New Ventures Podcast

A small country like Bangladesh is vulnerable to both extreme events and slow deterioration of living conditions due to climate change. People migrate in droves when extreme events occur, they migrate in trickles as agriculture and fishing becomes unviable. The Climate Bridge Fund, supported by the German Development Bank, and implemented by BRAC, the world’s largest NGO aims at increasing the resilience of people as they migrate to urban areas.

They fund two types of projects. Some projects are implemented by small NGOs who work in informal settlements to improve sanitation conditions and help people seek new livelihood projects. Other projects implemented by BRAC itself help develop nationwide climate adaptation strategies. These projects need to be implemented with urgency but they do not cost the earth.

Sections Section 1: First 16 minutes to understand why people are moving on account of climate impacts?

Section 2: Next 28 minutes about the Climate Bridge Fund

Host : Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

New Ventures Website www.regainparadise.org

Guest Name : Dr Md. Golam Rabbani

Head of Climate Bridge Fund Secretariat at BRAC

Guests Website and contact details. : rabbani.golam@brac.net

https://www.brac.net/program/climate-bridge-fund/

Michael Poisson helps us understand the types of companies in the crowded ESG scoring industry. The industry is very crowded with various types of companies offering different data products based on the customer needs. Incoming regulations will lead to standardised products. Companies use broadly two types of approaches. One way is to make sense of publicly available data and the other is to use technology such as artificial intelligence and quantitative modelling. To some extent, these approaches are merging not least because all publicly available

information cannot be believed.

I host this podcast with Michael Poisson, Managing Director of IdealRatings which has the world’s largest database of ESG scores of public companies with my co-host Raven McMenemie of Eden Smith Group, a specialist data staffing and consulting business.

Sections Section 1: First 20 minutes about the ESG industry and ongoing trends

Section 2: Last 10 minutes about how AI can be changing the industry and managing a ESG data company

Host: Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise. www.regainparadise.org

and Raven McMenemie www.https://edensmith.group/

Guest : Michael Poisson Managing Director, IdealRatings

Author at the ESG Data Revolution: Sustainable Fuel for Tomorrow’s Business

Guests Website and contact details.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpoisson/

https://www.idealratings.com/

What you learn at a world class incubator? In this podcast , two entrepreneurs reflect on the time they spent at Carbon 13, Cambridge’s climate venture builder. Why did they apply? What happened when they meet their other cohort members? Did the experience help them? What is the progress they have made since then?

Finally, it seems to boil down to know to the maximum; “Know myself”

Sections Section 1: First 20 minutes about the businesses of Andy and Natalia

Section 2: About their experiences in Carbon 13

Host: Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

New Ventures Website www.regainparadise.org

Guest Name : 1. Andy Hale , CEO and Co-Founder at xtonnes, https://www.linkedin.com/in/drandrewhale/

2. Natalia Dorfman, CEO and Co-Founder at Kita, https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalia-dorfman/

Human wildlife conflict has social causes and is being exacerbated by climate change. Solving it requires an integrated approach. Technology is key but you cannot air drop it in these frontiers of climate change. To make real impact organisations of different types must come together and their funders will have to support these partnerships. Listen to this fascinating podcast to know how software technology is being tested among the Masai tribes in a partnership between two very different organisations and understand how these unusual partnerships can be nurtured to meet the twin crises in biodiversity and climate crises.

Sections Section 1: First 20 minutes about the nature of the problem that is being tackled.

Section 2: Next 15 minutes on the solution.

Section 3: Last 11 minutes on how these projects can be supported

Host Name : Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

New Ventures Website www.regainparadise.org

Guest Name : 1. Dr. Irene Amoke

Executive Director, Kenya Wildlife Trust

https://www.kenyawildlifetrust.org/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-irene-amoke-a61a9241/

2. James Alden

Founder, Climate Edge

http://www.climate-edge.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-alden-7a1b699a/

Deep Science Ventures is building climate businesses with a plan. What is required to reverse global warming? What are the constraints in reaching outcomes? What technology solutions can remove these constraints? Who are the best people to develop the technology? How can we give them opportunity to think about the problem?

