Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Purpose, Impact, and Building a Business
179 Plays1 year ago
Handprint offers a platform that connects companies with impactful projects, allowing them to make a tangible difference in mitigating environmental challenges.
🌱 Handprint, a climate tech company, was co-founded in 2019 with the aim of regeneration and making a positive impact on the environment.
🌍 Their focus on using satellite images and blockchain technology for remote sensing and financial transparency in mangrove restoration and conservation projects highlights the potential of innovative solutions in environmental preservation.
🌱 Pursuing aggressive regeneration of natural ecosystems can create positive feedback loops that have unforeseen and surprising positive effects on the overall evolution of the planet's ecosystem.
🌊 Carbon sequestration can happen more effectively in the ocean through the growth of kelp, which absorbs carbon faster and can be cultivated in underwater farms.
🌍 There is a wealth of talent, knowledge, and ideas in the field of climatech, making it an exciting area with endless possibilities for innovation.
🐋 Whales play a crucial role in fighting climate change by absorbing carbon in their bones and moving Krill, the primary source of carbon absorption in the oceans, creating a positive cycle.
🔄 Climate change will force us to change the way we organize human life, while the biodiversity crisis fundamentally challenges the fact that we are alive.
🌍 There is no economic growth without a planet, as we can't have economic growth in a world where there is no clean air or where everyone is sick due to air pollution.
Business and Sustainability
🤝 Entrepreneurs, educators, and everyone should remain cautiously optimistic and work together to make a positive impact on the world.
🌍 Human ingenuity can work with nature to improve our chances of a long and healthy life on this planet for future generations.
🌍 SUSTAINABILITY PODCAST CREATED BY NEW PERSPECTIVE
========================
This podcast is proudly sponsored by New Perspective Marketing, a dynamic growth marketing agency in Boston, MA, celebrating 20 years in business. We help sustainably focused B2B organizations grow their brands and scale up revenue. If you or your organization is looking to grow, visit npws.com for more info.
🎧 SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST
===========================
- Spotify: https://bit.ly/3PSWIyI
- Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3RvlHte
- Youtube: https://bit.ly/3RDzkXg
- Google Podcasts: http://bit.ly/465gjS5
- Deezer: https://bit.ly/3PvQaof
- Amazon Music: https://bit.ly/3PQlijS
- Zencastr: https://bit.ly/48xt75s
💬 FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA
============================
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/greennewperspective/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/gnperspective
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greennewperspective
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/greennewperspective/
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@greennewperspective
- Threads: https://www.threads.net/@greennewperspective
#sustainabilitypodcast #cleanenergy #greennewperspective #sustainability #cleanenergy #podcast #cleantech
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:12
Speaker
Hello, you're watching another episode of Green New Perspectives Podcast, a webcast series dedicated to sustainability. Today's episode is featuring Simon Skelebix, a co-founder and chief strategy officer of Handprint, a company that prefers to call itself Impact as a Service.
00:00:32
Speaker
What does that mean? As the world continues to face unprecedented environmental challenges, consumers are increasingly demanding that businesses take actions to mitigate their impact and contribute to solutions. That's where handprints come
Handprint's Mission and Simon's Background
00:00:47
Speaker
in.
00:00:47
Speaker
It's a platform that connects companies with impactful projects that align with their values. So from forestry and coral reef reconstruction to plastic removal, targeted education and disaster relief, handprints offer a different range of initiatives that companies can support to make a tangible difference.
00:01:05
Speaker
Simon is also assistant professor of strategic management at Singapore Management University, and he specializes in digital sustainability. So stay tuned as we talk to Simon about how to create a business that makes a difference in the world, but it's still a business, and his experiences as an academic entrepreneur. So you're a professor at the Singapore University, so can you tell us a little more about your background?
00:01:32
Speaker
Sure. So I am originally from Belgium. I studied there and then I majored in business ethics and corporate social responsibility at Nottingham University in the UK, after which I went travelling for a year to South America.
00:01:49
Speaker
came back at the start of the financial crisis in 2008 and I wanted to work in sustainability, which was very tricky. So I was unemployed or semi-employed for a year, worked in bars. And then I got a job in sustainability and innovation consulting, which I did for about two years. But I got really bored with the reality of consulting that I was experiencing mainly that it just always
Journey to Singapore and Academia
00:02:16
Speaker
allowed me to study a problem never really in depth and then you end up delivering a PowerPoint or a PDF.
00:02:26
Speaker
And then the project ends. And so this was kind of frustrating for me. And I decided that I wanted to do a PhD. So just because I really wanted to have time to study problems that I was interested in and much more debt. And after a couple of failed attempts, I ended up going to Imperial College back in UK, in London.
00:02:50
Speaker
where I did my PhD with a professor called Jerry George, who's been my mentor for about 10 years. And about just under three years into my PhD, which was normally a four-year program, he told me that he was moving to Singapore and that I had to finish my PhD in the next six weeks instead of 14 months.
