

Another one is sbti, Science Based Target Initiative.

Do we have them accredited to that?

Which means you've got to go look at your Scope three.

You've got to go through a rigorous process.

So there are numerous frameworks out there, there.

But the one probably going to hit even smaller companies is that climate related disclosures because it'll force the large companies to look in their supply chain and ask questions.

And I'm doing that for my clients right now, asking suppliers very pointy questions that some of them just don't know how to answer and they've got to have to get up to speed reasonably quickly if they want to actually keep supplying to the big guys.

So that's what I'm seeing now.

That must be really a complex process getting the scope 3.

Now did you develop the triple C framework?

Yeah, sorry to throw another framework out there, but I wanted to just come up with the simplest one.

And this follows the three parts to my book.

And this is if you're new to sustainability or you want to test what your strategy is and what your thinking is.

And I peeled it down when all the tough conversation I've had could have been made simpler if I just followed this simple process.

Now the three Cs stand for confidence, commitment and consistency.

And when I've jumped to one other too fast, I realize, oh, I haven't spent more time there.

So when I talk about confidence, this is having an understanding of the global macro issues.

Climate change, diversity, inclusion, modern slavery, waste.

What are all these big global issues and what does actually mean to your business?

Are they relevant or not?

But you've got to have an understanding of what they basically are.

And also it'll force you to have a look in your supply chain as well.

So if you're a large polluter, obviously climate change is an issue or waste.

If you work in communities, you know that sort of areas need a focus as well.

So where I found, I've tried to go to a board to set a climate target and they didn't even know what a carbon was.

That's one of my biggest failures.

And you just spin your wheels and you have these political debates, these ethical debates and so forth.

And I'm going, oh, I didn't spend time with the confidence.

I need to just go to carbon 101.

I need to lay the breadcrumbs towards this big decision.

So they weren't confident.

So that's really, really, really important.

And that's the first section I book, which is covers off those at a very high level.

The next part is the commitment and that's looking at what matters most to your business.

Do you need to set things like a climate target, waste targets, anything around community or engagement?

What are you actually going to stand for?

What matters most to your business?

There's some good frameworks, again, sustainable development goals.

Looking at those, there's a materiality assessment which you should do, which is going out asking people, what do you think are our number top three or four things that we should focus on?

Ask your people, customers, even NGOs, even governments.

I've done that.

And then try really focus on three or four core things.

Most companies will come up with something like climate change, our people, community, maybe governance.

Those are sort of the generic ones.

And then the final bit is the consistency.

And that's where I see so many companies let themselves down, where they will come out with a great sustainability report some targets and go, hey, we're all good.

And then John or Amy has moved on from the company resting on one person, who is this token sustainability person and it falls all apart, you know.

Yeah.

So the consistency is the governance model, who's responsible, what executives or what functions of the business are going to be responsible for.

And hopefully that sustainability person, the organization, is more a coordinator, not the doer of everything and is making sure that everyone does that and the responsibilities are dispersed amongst from the leadership team down.

So that's the, that's the crux of it.

And if you follow that, you're in pretty good stead to make sure that you, you know, you avoid greenwashing, you have consistency and you have something that's relevant to your business.

When done Properly, it becomes a competitive advantage for you.

It's not a cost.

Talk about that.

Talk about how this is a competitive advantage for businesses.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, one of the things is if what I mentioned before, companies, especially if you supply a larger company, if they're going to be forced by this regulation or if they want to set science based targets, they're going to have to choose suppliers that are lower carbon over time.

So if you have all your stuff together and you have a program in place to look at that, that's going to be more competitive when they go to select you versus someone El it won't be just price, it'll be on what's the carbon component of your product or service and can you help us reduce ours.

So that's really important.

The other times I've really worked at is helping create a competitive advantage.

When you're looking at the sales, working with your salespeople and understanding where money comes into your business, what are your customers trying to grapple with?

Can you support them in some of these big challenges?

Because when I've been as head of sustainability, large multinational, I would love it when suppliers came to me and said hey Lee, I know you've got this climate target, can we have a chat?

Because I've got an idea and it's a very easy idea.

I haven't really been rejected on any one of the calls.

Just want to have a chat around sustainability how we could probably work together on something.

I've designed new products, new offerings together with suppliers that have grown market share.

So that's the real competitive advantage is something that's really undervalued in sustainability.

And this is where I see it.

When it's truly stuck sticks is when it helps drive revenue for businesses exist to make money.

Right.

When you align sustainably with the money making process of your company, it's, it has longevity and it's not something that gets chucked out when the budgets are tied.

It's something becomes core of the business.

So that's looking for those opportunities is key.

Sounds like you know, people, businesses, business leaders will come charging in and yeah, let's do something about it.

And then.

Yep.

And it kind of, yeah.

The worst thing I said, oh, I'm really passionate about this.