Listen to this fascinating podcast about they are building companies in Direct Air Capture and Renewable Energy from these first principles.

Sections Section 1: First 18 P minutes on the Deep Science Ventures approach

Section 2: Next 35 minutes on the approach in action

Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

New Ventures Website www.regainparadise.com

Guest : Pina Fritz, Ph.D Head of Scoping Climate. Deep Science Ventures

Adam Tomassi-Russell Director Climate & Energy. Deep Science Ventures

Website

https://deepscienceventures.com/

Contact details

https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-tomassi-russell-75363352/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pina-fritz-phd-8896499b

The mining industry contributes more than 4 per cent of the global greenhouse gas emissions. That is about the share of cement and chemicals & amp; petrochemicals taken together. It also consumes water in areas where it is in short supply. Things can get worse. The transition to electric vehicles and renewable energy will increase the demand for minerals and rare earths several times over. Ore quality is declining and companies are digging deep to meet the increased demand. Listen to this podcast to know how IntelliSense is using artificial intelligence to help mining operations not only reduce the use of energy, water and chemicals but also become more profitable.

Sections Section 1: First 12 minutes in understanding the problem

Section 2: Next 14 minutes about examples of IntelliSense’s solution

Section 3: Understanding AI and peering into the future

Host: Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

New Ventures Website www.regainparadise.org

Guest Name and Designation Sam Bose, Founder & CEO, IntelliSense.io

Guests Website and contact details : https://www.intellisense.io/, https://www.linkedin.com/in/sambose/

Can the tools that we have – science, technology and business – address the issues that we face from climate change? After all, these are the very things that has brought us to this problem. So it is right to be skeptical. But then in the limited time these tools are all that we have. It is not practical to think that we will build everything afresh . This difficult problem can be solved if we use the same tools with a different mindset. This is why the philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 may need to be resurrected.

Sections Section 1: First 13 minutes introducing Rabindranath Tagore.

Section 2: Next  24 minutes about his philosophy and why it is important in this time.

Host :  Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

New Ventures Website www.regainparadise.com

Guest Name : Dr. Bashabi Fraser, Professor Emerita of English & Creative Writing
Director, Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs)
Edinburgh Napier University

Guests Website and contact details. https://scotstagore.org/bashabifraserwriter@gmail.com

2 people attract 15 volunteers. These 15 volunteers are supported by people across the UK. Seeing the success of this first group, scores of groups spring up across the UK and the world all working on recycling plastic waste for products such as survival blankets for people who have nothing else to keep warm during the winter. The groups partner with corporate organisations, charities and public bodies. Scaling this organisation does not take money, it needs “admin time”. Is this how future of climate business should look like?

Sections Section 1: First 6 minutes about the

Section 2: Next 17 minutes about how our organisation works

Host : Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

New Ventures Website www.regainparadise.com

Guest : Pen Huston, Founder, Crisp Packet Project

Guests Website : https://crisppacketproject.com/

Description:  Suppose millions of people come together to fund innovations that have the highest impact on solving the climate crisis. The areas they target are the priority areas science is telling us to focus on, not just the VC flavour of the year. The innovations they support are examined by intelligent common people as well as by experts. The innovators license out the technology so that solutions scale rapidly. That is what Time for Planet is trying to build and making progress on.

Sections Section 1: First 22 minutes about how Time for Planet is reinventing investing

Section 2: Next 23 minutes about what climate innovations Time for Planet is supporting and how.

Section 3: The impact Time for Planet can create.

Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

Website : www.regainparadise.com

Guest Name : Cecile Duranton, Managing Director, Time for Planet

Guests Website and contact details : https://join-time.com/en

Wasted food leads to a greenhouse gas emissions. Not only is food waste causing global warming but climate change will lead to greater food waste. Extreme events will damage crops. Unseasonal flowering will lead to short term surpluses. Food is wasted because as consumers we have some unsustainable habits and because retailers are seeking efficiency. Oddbox provides growers an option to sell the fruits and vegetables rejected by retailers and compensates them for cost of growing.

