Non-governmental organization

And it's mostly invisible and very, very, very new.

And the problem, and that's also why I wrote this book, because working for the UN, I realized how plankton was totally absent in any discussions.

be it by a global international discussion from government, be it by global program from NGOs, national program in terms of research and so forth.

I mean, UK have been pioneering this clearly since in the very early days of the 20th century.

France, US are not doing that bad, but that's about it.

I mean, we were the only one to talk about this last time.

One discussion out of thousands of presentations, which is why I have designed Three years ago, two years ago, I mean, the book is an extension of this exercise.

I have designed the Plankton Manifesto, gathering the best 40 scientists in the world and tell them, OK, we need to design a small document, 10 to 20 page document, which is available online if you Google the Plankton Manifesto, 10, 20 page document for decision makers, political, NGOs and so forth, so they understand how Plankton is important and how we have a unique opportunity to understand it right now.

this was organized.

The old NGO thing all over again.

There's nothing new.

And USAID probably paid for it.

This is critical since traditional councils are often involved in hearing gender-based violence complaints.

For more than a decade, South Saharan has worked alongside NGOs, community members and lawyers in the effort to get women onto local cabinets.

Much of this work involves empowering women through training about their rights and potential to lead and supporting women to have conversations with male leaders, including council chiefs.

These women actually have a lot to offer.

absolutely none of you ask.

Last week, I went up to, up to? No, I went to the West, to Bristol in the UK to go to Wild Summit.

Now, those of you that might not have heard of Wild Summit before or those of you that are not from the UK and have most likely definitely not heard about it, it's basically a summit, obviously, with most of or a lot or hopefully all of The UK nature NGOs represented or present there to listen to different panel shows, different talks going on, keynote speeches, to connect, engage and come together as a community.

So I was there for two days.

It's only on a one day event, but I was there the day before helping an organisation out with a few things.

So I was shattered after it.

But I did manage to grab some recordings, which next week, hopefully... or in a couple of weeks, I'll be sharing a bit of a Wild Summit review where I'll kind of give my personal thoughts on it, maybe talk to a few more people and get their ideas on how it went and what it was like.

But we did get to speak to four NGOs very briefly at Wild Summit to hear about what their purpose was being there and what their hopes and actions are going to be after Wild Summit.

But then you realize in the middle of it, oh, whoa.

And I've been on, you know, I've been on NGO consult trips around the country, around the world-

That's right

... to some of the major hotspots.

I'm Michael Torrence, Chief Sustainability Officer at BMO.

On this show, we will talk with leading sustainability practitioners from the corporate, investor, academic, and NGO communities to explore how this rapidly evolving field of sustainability is impacting global investment, business practices, and our world.

The views expressed here are those of the participants and not those of Bank of Montreal, its affiliates, or subsidiaries.

Welcome back to another episode of the Sustainability Leaders Podcast.

We did two episodes on this one with Ilya Shumanov, who's a board member of Transparency International, Russia in Exile.

He also runs the Arteta, Russian climate or Russian Arctic and climate NGO.

And he's also doing his own investigative work under the banner of Tree Trace Investigations.

So let's listen to Ilya talking.

So they use up a lot of energy, it consumes a lot of water.

And because of that, I suppose, NGO and civil society organizations have come up to actually protest some of this building or development of data centers because of its environmental impacts.

I think there needs to be a standard.

And I believe that some of the state governments are working towards that.

So I've always been someone who fully commits to whatever I decide to do.

So when I went to India, I had met a woman in Australia who was funding projects through a local NGO called Manav Sadhna based out of Ahmedabad in India.

And I told her that I would go and build these, sorry, she was funding preschools.

So the goal of this, this program was to build 96 preschools in the Rampirinathekra in India, in this slum in Ahmedabad.