Well that's great.

Make sure that passion comes into a framework with accountability and it's not resting on one or two people in your organization to be passionate.

You know, how often do you encounter, and I imagine that you'd be able to sniff this out pretty fast, people that say yeah, we want to do something about it, but it's just a marketing ploy to please their customers.

I guess that's greenwashing.

But the first things that I look for is, do you have someone responsible for sustainability?

Where does that person sit?

It sits under marketing hr.

It's probably, yeah, probably not great.

You have a look at if they're trying to push.

A lot of companies will try to push, hey, this product's sustainable, right?

We've got this new offering, servicing.

Okay, what gives you the right to talk about that product?

What are you doing from a company's perspective?

Has your company set a climate target?

Has your company got a governance model around sustainability?

Or have you just come up with this one product that you think is going to solve all the problems?

Because if you haven't sorted out your own backyard first, I don't think you have the right to go out there and spruce your sustainment credentials of a product or service.

And you can be found out very quickly within five minutes.

I could go, right.

But I don't throw it out straight away.

I go, here's the opportunity for you.

And I'm sat on many times.

I'm going to play, say, a Greenpeace activist and you pitch this market to me and these are the five things I'll shoot you down with.

But guess what?

You can fix those relatively quickly if you have the desire to do so.

And it might be in a few months time, you could launch that product because you've got the credibility to do that, because you've looked internally, your backyard's in order, or maybe not totally in order, but you're getting towards that and you can talk about what you're doing.

Yeah, so that's my key thing is I don't want to discourage these innovations, but make sure you're standing on the right platform to talk about it.

To start with, do you ever appeal personally to leaders?

Like, what sort of a world do you want to leave your children kind of.

Kind of approach?

Or is that a little over the top for context?

It works in some context, but I think it's been done for 20 years.

And I cringe when I hear a leader say, it's all about five children.

I go, yeah, of course we are.

That's given.

What are you doing?

Get on with it.

Don't.

I mean, it's enough talk.

And sadly, I've gone to so many conferences where I think you said the same stuff 20 years ago.

The only difference is there's more people in a room.

But what are you actually going to do tomorrow?

Right.

All right.

For your children.

That's a great motivator.

It's a great motivator for me.

It's kept me going through some very dark times writing a book and the careers are going, oh, what am I doing this for?

I could earn more money doing something else.

I could have a better lifestyle.

But Jesus, I need to keep going with this because of the legacy, because we don't have an option.

And that's ingrained in most sustainably, people I work with.

But it's.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've been writing about climate change for about 20 years now.

And so I remember 20 years ago.

You know, the time is short.

We've got to do something now it's 20 years later.

Yes.

It's shorter.

What have we done?

Do you by any chance know of Scott Pointon?

No, I don't.

Okay.

The reason not.

I was going to say he's Australian.

That doesn't mean you should know him.

He's Australian, but he's the founder of the Rainforests Trust, right?

Yep.

And he's based in Switzerland now.

Yeah.

And the reason I, I bring this up, we're.

I was just chatting with him earlier today and he was talking about conferences and.

Yeah, a lot of talk and no doing.

Yeah.

What was his.

Was his.

Yeah, yeah.

So I've got a couple of conferences come out where I'm asked to speak and I've just talked them into turning into a workshop.

That sounds like a good idea.

Yeah, I suppose it.

Just talking at people.

You're talking.

Here's a one page worksheet and you're gonna fill us out as I talk and you're gonna go back to your business tomorrow and ask these questions and you're gonna choose two things you're gonna change in the next month, you know.

Excellent.

Yeah.

I mean, here's stuff to do and you have a ton.

You got a month to do it.

Yeah.

And it could be as simple as the basic one, you recycle better.

Or it could be you have a conversation with the guy or girl that manages the largest source of your emissions and ask them, what can we do to help you?

Yeah, just get off yet.

Just basically get on, get on the.

Floor, walk the floors, you know, do something.

Yeah.

And learn.

Learn by seeing for yourself.

Yeah.

You worked with the kingdom of Tonga, is that correct?

Yes.

Yeah.

And what is it they became the world's first circular kingdom.

Oh, we're working towards that, correct?

No, we're working towards it.

Working pro bono.

With the lovely people of tonga for last five or six years, and was one of the advisors that COP28 in Dubai as well.

And just going there and spending time and time at their landfill was their main issue.

There's no infrastructure for recycling and.

And countries love to donate to the Pacific islands.

So they donate them with plastic balers and crushers and stuff, which all work, which is great, but there's nowhere for it to go.

You can bail up plastic, you can crush it, but you got to ship it somewhere because there's no.

It's the infrastructure.

So I've just gone, well, we need to design better.

And there's papers going into parliament soon about trying to get serious funding to actually turn some of that shredded plastic into jewelry and have a local social enterprise.