Sections Section 1: First 17 minutes about “what” is Oddbox doing

Section 2: Next 18 minutes about “why” food is wasted and “how” Oddbox’s solution is creating impact

Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

New Ventures Website www.regainparadise.com

Guest  Emilie Vanpoperinghe, Founder Oddbox

Guests Website and contact details. https://www.oddbox.co.uk/

The inside story behind the dramatic drop in renewable energy prices is often quite mundane. In this podcast, we discuss how nitty gritty technical and commercial details led to the rapid decline of offshore wind prices in the UK. The story is really that of a trusted organization bringing together industry players to collaboratively explore solutions to common problems. The Carbon Trust is now expanding the approach to floating wind and expanding the integration of wind energy to existing infrastructure. In promoting innovation in energy access it is trying some of these same tools on the energy access situation in Africa. Here it is using challenge funds to support a broad range of initiatives, collaborative approaches and an educational programme on energy access.

Sections Section 1: First 5 minutes about The Carbon Trust, the organisation

Section 2: Till 22 minutes about The Carbon Trust’s work in energy access

Section 3: Last 21 minutes about The Carbon Trust’s work in offshore wind

Name  Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

New Ventures Website www.regainparadise.com

Guest Name Angus Vantoch-Wood, Senior Manger, Carbon Trust

Guests Website and contact details. https://www.carbontrust.com/ https://www.preo.org/

Green hydrogen is necessary to decarbonise industry. It is possible to make green hydrogen from electrolysis process from renewable energy but the UK government has given out grants to test various ways of making green hydrogen from biomass. A few of them will go to the demonstration stage in the next few years. Post demonstration they can go to commercial stage. Depending on which technology makes its way down this path, green hydrogen can be produced much more cheaply and help both the agriculture and industrial sectors in the UK. Phoebus Power is experimenting with ways to use waste biomass and make green hydrogen. The ability to experiment with innovative approaches is what makes UK’s green hydrogen policy ambitious.

Sections Section 1: First 11 minutes about the various ways of producing green hydrogen and how the UK government is trying to explore the use of biomass.

Section 2: Till 38 minutes about what exactly Phoebus Power is trying to do with the grant and what could happen if they are successful.

Section 3: Last 9 minutes about other clean energy businesses Ravinder is involved in. 

Host : Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

New Ventures Website www.regainparadise.com

Guest : Ravinder Shan, CEO Phoebus Power

Guests Website and contact details. https://www.phoebuspower.com/, https://www.linkedin.com/in/rshan/

Helping climate businesses to get their first customers and the first seed investment is a very tough job. The Greenhouse at the at the Centre for Climate Change Innovation gets it done for about 60 to 70% of the companies they support during a twelve month process. More creditable: most companies they have supported are still in business defying the high mortality rates of start-ups. In this podcast, Naveed Chaudhry talks about the incubation process, the types of companies supported, the angel investing ecosystem in the UK. He goes on to provide two critical insights: specialised VC investors should be ready to invest large amounts in climate but not to chase market share and entrepreneurs should not chase grants and competitions at the expense of their own business.

Sections Section 1: First 29 minutes about what the incubator works.

Section 2: Upto 41 minutes on the impact created

Section 3: Investment patterns and ecosystem lessons

Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

New Ventures Website www.regainparadise.com

Guest Name : Naveed Chaudhry, Co-Founder & Head of The Greenhouse at the Centre for Climate Change Innovation

Guests Website and contact details : n.chaudhry@imperial.ac.uk

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/grantham/innovation/what-we-do/the-greenhouse/

Every report on climate finance claims that we need trillions to adapt to climate change and moans that the money is not coming through. In this podcast Jaideep Prabhu, the international frugal innovation guru, contemplates the future where not enough money is available soon enough. His message is one of hope.

Sections Section 1: First 22 minutes about how you can do a lot with less.