00:03:17
Speaker
I've said sure if that's really necessary So it wasn't really the plan but then yeah, I had to finish so it was a very tough eight weeks I think it took in the end and But he did tell me that if you do and you pass then I will take you to Singapore if you went for a year and a half to as a postdoctoral fellow and so That happened. So I passed we moved to Singapore I
00:03:47
Speaker
arrived here on the 17th of January 2015.
Sustainability Progress in Singapore
00:03:51
Speaker
So just over eight years ago now. And then I ended up liking it a lot. And then I was lucky enough to become a professor here. So I've joined as a faculty member at SMU in July 2016. And I have been ever since. And how is it going with sustainability in Singapore?
00:04:14
Speaker
It's getting a lot better. I remember in the first year that I was here, I had a variety of conversations with people in the sustainability space, various companies, the large businesses that exist here in Singapore. And I was taken aback by the fact that the quality of conversation and the understanding at the business level of sustainability
00:04:43
Speaker
So this was then late 2015, early 2016 was significantly less advanced than the type of conversations I was having as a consultant in 2009, 2010 back in Belgium and the Netherlands. So that was a bit of a shock.
00:04:59
Speaker
All has happened in the last eight years, and I think there's been a lot of progress. A little bit has been inspired and pushed by the government.
Founding and Evolution of Handprint
00:05:07
Speaker
But now there are companies in Singapore, some large companies like CDL and property development, DBS bank, that are globally perceived to be some of the most kind of pioneering organizations in the field of sustainability. That doesn't mean there's not a lot of work to be done. There is.
00:05:29
Speaker
Yeah, baby steps. Yeah, something is happening. So how did you get involved in Handprint? Let's talk about that a little. Sure. So Handprint is like a new generation or climate tech, nature tech company that I co-founded at the end of 2019. It
00:05:51
Speaker
basically grew out of two different things we did before. One was me, Ryan and I, so we're the three founders, Ryan Matias and myself, Simon. And so Ryan and I worked at SMU together. I had hired him fresh out of his PhD in environmental policy to come work with me on innovation in the natural world in Southeast Asia.
00:06:18
Speaker
So we did this for about a year and a half, two years. And during that time, we co-founded a nonprofit organization called Global Mangrove Trust, which still exists. And the purpose of that organization was really to help small scale mangrove restoration and conservation NGOs in Southeast and East and South Asia. Initially, especially Myanmar, was to help those kind of organizations access international climate financing.
00:06:48
Speaker
We did a lot of work in that space, but mainly focusing on the development of technology for remote sensing, so using satellite images to understand what is happening in forests over time, as well as blockchain technology to improve financial transparency.
00:07:09
Speaker
After a couple of years, about two years into the existence of that nonprofit, we started working with Mathias, now our co-founder and CEO, on a grant proposal to get access to funding from the Singapore and French governments to improve our
00:07:27
Speaker
technology. Now we had a couple of partners in France and in Singapore for this ground proposal, but eventually the ground proposal didn't go anywhere due to a variety of reasons, but we did realize that while working on this that we really liked working together, and Matthias convinced us to
00:07:45
Speaker
set up a social enterprise, which became Handprint, using some of the technology we developed at Global Mangrove Trust, but with a clearer commercial purpose, which for the NGO, of course, was less the case. And yeah, we jumped at it and set the company up at the end of 2019, just before the COVID pandemic hit, and yeah, through as low as life. Yeah, and how did it work during the pandemic?
00:08:15
Speaker
Was it a good time for you in the company or was it challenging? I think it was both. So the benefit of the pandemic and especially in the beginning here in Singapore, so Matias and I were living in Singapore, Ryan was living in Bangkok.
00:08:33
Speaker
The benefit was that we literally had nothing else to do. I had my day job, Ryan and then I were still managing GMT, but there was no social life. We were at what is known here in Singapore as the circuit breaker, basically in lockdown. For the first couple of months, there was really not much going on outside of potentially working.
00:08:55
Speaker
We did a lot of hard work in the beginning and then we decided as a team that what we should be focusing on because of this pandemic was e-commerce. So initially when we started the company, we didn't really know which product we were going to develop. We really wanted to do something
00:09:18
Speaker
To further mangrove restoration and that we kind of adopted that perspective from GMT Global mangrove first and we knew we wanted to create some kind of digital platform that would make it easier for someone either a company or an individual to
00:09:35
Speaker
basically plant trees and contribute to reforestation. Because of the pandemic, we decided that we probably should start by creating a tool that enables companies to integrate mangrove restoration into their transactions, into their sales. Inspired about the pandemic, we built this, we learned a lot, we realized it's very hard to make a scaling business out of that, but we built a lot of capabilities
00:10:03
Speaker
that are still pretty essential to what handprint is doing now.