So what we're going to do is going to be led by local women of working with the universities here in Australia.

I can't say which one because it's close, but where they've got it in a container ship where they can shred plastic and turn it straight into 3D filament for printing.

So they will print a sort of outline of a whale tail, which be finished off by hand painted by locals and sold to everyone that comes to swim with the whales in Tonga.

Oh, really?

So we're trying to create a circular economy that way and a social enterprise that gives jobs and women leadership roles in the Pacific.

And if that model works, we will have these containers go out to some of the other islands so we can actually start harvesting the plastic, doing something.

So turning that into a resource.

So that's the vision for that idea.

That's great.

But, you know, Tonga is the second most impacted country in the world by climate change.

I've seen firsthand things like burial grounds being washed away.

It's heartbreaking to see what's going on.

And then it was an honor to be part of their delegation at COP Dubai a few years ago.

And just to see that delegation just outnumbered by the US and eu and they're bustling and hustling, and there's the king of Tonga prime minister trying to help get them to their area where they need to be.

And it's, you know, koa and stuff.

And just.

And I just wanted to scream out, these guys are the reason why we're all here, and they need a better stage.

Yeah.

And.

And just.

And so there's lots of work to do for them.

And that's kind of my purpose has been finding that, okay, yes, I do work and I get paid reasonably well, but I'm using that to help a nation survive and doing my best I can.

Right.

So that's the thing that really keeps me going.

Has been a fantastic journey so far and there's more to come.

There's a lot more coming there.

Yeah.

What are your feelings now on of the COP process?

Oh, you've only been to one.

It's a hard one.

The Dubai one was hard because there were a lot of fossil fuel lobbyists there.

Exactly, yeah.

I do think, and I heard countries like New Zealand and Australia sort of bag it out and not go there.

But it is a trade show and a connection place more than anything else.

It is the opportunity to connect.

And that week I was there, I had bilateral meetings with seven or eight countries and they weren't arranged.

But you walked and hustled and this guy, you know, and you went in there and you got to the us, Canada, uk and you did that.

And it was just an amazing experience to see that everyone's there on a.

Generally on a common purpose and it's just that face to face connections, the randomness of it and throwing everything together and good stuff happens.

So it does have a bad rap because a lot of talk fests and stuff, but it's what happens on the edges, the human connections, especially all the people in their traditional dress seeing it, it was just amazing.

Walking around, you would see 15 African, South American, Pacific, North American.

It's just an amazing boiling pot of humanity trying to do the right thing.

So it's not the main stage, it's around the edges where I think a lot of the real stuff is done.

I was able to do two cops, cop 15 and cop 21 and 15 was back in 2009 and that didn't go so well.

But I have to say COP21, that's the one moment in this whole journey of me being concerned about climate change where I felt, oh, wow, the world is coming together.

There was real feelings, it was all aspirational and we can talk about what's happened since then.

But that was a great moment, I thought, back in 2020.

Yeah.

And I do need to remind people when they say that I think, what, up to 160, 190 countries agreed on something.

Yeah.

When does that ever happen?

It's a solid foundation and yes, there's been disappointments and we need to do more.

But I to remind myself that that's quite significant what happened.

You're involved with AI technology and sustainability.

Yes.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, I'M using it to help with working with the customer journey that I do.

So I use it to interrogate their competitors, their own public information.

And I've developed a query quick scorecard based on the framework I spoke about on the book and what they do and the policies and so forth.

So that's really helped streamline my time to be more effective because every customer I work with wants to know how they're doing relative to their competitors.

So it's quite easy to do a quick scan of that.

Where I'm helping with and some people in my team I work with helping with is carbon accounting and measurement.

I think that's a huge growth area where we can streamline a lot of that energy efficiency scenario analysis.

There's quite a lot of opportunities there to look with AI and even work with some of the universities.

There are 3D printing cities and then projecting onto them what 1, 2, 3, 4 degrees looks like and showing how the city.

So that's looking really good.

So the visual aspects of that is really amazing.

The type of stuff you do so largely untap that potential for good.

Definitely there's a long way to go.

But if you were starting a software business right now around climate change and sustainability, you're probably better off just starting from scratch and using the tools available to scale quickly.

So that's quite exciting, the possibilities there.

Yeah, it really is.

The opportunities of AI.

There's obviously a discussion around AI, the good, the bad, the ugly, whatever.

But I think if you approach it as a tool.

Yep.

With a good purpose in mind as opposed to putting out AI slop or something.

Yeah, yeah.

And I treat it like a intelligent coworker.

So I've trained my little tool up.

It's got my whole book in there, it's got all the policies I've written for other clients, it's got my knowledge base and I can interrogate it and sort of help me with that.

So it helps me be more effective and create a bigger impact.