Section 2: How can we reorganise to transition frugally

Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

New Ventures Website www.regainparaise.com

Guest - Jaideep Prabhu, Professor of Marketing Cambridge Judge Business School

https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/faculty-research/faculty-a-z/jaideep-prabhu/

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/jaideep-prabhu-94b3102

Climate change will not cause disastrous impact. Vulnerability to it will. To reduce vulnerability, public and private managers will have to be clear headed about risks and plan for them. It is not hard to guess that all businesses will be subjected to greater physical risk. What is hard is to assess to what extent and in what time frame. Cervest uses machine learning and statistical modelling to make sense of very complicated scenarios. Its customers include organizations that have to mandatorily disclose climate risks, organizations managing global supply chains and architect firms building prominent new buildings.

Sections Section 1: First 22 minutes about how computing power, data and algorithms are harnessed to assess climate risks for specific assets

Section 2: Till 41 minutes about how this assessment can be used by organisations

Section 3: Last 10 minutes about managing a mission driven nerdy team

 Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

New Ventures Website www.regainparaise.com

Guest Name  Iggy Bassi, Founder & CEO Cervest

Guests Website and contact details. https://cervest.earth

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/iggybassi

Heatwaves, fires and flooding will impact physical and mental health and will cause additional pressures on public health facilities. This means that not only health facilities but also offices, building and public spaces will have to be designed keeping in mind the health of people who will use them. Architects have to build for this new world also keeping affordability and a growing shortage of construction material in mind. New technology will help but it is also important that architects learn from what worked in the past.

Section 1: First 14 minutes about Sumita and her approach to architecture

Section 2: Till 28 minutes about building for healthy living in a time of climate change

Section 3: Till 38 minutes about building techniques and technology for sustainability and affordability

Section 4: Last 6 minutes her advice for younger architects

Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

New Ventures - www.regainparaise.com

Guest Name and Designation Sumita Singha, architect, teacher, writer, artist

Guests Website and contact details- https://www.ecologicarchitects.com/ , https://uk.linkedin.com/in/sumitasingha

If we use climate data, we can take actions today at low cost and avoid a lot of pain later. Kayross collects climate data observed by satellites and then makes them useful for public and private investors by combining various sorts of data and interpreting the results using clever algorithms. Investors can

use this analysis to take informed effective decisions to manage risks and take positive action. With authentic data, they can also guard themselves against greenwashing.

Sections Section 1: What is observed? (1-11 mins)

Section 2: How does it help investors? (11-22 mins)

Section 3: How is the data made useful? (23- 43mins)

Sanjoy Sanyal, Founder Regain Paradise

New Ventures Website www.regainparaise.com

Guest Name : Christian Lelong, Director Climate Solutions, Kayrros

Website and contact details: https://www.kayrros.com/

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/christian-lelong

Listen to George Kibala Bauer, Director Digital Utilities, GSMA in this second episode as he reflects on underlying strategies of businesses using mobile and digital technologies to deliver basic services in emerging countries. Innovative companies are seeking out partners as the mobile companies have customer acceptance. Larger companies are partnering with the younger companies to increase their value to existing customers but also to service entirely new set of customers.   But it is also the responsibility of the larger companies to use technologies to help communities come out of poverty and help nations reach climate goals. Public organizations  are working with private initiatives to deliver basic services and gather data.

Listen to George Kibala Bauer, Director Digital Utilities, GSMA for a fascinating tour across Asia and Africa, as he talks about how private sector businesses are learning and experimenting and how the deep industry experience of the GSMA  is helping to build these businesses.

The GSMA Foundation has been running the donor funded Mobile for Digital Utilities Innovation Fund and has provided catalytic capital to support innovation in providing  energy, water and sanitation services to underserved communities in emerging economies.

Sanjoy Sanyal ( Director)

https://www.regainparadise.org/

While refrigerants cool commercial and industrial facilities they heat up the atmosphere. The refrigerant gases leak and while they stay in the atmosphere for a shorter term than carbon dioxide, they heat up the atmosphere to  a much greater degree.  This Catch 22 problem will become worse in a heating world.