Global Environmental Challenges and Hopes
00:10:07
Speaker
And yeah, so was it a bad thing? I think it was a mixed blessing. Yeah, I feel the same. But you're working with companies. So how do you feel? Have they been good in their attempts to lessen their adverse effects on the earth during the past 10 years? Or you think they have plenty of challenges to overcome at the moment?
00:10:33
Speaker
Mildly speaking. I mean, overall, I would say I am very disappointed in the progress, if any, that has been made when it comes to environment, especially environmental sustainability, which is much more my area than the other aspects of kind of governance and social. But when it comes to environmental sustainability, the progress that has been made has been grossly insufficient.
00:11:01
Speaker
This is the unfortunate reality. We are in a situation now in 2023 where
00:11:10
Speaker
the planetary boundaries for climate change and for biodiversity laws and for a variety of other things in terms of like nitrous in the soils and so are all being transgressed against. And I think this was entirely avoidable. Back in 1989, when
00:11:37
Speaker
all countries and companies globally came together in Montreal to sign what is known as a Montreal Protocol to halt the emissions of CFCs, which were pretty much singularly responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. We've shown that
00:11:58
Speaker
As a global community, we could come together, make a difficult decision, and restrain environmental pollution in a way that has proven to be very effective. I think the Montreal Protocol is still the most effective and most successful
00:12:15
Speaker
environmental global agreement that we've ever reached. I'd say more successful than Kyoto and the Paris Accord. And in the same year, in 1989, we were very close to signing a global agreement on carbon emissions as well. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. And there is a fantastic and very, very long New York Times article about how this exactly failed. Why the New York Times or the New Yorker?
00:12:43
Speaker
And yeah, then as a consequence, we ended up not making any decisions and it took until 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol came into being and then many, many years later in 2015, the Paris Accord. And I think if we look at that time as a race and opportunity, then
00:13:01
Speaker
Yeah, it undoubtedly was. Now, of course, we're not here to reminisce about everything that went wrong in the past. I think the job of entrepreneurs and the job of educators as well, and everyone really, is to remain cautiously optimistic. And I think that there is still room for
00:13:24
Speaker
optimism and there is still a good chance that we can avoid the worst of climate change. If we look, for instance, at the change in projections of the IPCC, so the International Panel on Climate Change, over the last 10 years, we've seen
00:13:44
Speaker
Two things. One is that the IPCC has consistently underestimated the velocity with which climate change is happening. That is scary. And that basically means that the acceleration of the temperature increase on planet Earth, as well as the volume of carbon emissions in the atmosphere. And so the carbon concentration has gone up faster in the IPCC
00:14:13
Speaker
predicted. But on the other hand, and that is the positive note, is that we've also seen that based on mainly the policies that have been put in place in the last couple of years, that the forecasted path of where we are going to end up with under a variety of policy scenarios has
00:14:36
Speaker
Peetered off and so has become a little bit flatter and has also narrowed in width, which means that we have a better understanding now of given where we are now, or where at least policy has decided that we should be.
00:14:51
Speaker
it looks like we are much more likely to avoid truly catastrophic consequences in terms of like above four degree temperature increase scenario now seems increasingly unlikely so that is the main positive i think there is.
Nature's Resilience and Innovative Solutions
00:15:10
Speaker
an enormous amount of additional work that companies will need to do, that governments will need to do, and unavoidably, at some point, hopefully, I would say sooner rather than later, that will mean that there are going to be, at least temporarily, some limitations on our consumption behavior.
00:15:33
Speaker
That's just going to be necessary if we're going to stay within reach of that elusive 1.5 degree goal. Do you think we're going to stay within the 1.5 degree goal?
00:15:54
Speaker
Based on the latest forecasts, I think it's very challenging. It's probably a little bit unlikely. But there is one thing I think that still gives me hope, and that is
00:16:13
Speaker
Most of the forecasts when it comes to these kind of mathematical complex climate models are strongly anchored in a singular mentality of sustainability as reducing negative impact. Reduce carbon emissions, eliminate carbon emissions from industrial production and
00:16:38
Speaker
and all of the things that come with that, that is the decarbonization of energy and all of those things. And I think we are pretty good at estimating what the consequences of this will be. What we are less good at is understanding the resilience and the feedback loops of natural ecosystems.
00:17:03
Speaker
And that's a double-edged sword. So on the one side, it is very clear that if we hit certain tipping points, which we don't really know where they are,
00:17:15
Speaker
then what we could face very suddenly is a massive acceleration of climate change. If we would reach a tipping point where specific parts of the Arctic start melting or of Greenland, then the methane stored in the ice would suddenly be released.
00:17:37
Speaker
I mean, we were below the 1.5 degree things out of the water. And suddenly we would go to a greenhouse gas concentration that is significantly higher than we are now. So that is the big risk with these tipping points. There can be negative feedback loops. And if we hit them, it's going to be very hard to reverse them in the period, in the lifespan of a normal human being. So then we're looking really at very long-term change and very long-term challenges.
00:18:06
Speaker
On the other hand, the ability of natural ecosystems to positively surprise us is also still there.
