Sustainable Business Covered Podcast: Delivering transformational action at the Sustainability Leaders Forum (Part Two)

Pictured left: Wednesday's proceedings started with a busy B Corp breakfast briefing 

Episode 113 of edie’s long-running Sustainable Business Covered podcast sees the editorial team recording live from London’s Business Design Centre as the third and final day of the three-day conference comes to a close.

Content director Luke Nicholls, content editor Matt Mace and senior reporter Sarah George reflect on the event as a whole, which saw more than 500 professionals attending in-person and virtually, to hear high-level speeches and panel debates, and to co-create solutions. 

Highlights from Wednesday’s (9 March) proceedings, specifically, included keynote speeches from Sir David King and Maria Mendiluce; a high-level panel debate on green finance; and a fireside conversation between Futerra’s Solitaire Townsend and activist and model Lily Cole. 

There was also a B Corp breakfast briefing workshop, kindly hosted in association with edie’s B Corp partner Seismic. 

In between these discussions, Matt and Sarah deliver a relay of four exclusive interviews, conducted throughout the day. 

First up, Matt catches up with Beauty Kitchen founder Jo-Ann Chidley for an update on its mission to make refillable FMCG products a wide-scale reality. She also provides her thoughts on how the circular and linear economies, more broadly, are converging. 

Matt then passes the mic to Sarah, who meets up with ShareAction’s head of corporate climate Helen Wiggs. Helen is fresh off a panel on green finance, in which representatives from the Green Finance Institute (GFI), BSI Group, Nationwide and OnePledge provided their reflections on COP26 outcomes. She recaps on this panel and looks ahead to what is set to be another busy AGM season, in terms of environmental and social resolutions being filed by activist investors. 

Staying on the topic of green finance, our third guest speaker is Green Angel Syndicate president Nick Lyth. Nick speaks with Matt about his vision for scaling investment in emerging climate technologies, and how this fits with investment in more mature solutions. 

Last, but by no means least, is a discussion between Sarah and CDP’s global head of value chains and regional director of corporations Sonya Bhonsle. Sonya gives us the key takeaways from her panel discussion on building resilient supply chains, including advice for collecting and interpreting data, and ensuring suppliers are engaged. This discussion builds on a recent CDP report on these topics. 

This special episode was part of a two-part podcast feature live from the Forum. You can listen to the first part of the feature, from Tuesday 8 March, here. This episode includes discussions with representatives of the UK Government’s COP26 Unit, Bupa and Belu Water. 

You can recap on the Sustainability Leaders Forum as it happened with edie’s live blog, here. 

The edie podcast is available to listen to on Spotify, SoundCloud, Apple and Google. You can also subscribe to this podcast on iTunes and bookmark this page to see the full list of podcast episodes as they appear. 

Have a question about this podcast or a suggestion for future episodes? Email us at podcast@fav-house.com. Please bear in mind that all our speaker slots are now filled until the end of April.

edie Staff