Luckily solutions exist. One solution is to move to natural refrigerants (air, water and chemicals such as ammonia, butane, carbon dioxide and propane). To enable companies to effectively manage their refrigerants three steps are required. First, measure what is used and where it is used and how much is used. Second, mitigate and manage leaks. An equipment that is leaking refrigerants is also using more energy so plugging leaks also saves costs. Third, personnel will also have to learn about refrigerants. So far it is mostly relegated to the corner of the basements.

Listen to this podcast from Adrian Bukmanis to explain all this and also discuss what investors should look out for. First, there would be investments in the production of natural refrigerants. Second, there will be opportunities to support companies as they install monitoring software and make the switch. Finally, there will be a need for investment in safely disposing off the current generation of refrigerants when they come to the end of their life. These last opportunities will emerge as regulations tighten.

Sanjoy Sanyal (Director)

https://www.regainparadise.org/

Microbes can mimic cows  and you can pick and choose milk ingredients you can make in a cell factory.

Lactoferrin is a protein in human milk, animal milk, and other bodily fluids. Colostrum, the first milk made after a baby is born, is higher in lactoferrin. It is made from whey but only 1-2% of whey protein is lactoferrin.

Getting lactoferrin is resource intensive. It involves dairy (think methane emissions and water use) and then converting large quantities of whey into lactoferrin.  Very little quantity of it is available in the market and it is expensive.

TurtleTree is trying to make lactoferrin more available by growing it in microbes. Listen to Fengru Lin, Founder & CEO, tell you about how microbes can mimic what cows do and lactoferrin can be mixed with other products to make tasty products.

Milks from plant based sources have been around for a long time but here we are talking of developing specific nutritional products based on what you find in food.

P4G Partnering for Green Growth and Global Goals 2030 has been supporting pioneering partnerships in the areas of clean energy, water and sanitation, sustainable agriculture, sustainable cities  and circular economy.

Here she recounts some of the successful partnerships:

1. Creating a credit worthy market intermediary in Zambia for promoting renewable energy.

2. Deploying digital solutions for reducing water wastage in Asia.

3. Reducing plastic waste in the poorer communities of cities.

4.  Sourcing sustainable products from small holder farmers.

5. Developing sustainable industrial clusters.

Developed nations can use their climate finance commitments to help emerging nations develop vibrant and innovative approaches to address climate challenges. In this podcast, Robyn McGuckin Director of Partnerships at P4G makes the following points:

1. Public funds should support partnerships that bring innovative approaches to pressing problems.

2. Grant support to projects should be accompanied by capacity building to attract private capital.

3. There cannot be just one fixed approach. To support innovation, funders need to be agile, ready to adapt and be willing to fail.

It is possible to add revenue lines with upcycled products

CRUST Group makes beer from bread and rice that would be otherwise wasted. It also makes a sparkling drink from the parts of fruits that would otherwise be lost.

As it has learnt to make and sell these products, it also offers to partner with customers to take their food waste and convert that to a sustainable product. This helps their partners improve incomes, reduce costs and earn sustainability points.

Reducing food wastage is key to feeding the world in an era of climate change. Travin says that it requires collaboration and localized solutions.

In this podcast, Emir Nurov , Co-founder of Resync,  explains how digitalization technologies helps three types of customers.

First, they can help building owners take control of both the energy consumed and energy produced (given that many buildings are now also producing energy). The Resync system helps building managers both by alerting them to important decisions that need to be taken and automating routine decisions.

Second, they can help renewable energy power producers and the companies that set up, operate, and maintain the renewable energy plants to choose and maintain equipment. In addition to helping large renewable energy producers, the technology can also help smaller companies where the electricity grid is just one source of power and is backed up by both diesel and solar. Resync can help in seamlessly switching from one source to another.