Transparency, Greenwashing, and Accountability
00:18:15
Speaker
And this is really the area where I am relentlessly optimistic that by pursuing much more aggressively the regeneration of the planet, both on land as well as in the water, we can achieve
00:18:31
Speaker
positive feedback loops that will have almost unforeseen and surprising positive effects on how the planet's ecosystem as a whole is evolving.
00:18:51
Speaker
And so just one example, I think that's an interesting one and that's not very often heard of. So everybody kind of knows about the fact that like, oh yeah, planting trees can potentially be very good for the planet because trees absorb carbon, they provide natural habitat, biodiversity and so, and it's great, right? And I'm a big fan of reforestation if done well, which is a big if, because very often it's not done very well.
00:19:16
Speaker
But we've also learned recently that a lot of carbon sequestration can actually happen much more effectively in the ocean. So kelp as an alternative to reforestation, kelp is like a big seaweed, absorbs much more carbon, much faster. Plus we can use it as animal feed.
00:19:38
Speaker
And there are uniquely weird benefits to doing so. So if you give kelp, you grow kelp in a commercial kind of underwater in the ocean, like an underwater farm in the ocean, then it absorbs a lot of carbon. That's great. We like that. You can use it to feed cows, which means you can take land that we're currently using to create feedstock and repurpose it potentially and rewild that and give that back to nature, which is great.
00:20:08
Speaker
Moreover, by feeding the cows with kelp, you reduce their methane emissions. Cows are probably the biggest source of methane emissions on the planet, which is one of the reasons why eating cow meat is so bad for the planet because of the methane emissions associated with cows burping and farting.
00:20:31
Speaker
just the way it is. But if you give them this kelp as a feedstock, then they would use their methane emissions dramatically. So there are interesting kind of positive feedback loops that we can achieve. Similarly, we've discovered that whales are
00:20:46
Speaker
an incredibly important animal in the fight against climate change. Because whales absorb heaps and heaps of carbon in their bones as they grow. And then eventually when they die, they normally will sink to the bottom of the ocean and store the carbon there for a longer time period. That is already great. But more importantly, whales are
00:21:09
Speaker
what is known as keystone species in the oceanic ecosystem and that is because they move the krill that exists in the ocean through various oceanic layers and krill
00:21:26
Speaker
is really the primary source of carbon absorption in the oceans. And if you have more whales, you will have more krill. And if you have more krill, more carbon will be removed from krill and plankton. And so more carbon will be absorbed by the oceans, and as in the whales will eat this, and so you create this positive cycle. So there are lots of those things that we have discovered. We don't necessarily know yet how to
00:21:53
Speaker
make that new knowledge, that reasonably new knowledge, how to make that actionable from a climate change perspective. But I think there is plenty of room for human ingenuity to work with nature in order to improve our chances of having a very long and healthy life on this planet for the next thousands of generations. Yeah, I think that February 19 was the World Whale Day.
00:22:23
Speaker
So we can ask people to explore more about these amazing animals. I wanted to ask you, you said that you were disappointed in the way the businesses are doing environmental progress.
00:22:43
Speaker
But if you look around you, you'd be thinking that we're living in a sustainable world because of the advertisements, because of the carbon offsetting. So I wanted to ask you, how do you feel about greenwashing? And especially about greenwashing in the carbon offsetting space because well, handprint is operating there. I will answer this question as soon as possible, but I need to plug in my apparently I have plugged in my
00:23:14
Speaker
charger in the room. Okay. My computer was on my brain. So, are you still there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm here. I'm here. There are my screens. No problem. All right. So, how do I feel about greenwashing in general? I think that, I mean, I have a controversial opinion on greenwashing where I'm actually in favor of greenwashing.
00:23:43
Speaker
And not because I think it's good that companies say things about, oh, we are very, very socially or environmentally responsible. While it's not true, that's obviously not good. But the fact that companies want to do this shows unequivocally that there is consumer and customer demand for more sustainable products.
00:24:12
Speaker
That's one thing. So the fact that the practice exists proves that actually being more sustainable or at least appearing more sustainable is valuable. Secondly, given the world we live in where any kind of little nuggets of newsworthy gossip and information will travel through the internet at light speed and will
00:24:40
Speaker
reach anyone who's interested very quickly, it has become increasingly hard for companies to hide bad behavior. This is definitely true at the social level. It's also increasingly true at the environmental level. Let's look at a very simple example. If companies will make claims about their carbon emissions, especially, let's say, energy companies.
00:25:10
Speaker
We now can have independent organizations using satellite data can actually verify whether these claims are real or not. And if you get caught lying, then increasingly there are strong repercussions. So there might be legal repercussions, especially as
00:25:29
Speaker
Different countries, US, Europe, even China, are moving towards mandatory disclosures of ESG performance, so environmental, social and governance performance. China is not mandatory yet, but they are moving in this direction as well, and many other countries are following suit.
