Environmental Resources Management

hi everyone and welcome to this next episode of all in the sustainable business podcast it's great to have you with us today uh we're recording this one just at the very start of october and um a great set of guests today interesting moment in the year everybody who's on the call today and we'll do proper introductions in just a moment was at climate week in new york so we'll do a little bit of reflecting back on that Mark Lee, Global Director of Thought Leadership at ERM and one of the regular hosts.

I'm with Chris Coulter, who's the CEO at Globescan.

Chris, hi and welcome.

Really doing air quality work, atmospheric modeling, supporting industry though.

So really always supporting industry on growth because industry is critical to our infrastructure, but making sure that they were in compliance, Mark.

ERM obviously does some of this.

I used to work for a company that competed with ERM many years ago.

But helping them acquire their air permits and all of that.

So I remember that clearly.

And you served as a partner at ERM in South Africa, focusing on sustainability and climate change.

And you actually began your career at Accenture's strategy team focused on energy and natural resources.

progressing from a consultant analyst in London to a manager strategy in South Africa.

And so they are dependent on top management buying into what it is that they feel is required either in reaction to the law or in reaction to something or possibly proactively because they can see that things are going to happen and And of course, your background is in business administration.

So I just, you know, I wonder if you want to share a few insights of what is the best way of making a case for, you know, an argument for the business case for ESG internally, you know, and how do you get that top management buy-in?

I mean, I think I was very lucky because one of the earliest projects that I had when I came into pure, what I call pure sustainability consulting, which was, you know, when I sort of moved from Accenture into ERM, was actually a project where we were working with a mining company and we were looking to really articulate what is the value of sustainability when it's integrated very early into capital projects so if you're thinking about developing a mine you know you make decisions at the onset that essentially you're going to be locked in for 30 years um and you're very good tech usually at making what we call technical decisions so either around the financials or around the engineering piece, because, you know, it's kind of, you know, what you're building, you're very bad at making decisions around the non-technical aspects, the communities around you, the environment around you.

And usually you have project managers that are incentivized to get a project through the investment committees as quickly as possible that tend to completely underestimate your kind of longer term risks around communities, social, you or the environment.

[upbeat music] Hi, everyone, and welcome to this next episode of the ERM Sustainable Connections podcast.

I'm Mark Lee.

I'm our-- the global director of thought leadership at ERM.

If you've listened in before, you've probably heard my voice, then I just wanna say welcome back and thank you for listening to yet another one of our episodes.

Really interesting conversation, I think, today.

I am not gonna do this by myself.

I am really happy to be joined by two people who know these topics in the region we're gonna talk about really well.

Those people are Jennifer Park, who is the head of impact at Alterra, and then my colleague Peter Rawlings, who is our lead in the Middle East at ERM.