Third, they can help residential consumers and the distribution utilities that serve them to help manage the electricity consumed at their own homes without going through the expense and effort of inserting sensors at each consuming point. Using machine learning technologies, Resync has learnt to spot patterns of appliance use and provide suggestions on when and how they should be used.

Consumers can send powerful signals from their spending habits.

Let’s first say what sustainability is not.

It is not about spending more money. It is not about feeling guilty. And there is no one way to achieve sustainability.

Sustainability is being thoughtful about what you eat and what you buy.

As sustainable consumers,  we need to be consciously deciding where and how to spend your money.

In this podcast with sustainable lifestyle blogger Dr. Luci Petlack we try and understand the many different things consumers are doing to  connect it with the wonderful things that entrepreneurs are doing.

And along the journey we discuss issues of history and justice in the quest for this transition.

Voluntary carbon markets are an important part of the transition path to a low carbon economy as companies reorient their businesses and technologies. No wonder then that carbon prices have been rising steadily in the carbon exchange that is being built by AirCarbon.

AirCarbon is a Singapore based company building an exchange for the world's most global commodity : carbon. Using a clever combination of tokens and blockchain technology, it is solving the problem of carbon prices being opaque. It was launched in late  October 2020 and even during the pandemic has attracted 200 member clients. The technology allows geographical portability and AirCarbon is helping build an exchange in Rio, Brazil.

Getting close to the customer experience and targeting early adopter markets.

For many people across the world, Thai is the preferred cuisine for a Netflix evening takeout or a special dinner. Smith Taweelerdniti,  founder of Let's Plant Meat, is developing plant based meat for Thai dishes. The trick he says is to try and meet the whole customer experience of savouring the Thai Basil chicken and not just to make the product taste like meat. Targeting early adopter markets - for example expat communities in digital nomad havens of Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Phuket - provides the company with the initial niche markets. It is also easier to reach global markets as it does not made from animal products.

Plant based meat is good for the global climate but  it also helps to clear up local pollution. Chiang Mai, the much loved tourist destination, is suffering from pollution arising from the need to grow crops to be used as animal feed. Let's Plant Meat also claims that it improves health.

Verification of carbon credits takes time and effort, so only large project developers have been able to invest in the upfront costs of carbon credits. Solstream's algorithm tracks  the small quantities of solar electricity produced by millions of solar home systems distributed across vast rural areas and converts them into carbon credits. These credits are now digital assets which can be sold by the solar home system company or held on as a digital asset whose value should come up as more large companies make net zero declarations. These carbon credits should be more valuable than that produced by a large renewable energy farm because they have social benefits as well. They help rural children study better and prevent the noxious fumes of kerosene. Their use avoids deforestation which helps communities be more resilient to climate change.

Listen to this podcast as Karim Jabbar takes time to explain the geeky technology used by Solstrom. The electricity generated by these small solar systems are assessed real time by tracking the small amounts of money consumers pay on these pay as you go systems and then using an algorithm that has been verified by DNV. The number crunching is done on a distributed ledger system (like in blockchains) which ensures that the system is tamper proof and that it can go on functioning even if Solstrom goes under.

In this podcast, Troy Carter, co-founder & CEO of Earthshot Labs talks of putting together an international collaboration to help learn what it takes to protect nature. Earthshot Labs is pioneering a high tech solution to help empower  communities with small scale, low-tech and high-touch fixes to the ecological crisis. With the use of simulations they would learn about what needs to be done. With the use of data, they would be able to access carbon money without the current difficulties.

All this would sound like science fiction except Earthshot Labs has just received funding from a very well known Silicon Valley investor and will be putting its theories in practice in South America.

If you are an innovator in clean energy, smart grids, carbon markets and electric vehicles anywhere in the world there are four reasons you should consider being in Singapore.

IP Protection. R&D support. Green finance. Supportive customers.

And the Sustainable Energy Association of Singapore should be on your list of organizations to visit. In its capacity as an industry association, it wants the industry to grow. And has a focus on providing the ecosystem for innovative young companies.