00:25:47
Speaker
We see the work being done by the task force for climate-related disclosures and the task force for nature-related disclosures. We see an increasing tendency to formalize the reporting requirements of companies
00:26:03
Speaker
And what's interesting, if you look at, for instance, specifically what's happening in the US, the SEC has basically, in its latest guidance, has told companies, and this is for publicly listed companies, that they will need to have their emissions
00:26:21
Speaker
externally verified by an auditor. Now that's going to be very costly, but it also will make, again, it's going to make those claims, the false screen rushing claims harder. And I think the
00:26:34
Speaker
The benefit that I see there is that when companies make these claims and they are not based on reality, or they are based on reality, but they are very kind of shaky, then the likelihood that they will face some kind of public outcry for this is increasing rapidly with digitization, with the global penetration of the internet, and with increasing awareness from customers.
00:27:03
Speaker
And so I believe that practice, as long as it remains appealing,
00:27:11
Speaker
just continues to prove that there is a strong appeal for more sustainable practices, and companies that get called out will need to change, or they will lose their ability to serve their customers, because their customers are just going to walk away. Just to give another piece of information there, there recently was a study done in the UK
00:27:38
Speaker
unconscious quitting. So to what extent are employees willing to or actually leaving their job because their employer, the company they work for, is not aligned with their values?
00:27:54
Speaker
This is a reasonably recent phenomenon and it's really reached massive scale. I think there are more than 50% of people in the UK said, yeah, I would quit my job or I am quitting my job because I don't think the company that I'm working for has sufficient, not sufficient in terms of environment, does care enough about climate change.
00:28:22
Speaker
I see lots of those trends, these trends at the employee level and these trends at the customer level are really interacting. That's why I think that the greenwashing in itself actually may have
00:28:35
Speaker
some positive effects.
Handprint's Impact and Strategies
00:28:37
Speaker
Now, there are negative effects, of course, if individuals are tricked into believing that a company is more sustainable, that may obviously also affect their purchasing decision, that's not ideal. But overall, I'm somewhat of the belief that this may actually be a positive thing.
00:29:00
Speaker
So you think like if they're doing it, they're going to get caught eventually. So they're going to have repercussions, but it takes a long time, I'd say, because they're doing it for a long time without repercussions. And that's the problem with greenwashing.
00:29:15
Speaker
No, and that's absolutely true. And this is, of course, the major counter-arguments to my point. Companies can get away with it for a long time. One of the complexities there with greenwashing is also that it is very hard to define what it really is.
00:29:35
Speaker
Because it basically really relates to perception, right? And the simple example here, if I'm an individual and I plant 100 trees every month, or I pay for the planting of 100 trees every month, then I'm potentially a very kind of sustainable and green person. If, I don't know, Chevron, the oil company does the same, and then builds an advertising campaign around we're planting 100 trees every month, they are greenwashing.
00:30:04
Speaker
Fundamentally, at the level of the ecosystem, the two actions are equivalent. The planet doesn't care about who does what for what reason, which is important. But the messaging is very different. And the scale at which one expects an organization, let's say like Chevron or Exxon Mobilism, to do something would be very different. And so this is why I think greenwashing is very complex.
00:30:32
Speaker
Because right now, we've had this conversation recently with one of our prospects in France. They read this article about carbon credits being kind of discredited as an outcome of some research done by the Guardian and a variety of other groups. And as a consequence, they said like, oh, we've read this article.
00:30:55
Speaker
Because people have limited understanding of what exactly has happened there and all of the interesting things of this study, their kind of takeaway is we can't plant trees anymore because that's greenwashing. And that's fundamentally the wrong takeaway.
00:31:11
Speaker
So I think there are real risks with exposure. There are real risks with trying to say, this is good and this is bad. Many things are gray. And I'm still in the middle of figuring out how I feel about this myself. Unfortunately, there is no
00:31:37
Speaker
standard that has been set to say like, if you're doing this, then you can make legitimate claims about being maybe a sustainable organization or a regenerative organization. And we see there are voluntary systems like the 1% for the planet or similar initiatives around the world.
00:32:00
Speaker
There is no kind of global agreement. And as a consequence, brands, especially brands that are very consumer facing, are always at risk of being accused of this. And that fear might actually also create a lot of paralysis.
00:32:20
Speaker
risking something and then not doing enough. We might prefer to stay in the background and not do anything because the risk of being accused of greenwashing is right. And then the consequence of that is probably worse than nobody talking about you. So your slogan and the handprint tech is sustainability pays off. So how does the company achieve this?
00:32:48
Speaker
What Hambrin does is fundamentally different from what many of the companies in sustainability do. Most companies when we look at sustainability right now focus on reducing negative impact. Reduce your emissions, reduce your energy consumption.