So that's where I treat it like an intelligent co worker that still needs a little help a lot.

But yeah, so say there's a businessman that hasn't really been thinking too much about sustainability, but he's.

You know what, I should do something about this.

What would you.

First off, I'm sure to buy your book, be the first thing.

Yes.

But what is your advice for business leaders that want to get more active in this space?

Just first of all, look at your backyard a little bit and you can do this on a back of a You know, page just write down where you think your biggest impacts are of your operations.

So could it be the amount of emissions waste you work in communities?

Just list all these down and especially if you're in a larger organization, maybe have a chat to the guys that look at that.

What are they doing around energy efficiency or reductions around that?

Just understand that landscape a bit better and from there you might find two or three core things and then probably just research.

So if you've got a long supply chain that goes to say developing nations, you might want to understand a bit more about modern slavery, what's going on there.

If you're a large polluter and you create a lot of waste, you might want to understand what's the global issues around plastics and the oceans and other things.

Do I contribute to that?

So you have that sort of framing and that confidence piece.

From there you should be able to try and understand what you're already doing because I bet most organizations are doing some stuff already which is great and is there an opportunity to bring that in under overarching strategy where you get more benefit from that.

So you might have a classic example.

I work with a large retailer, it's got 100 odd stores and store is doing some great stuff around recycling.

Let's share it with everyone else you know.

So let's bring those stories to life and don't be afraid to start telling those stories internally which you'll be encouraged by what comes out from your own team.

There'll be a lot of people that were thinking about this and going oh now I've got a vehicle, I've got these ideas.

So harness your team is a really, really untapped resource.

Yeah.

Would you say you might have already addressed this but more of an acceptance, taking sustainability seriously in the business world?

Yeah, definitely.

And the key, probably the next step for what I do for that bit is look where your customers are, where does your money come in and what do they care about?

They might have a published sustainability report, your largest customers.

So have a read of those.

So that's where you can align your vision or your sustainability strategy to be climate customer centric.

And don't be afraid to go and ask your key customers if you're new to sustainability, say oh you've got a sustainability report.

How do you go about it as a supplier to you?

What do you want to see from us so you can co create your sustainability strategy in line with your clients needs and wants.

And that is a very powerful conversation.

It's not you trying to push more product or services down there, it's you collaborating genuinely on a mutual global issue and that reaps huge rewards over time.

I think authenticity is key.

If you were to have the ear of government leaders, what would you tell them that we need right now?

Oh dear.

We just need consistency and get out of the way.

Yeah, I like that.

Australia's got three year terms, you know, it's not long enough.

You need to sit down and sort out the energy policy and don't touch it for a decade and let industry take its place.

Don't just flip flop stuff on these core issues and seriously, get out of the way.

That's a frustrating thing here in the U.S. you know, we're in the Paris agreement, we're out of the Paris agreement.

Yeah.

And for me, from the other side of the world, we've been here before, California's still in and then we look at all the other states they're still in and it's good and it's sad how it's become that way.

But I think at the core we all want a better future.

Even when I talk to the most climate skeptic farmers in my last role in New Zealand, they want to leave their farm in a better condition than they got it for the next generation.

So it's that, it's that.

And I think if I step back a little bit, the climate movement that you and I have been a part of is guilty of selling doom and fear too much that we can turn people off.

But I like to sell here's a positive future vision, you know, and the core, I don't think anyone wants to leave the world a worse place.

I don't think so.

And I agree that there's been too much doom and gloom and too much, you know, talking over people's heads and not, not finding people where they are and addressing.

A chat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, just having a chat.

Exactly.

And this has been a great chat.

Yeah, it's been awesome.

So tell us about your book.

So we want to make sure that.

People know about your book.

So the book is how to build sustainability into your business strategy.

I wrote it for business leaders and it's in business speak.

It's not sort of from the tree hugging angle.

It's practical business guide of what you can do, look at your business and how you can use sustainability as a competitive advantage.

So ideally you can read it in a weekend, ask questions in your business, Monday, Tuesday and by Friday, hey, you might have done something for good and you've been excellent.

I may have on occasion been guilty of, as Lee Stewart says, selling fear and doom.

It's hard not to be profoundly concerned about the future of our species, the world we built, and the fate of life on the planet.

It's all heady stuff.

If I say that hope is when we stop fooling ourselves, as I often do, it means there's still hope.

To put put another way, we can maintain hope not by deceiving ourselves, but by taking practical steps to incorporate social and environmental business strategies with the notion that we're all in this together.

If we all pick up our trash, every sector, every CEO, every citizen, will each one be better for it?

Check the Show Notes to find out more about Lee Stewart's work, the circular economy and the triple bottom line.

Business leaders looking for a real world practical guide should check out his best selling book, how to build Sustainability into your business Strategy.

A practical, no nonsense business guide.

You know the drill.

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