There is something beautiful about timber that makes it the construction material of choice for some of the iconic tourism projects . Add to that, the efficiency that comes from prefab constriction.

For timber to have its rightful place in the sustainable world, digital technologies will have to tell you exactly where it comes from and about how its cultivation is protecting nature and communities.

To understand the international nature of  new food, you can follow the career of Eugene Wang. He took his Taiwanese Buddhist family's recipe to California ten years back to make seafood substitutes. The New England crab cakes made from plant protein are his personal favorite. Then he came back to Singapore where space is at a premium to work on making protein powder by fermenting microalgae. Now he is in the Netherlands working with international food companies.

Along the way he talks of the importance of how making alternate food is not that hard but getting the "correct recipe" for customer and regulatory acceptance is an entirely different story.

Not all companies can say exactly where they are on their path to a net zero carbon footprint. Siemens can.  And the technology it uses to do so is now also available to others.

Listen to this podcast with Sunil Yadav, Head Building Performance & Sustainability to know the four components of the solution that Siemens has for buildings and data centers. Together, they will help you define your path, reduce energy consumption, procure renewable energy, manage and measure your progress.

Sunil also talks of the advantages of being based in Singapore and the overall state of the ASEAN market.

If quality clean technology products exist, results based financing can help create markets for them

How can you ensure that markets do not collapse when incentives are withdrawn?

In this podcast, Martijn Veen Global Head of Energy at SNV  tells us how. There are four things really:

There has to be a  data driven mechanism to allocate incentives.

The processes have to be clear and transparent

There needs to be some experimentation ahead to understand what will work

The incentive provider will have to work with commercial capital providers

Why should industrial and commercial customers in ASEAN adopt microgrid solutions?

Canopy Power, the company founded by Sujay Malve, has been setting up microgrids for remote resorts in the Asia Pacific region. Customers have been benefiting from the money saved from diesel. But post pandemic, Sujay hopes that a focus on attracting sustainability conscious customers seeking a staycation would drive customer demand. New categories of customers -for example fisheries which export to Western markets – are also switching to cleaner power.

Canopy Power is in Singapore and though the pandemic has created multiple travel restrictions the Singaporean ecosystem helps attract customers, talent and finance.

What can Singapore tell us about urban sustainability?

Ken Hickson has been working in Singapore since the early 1980s. He published his first book on sustainability in 2009. In a weak moment, he would say "give up" because it is "like banging your head". But the moment quickly passes. In this inspiring podcast, Ken, who just celebrated his  77th birthday, talks about businesses which are bringing sustainability to the built environment in Singapore. He talks of his brand new project that he is working on for the London Design Festival and why the carbon embedded in the building materials is as important as the energy consumed inside buildings.

Crowdfunding can be a powerful tool. Not, however, if you think of it as the next cool thing.

In my conversation with Davinia Cogan she provides the following advice.

Entrepreneurs will have to do the ground work and prepare for a campaign. Incubators will have to really understand their companies and support them with fundraising over several years.

And foundations will have to work closely with platforms to tailor their initiatives to what the market needs.

Crowdfunding is a serious option for funding clean energy businesses

The  market took a bit of a hit last year but is still in a very respectable shape

Davinia Cogan, who has literally written the book on crowdfunding for clean energy access talks about the different types of crowdfunding and how the markets have reacted to covid.

In Davinia's words her interest in crowdfunding was piqued because it was so frustrating to see companies not get funded. But she worries that some of the problems with the other types of impact investing may make its way into crowdfunding too.

This is the first part of our podcast. In the second part, we take a deeper dive into how crowdfunding can work for African entrepreneurs.

What makes rural business in climate friendly technologies so hard to build?

Nancy Wimmer should know why. Thanks to support from Good Energies Foundation she has spent a decade in Bangladesh, a country that has built rural renewable energy businesses like no other. A few highlights of what she has learnt:

It requires dogged determination .

It requires specialized financing structures.

It requires obsession with quality.

It requires public sector entrepreneurship.

And if building it is hard , keeping it going is harder.