00:33:04
Speaker
reduce your material waste, all of those things. And basically, if the focus is reduction or elimination, then the direct consequence of this tends to be cost savings, which is very clear how it pays off. So what Handprint does is quite different because we are actually telling companies that they should incur additional costs. But doing so is going to increase their
00:33:32
Speaker
strategic growth success or the kind of KPIs. And so what we have, for instance, doing and what we've shown is that depending on the type of industry or the type of organization you are, if you embed positive impacts in the interaction you have with your
00:33:53
Speaker
Stakeholders with your key stakeholders you can actually improve your business outcomes. So let me give some concrete examples. So we've we created this plugin for income versus I mentioned this where we started and we've tested with one of our clients in Australia that implementing this plugin and demonstrating to the customer at the moment that they're making a purchase. Oh, by the way, if you're buying this we are planting a tree.
00:34:23
Speaker
That simple act increased our sales by 16%. And this is baffling. I mean, that result was surprisingly high. And we did this with Google, so it's a pretty reliable result. But an increase in sales by 16% from your AB testing, a new feature, anyone who's in e-commerce would know that that is an incredibly high effect.
00:34:51
Speaker
This was a key proof of concept that there is something you can do that will actually increase sales. We're now exploring in collaboration with another company,
00:35:02
Speaker
And also in e-commerce space, whether you can incentivize individuals to register their email address, which is a key thing for future marketing, by giving them impacts rather than discounts. And so discounts are the most common thing. You get 15% discount if you register and the first item bought. But what if you say you get two trees or one tree?
00:35:25
Speaker
or a call or two hours of education, whatever, like some kind of positive impact. So this is now an experiment we're running. We'll see what that gives. We've also seen in advertising space that we can't disclose the company yet. And so we've done a campaign where we embedded impacts in the advertising unit. So basically under the ads that is pushed to a variety of
00:35:51
Speaker
new sites, and so with our partner Teets, the advertiser, the brand, was able to put this message that this ad was going to support elderly people getting access to food in Japan. And so what we found in doing so is that creating this little banner underneath the ad had a very strong and positive effect on brand recall, on attention, on
00:36:19
Speaker
kind of the value of the brands in Japan increases. So we measured all of this as well as on click-through rates, like everything we care about in advertising basically improved significantly like it to an ordinary campaign. So again, clear business value. Then in the banking space, I think the most successful example here is Alipay, so the Chinese mobile payments app, that back in 2016 created and first a
00:36:50
Speaker
simple forestry tool that enabled their users, about 500, 700 million people in China that are using Alipay, to earn energy points if they were engaged in a variety of behaviors that were typically both considered to be sustainable, but also very strategically aligned with what Alipay was doing.
00:37:16
Speaker
So you could earn energy points for like putting your bills online through Alipay or taking the bus instead of driving to work or walking because of course if you walk then Alipay is allowed to track your movement and that's valuable data. So lots of those maybe more or less insidious things
00:37:35
Speaker
that enabled Alipay to gain a lot of information about you, but you were rewarded with energy points. And once you collected enough energy points, you could plant a virtual tree. And once you cared for your virtual tree by virtually weathering it and all of that, Alipay would actually plant a tree in, somewhere in the Mojave Desert in China. And it's the most successful reforestation project in the world, run by a company.
00:38:06
Speaker
What's incredible about it is that it's been years now that this new feature within Alipay has been created. And when I talk to my Chinese students, all of them, I still haven't found a single exception. All of them use it. All of them check it every day.
00:38:28
Speaker
And it's the first thing they do in the morning, because the other pain very cleverly gamified the system so that if you, you're earning energy points, let's say on a Monday, and if you don't claim them, choose the morning, I think before seven to eight a.m., like really early, then your friends can steal your points.
00:38:47
Speaker
So they gamify it, they force attention on the app, strategically very clever, which means that individuals are doing this on a daily basis and it takes up to a year before they earn enough energy points on average for Alipay to plant a tree. So the financial rewards.
00:39:06
Speaker
in terms of creating a positive environmental impact is extremely low and the effort is extremely high and still it's extremely successful. So I really believe that companies can heed the lessons of how to really gamify and use customer engagement to create kind of desirable consumer actions.
00:39:31
Speaker
or nonconsumption actions here there is so much to be done and this is possible in the in the in the banking industry general in insurance in and so many different industries where.
00:39:46
Speaker
that kind of the knowledge of behavioral economics and this idea of like, how do we match people to making the right choices can be implemented successfully. And people maybe more than we expect. And I think this is especially true in the US and Europe and coming in Asia and also definitely true in Australia. People are willing to make small, regular efforts for the collective good.
00:40:16
Speaker
And I think that is something that companies really need to seize on in order to achieve these environmental goals. And that's really the essence of what Handprint is trying to do with all of our clients.
Beyond Carbon: Biodiversity and Natural Capital
00:40:31
Speaker
How do we find that KPI that makes you successful? How do we embed impact into that KPI? And if that KPI is consumer facing or
00:40:40
Speaker
or apartment facing or employee facing, then you're going to see the positive consequences for your business from doing so. I wanted to ask you one more thing.
00:40:54
Speaker
You're obviously in this carbon offsetting space, business space, and you're very active on social media, and you regularly post blogs, videos, and talk about the problem of carbon tunnel vision. So can you talk a bit about that, about the content that you're producing and, well, the point of view on this issue?
00:41:16
Speaker
Sure. So I think as an entrepreneur, I probably have to say that I'm an entrepreneur now. It's still weird. Yeah, being active on LinkedIn is very useful, right? So it can create a lot of attention. You can use, of course, kindred spirits and
00:41:34
Speaker
And sometimes, if you're very lucky, you can do something that kind of touches the right nerve and goes viral. And so one of the things that's really kind of at the essence of Handprint is that while we started out as an organization that was focused specifically on mangrove restoration, we've kind of expanded our scope into any type of positive impact that's aligned with sustainable development.
00:42:00
Speaker
One of the things we realized in the kind of current sustainability narrative that the only currency companies really understand is carbon. And this leads to a lot of problems. Problem number one is that biodiversity from an environmental aspect is overlooked.
00:42:21
Speaker
As a smarter person, when me once had the name, sorry, I can't remember the name, if we look at climate change as an existential threat, it is because it will force us, if climate change would really start becoming even more problematic than it already is, it will force us to change the way we organize human life.
00:42:45
Speaker
Travel will become more difficult with environmental disasters. It might become much more costly, the way we produce energy. It's going to force us to change the way we organize human life. And there will be more human life. But the biodiversity crisis, if we look at that as an existential crisis, it's not about changing the way we organize.
00:43:07
Speaker
it is fundamentally changing or challenging the fact that we are alive. So in many ways, the biodiversity crisis, although right now it's been receiving much more attention, is a much more serious existential threat to humanity, to human life as we know it, than climate change. And the problem of carbon tunnel vision is that right now,
00:43:37
Speaker
Companies and countries might be forced into making a trade-off that is typically about, okay, is it more environmental or is it more economic? But the reality is that, first of all, that trade-off is false. There is no economic growth without a planet.
00:43:58
Speaker
So the question is always like, if people say like, oh, but we have to balance these things, it's like, no, you don't have to balance. It's very clear that we can't have economic growth in a world where there is no air to breathe, or where there's no clean air, or where everyone is sick because of air pollution. And so that kind of balancing logic requires two systems to be independent, not one system, which is the economic system, to be entirely dependent on the environmental system.
00:44:28
Speaker
We have to realize that. We have to realize as well that when it comes to making decisions, purely considering the carbon avoidance or the carbon sequestration potential at the expense of the biodiversity potential might be a short-term patch that eventually leads to much more bleeding.
00:44:54
Speaker
And one kind of key example here that's easy enough to understand is that we know, for instance, that bamboo is a very fast growing tree, which is useful because it means it absorbs carbon very quickly. Does that mean that it would make sense to do every reforestation project in the world globally with bamboo? From a carbon perspective, you might argue, yes.
00:45:23
Speaker
But from an ecosystem perspective, from a biodiversity perspective, this would be absolutely terrible. And there are many reasons for this, but first of all, you don't necessarily want to introduce non-native species in areas where they're
00:45:38
Speaker
They are not native because this creates harm to the local biomes. Secondly, bamboo might be good at capturing carbon, but it might not be very good at storing carbon in the long run. Mangroves are much better at this because they store a lot of carbon in the soils. And of course, if you want to, so as a consequence, we already need to make those decisions, saying like, okay,
00:46:02
Speaker
recreating forests from a man-made perspective, which is what we need to do right now. We know that if we compare a man-made forest to an organically grown, kind of spontaneously growing forest, that the man-made forest absorbs a lot less carbon. So even just from the carbon perspective, we know we are not as good as nature itself as creating a
00:46:27
Speaker
biodiverse rich ecosystem that leads to sufficient amount or the same amount of carbon sequestration. So the carbon tunnel vision that is kind of very present in sustainability debates I think poses might be a short-term solution but in reality creates a lot of long-term liabilities and so when talking about
00:46:52
Speaker
kind of climate change, we really should be very considerate about nature in general as well. And recognize that the way forward is not by purely thinking about
00:47:11
Speaker
What are my carbon emissions and how do I reduce them? What is thinking about what is my social capital? What is my human capital? What is my intellectual capital? What is my financial capital? And what is my natural capital? And we need to start thinking about organizations, whether they're for profit or non-profit, as
Advice for Future Sustainability Leaders
00:47:37
Speaker
actors that have a responsibility towards the creation and preservation of natural capital in the same way that they have a responsibility towards the creation and preservation of financial, human, intellectual, and social capital. And if we get to that point, then we're going to be much closer to a world that we can equitably enjoy with all human beings
00:48:09
Speaker
Simon, for the end, since we don't have much time left, I wanted to ask you two questions. They're fairly simple. As a professor, what would you advise your students and your young professionals who are interested in sustainability and climate change? And what's the future of handprint tech?
00:48:29
Speaker
Okay, so as a professor, my advice would be, if you're interested in sustainability, get into the space. You don't necessarily need a lot of experience, of course it's useful. Everything you need to know, you can probably learn on the internet.
00:48:48
Speaker
Without, I would say, maybe in competition with kind of AI and maybe even blockchain, it is the most exciting space to be in right now. It is where all of the big companies are. It is where all of the VCs are. If you think about venture capital and you want to be an entrepreneur, venture capitalists are basically people who don't want to grow old and they want to hang out with the cool kids. Right now, all the cool kids are in climate tech, nature tech, AI,
00:49:15
Speaker
If you're on that intersection you're going to meet with all of those people. I think it's a super exciting time to be in the space. It's frustrating, it can be hard work, but I highly recommend anyone that is interested. If you want to come and do an internship, we won't pay you, but if you want to get experience,
00:49:35
Speaker
Feel free to reach out and we'll try and facilitate that wherever you are in the world. It doesn't matter. So yeah, I always tell my students it's the most exciting area. There's so much happening. There's so much need for more talent and for more knowledge and for more ideas. So yeah, everyone is welcome in this space. And then where do I see the future for Handprint? Well,
00:50:02
Speaker
As a startup, you're always in between greatness and complete annihilation and demise. So we're still in that space. So I'm very hopeful. I think there is a lot of positive signals from the market that we are on the right track. It remains a very hard market to be in as well.
00:50:27
Speaker
Convincing companies, especially larger companies, to experiment with these new ways of thinking, which we kind of summarize under regenerative strategy rather than kind of sustainability, remains hard, especially in this day and age where we are of course still kind of ruling from a global
00:50:47
Speaker
from the war in Ukraine where we still have a lot of kind of issues with interest rates, which is interest rates going up after the COVID pandemic, which leads to higher costs of capital and as a consequence, reduced venture capital investment and in general just reduced investment. And so all of those things are still pretty important, but
00:51:12
Speaker
I think the future for Handprint is bright. We are launching our banking products, which we're really bullish on. This will enable any bank in the world to issue a bank card that tops up for the planet or that rewards its customers for making specific green behaviors or for saving money or whatever. Banks can design their own logic. I think this is a really exciting product.
00:51:41
Speaker
We're advancing our voucher capability so that companies can hand out impact vouchers to their employees or other stakeholders and empower those people to actually choose the types of positive impact they want to contribute to that has very valuable engagement benefits, but also learning. What we're trying to stimulate is this idea that companies should crowdsource their CSR strategy, shouldn't be decided by
00:52:10
Speaker
the CSR manager or the sustainability manager on his or her own, especially because so many companies are struggling with engaging their employees in their wider sustainability story. So that's very exciting. And then, yeah, I think the
00:52:30
Speaker
The monitoring capabilities that we've developed and that we are developing with a variety of partners when it comes to reforestation coral reef reconstruction biodiversity assessments are also very exciting and we realize that
00:52:47
Speaker
even the largest companies are really struggling with this. And so we had a conversation recently with a large company, not going to name them, but they are using a lot of good products. And so they manage lots and lots of forests. And when we're talking to the people in charge of that process, we ask them, how do you collect data about the state of change in your forests?
00:53:12
Speaker
and they told me their own computers in Excels of different people in Excel, but how do you know?
00:53:22
Speaker
the state of every forest and like, oh no, no, we don't. And so the ability to collect data at scale and kind of streamline homogenized data to make it easily accessible, to make it easily auditable is I think something that handprint was developed and kind of unknowingly we've realized that this is a massive problem that large companies have and that we can help them solve when it comes to their kind of
00:53:49
Speaker
Corporate Philanthropy or CSR in general. So yeah, I'm really hopeful about those capabilities that they're going to find their way into the market and that by the end of the year, we'll have a successful series A launch and that will
00:54:05
Speaker
I mean, our big goal is to increase our impact in such a way that at some point, hopefully in the next two or three years, maybe it's a bit optimistic, let's say five years, that handling becomes a gigacorn, which would mean an organization that removes more than one gigaton of carbon from the atmosphere through its operations. And we want to find some equivalent terms for biodiversity protection and for social impact creation.
00:54:34
Speaker
We haven't found those yet. So if your listeners have any idea, please let us know. But yeah, we're hoping to massively increase our handprint in the world as an organization. And if we can do that, then yeah, we will be successful. And that's great. But then also the planets and all of its inhabitants will be better off. And that's pretty important. Well, Simon, thank you a lot.
00:55:04
Speaker
Keep up with the good work and your great thought leadership. I really love your articles, so...
00:55:16
Speaker
Thank you for tuning into our podcast today. We hope you enjoyed the discussion and gave some valuable insights. Please don't forget to hit that subscribe button and leave a comment or a review. We would really appreciate that. We appreciate your support and we're looking forward to having you join us again and next time. So until then, take care and keep learning.