I'm a big fan of the concept of Indoor Vertical Farming, so when I came across the company &ever I reached out to their CSO, Mark Korzilius and asked him to come on the podcast to tell me more about their operations.

&ever is a startup in the vertical farming space with a large operation in Kuwait, some interesting hyperlocal operations in Germany, and a larger plant (sorry, bad pun!) opening in Singapore.

I loved that in this interview with Mark, he was very realistic about the advantages of vertical farming - not promising that it will save the world, but rather giving a sober, studied view of its advantages, and the huge advantages they bring.

As you can probably tell, I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I hope you enjoy listening to it too.

If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page, head on over to the Climate 21 Podcast Forum, or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

And if you want to know more about any of SAP's Sustainability solutions, head on over to www.sap.com/sustainability and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover the show. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Music credit - Intro and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

So much of what's happening in the climate space revolves around geopolitics that I thought it might be interesting to bring an expert in to talk about that.

So, I invited Jacob Shapiro to come on the podcast to talk about these issues. Jacob is the Founder and Chief Strategist at Perch Perspectives, as well as the host of the Perch Pod podcast.

As we covered the supply chain risk implications of geopolitics in the podcast, I published a lightly edited version of this conversation (less climate info, more supply chain data) on the Digital Supply Chain podcast.

But we covered off its of other climate related topics in this chat too.

As you can probably tell, I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I hope you enjoy listening to it too.

If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page, head on over to the Climate 21 Podcast Forum, or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

And if you want to know more about any of SAP's Sustainability solutions, head on over to www.sap.com/sustainability and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover the show. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Music credit - Intro and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

Boston Consulting Group is one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the world.

In September 2020 BCG committed to going Net Zero by 2030, and carbon negative thereafter. And they are committing "$400 million over the next decade to enable BCG teams to drive climate and environmental impact across industries and countries".

Then in late January of this year (2021) BCG CEO Rich Lesser wrote a post on the World Economic Forum blog titled "Supply chains can be a climate game-changer. Here's why"

Intrigued and wanting to know more, I reached out to Michel Frédeau and Daniel Weise at BCG. Michel is a Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG and is their Global Leader, Climate & Environment. While Daniel, a Managing Director and Partner is BCG's Global Topic Leader Procurement.

We had an excellent wide-ranging conversation covering not just BCG's Net Zero commitments, but also how they help their clients with their carbon commitments.

As you can probably tell, I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I hope you enjoy listening to it too.

If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page, head on over to the Climate 21 Podcast Forum, or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

And if you want to know more about any of SAP's Sustainability solutions, head on over to www.sap.com/sustainability and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover the show. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Music credit - Intro and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

In the episode of this podcast where I talked to JP Morgan's Head of ESG Debt Capital Markets, Paul O'Connor, Paul mentioned ESG and it's importance.

I wanted to dig into this in more detail, especially it's relevance to companies, the reasons for its increasing importance, and why it is suddenly a board level issue.

To that end I invited Adam Lyons to come onto the podcast to delve a little deeper into ESG and why organisations need to have this very much top of mind. We had a fascinating conversation on the topic.

As you can probably tell, I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I hope you enjoy listening to it too.

If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page, head on over to the Climate 21 Podcast Forum, or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

And if you want to know more about any of SAP's Sustainability solutions, head on over to www.sap.com/sustainability and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover the show. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Music credit - Intro and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

On this week's episode of the Climate 21 podcast we have a slight change of direction - away from the corporate world, and into the world of sport. Specifically powerboat racing. Not very sustainable, right? Well, that depends...

The new E1 Series is the first ever world electric powerboat series - yes, electric powerboats. In the same way that Formula 1 car racing brought about many advancements in modern cars, the E1 Series intends to modernise the marine world and push the envelope on technological advancements there.

To learn more about this fascinating space, I invited E1 Series founder and CEO Rodi Basso to join me on the podcast to talk about the thinking behind, and the aims of the E1 Series.

As you can probably tell, I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I hope you enjoy listening to it too.

If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page, head on over to the Climate 21 Podcast Forum, or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

And if you want to know more about any of SAP's Sustainability solutions, head on over to www.sap.com/sustainability and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover the show. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Music credit - Intro and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

The investment community has enormous influence on global markets  (by directing capital flows) and the climate emissions space is by no means immune to this.

I invited J.P. Morgan's Head of  EMEA ESG Debt Capital Markets Paul O'Connor to come on the podcast to talk about how this works.

I know next to nothing about finance as you can probably tell from the questions I was asking, but Paul was excellent, and explained it all extremely well, so even I could understand, and I learned loads.

As you can probably tell, I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I hope you enjoy listening to it too.

If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page, head on over to the Climate 21 Podcast Forum, or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

And if you want to know more about any of SAP's Sustainability solutions, head on over to www.sap.com/sustainability and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover the show. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Music credit - Intro and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

So, Auke Hoekstra is a bit of a legend in the renewable energy, and electric vehicle world.
Program Director at NEON research leading a team of 35 PhD's at Eindhoven University of Technology Auke and his team are at the forefront of R&D into clean energy generation, electricity storage, and usage in transportation.

However, it is on his Twitter account (@AukeHoekstra) where Auke really shines. He regularly posts detailed, carefully researched, Twitter Threads debunking silly scare stories published with the intent of making electric vehicles look bad (for example). Check out some of his excellent recent debunks here, here, and here, for example.

We had a super chat covering renewable energy, storage, and the electrification of transportation, including Auke's research showing that electric 40 ton trucks are not only feasible, but because of the savings they'll bring, the market for them will flip very quickly.

As you can probably tell, I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, and I learned so much. I hope you enjoy listening to it too.

If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page, head on over to the Climate 21 Podcast Forum, or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

And if you want to know more about any of SAP's Sustainability solutions, head on over to www.sap.com/sustainability and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover the show. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Music credit - Intro and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

In this week's episode of the podcast I'm talking Prof Stephanie Bertels - Prof Bertels is the Director of the Centre for Corporate Governance and Sustainability SFU Beedie School of Business as well as Founder and Executive Director of The Embedding Project.

We had a fascinating conversation covering the reasons why climate change matters to business today now more than ever (spoiler alert - it has to do with the risks to global markets), the setting of climate goals by organisations, and the fantastic work the Embedding Project is doing in this space, the setting of net zero emissions goals across industries, climate justice, and the climate interest trends of students in SFU.

This was an amazing podcast to make. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, and I learned so much. I hope you enjoy listening to it too.

If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page, head on over to the Climate 21 Podcast Forum, or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

And if you want to know more about any of SAP's Sustainability solutions, head on over to www.sap.com/sustainability and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover the show. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Music credit - Intro and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

The last Climate 21 episode of 2020

Quick announcement - to help serve you the podcast audience better I have created a chat room on my TomRaftery.com website. Just go to TomRaftery.com/climate and there you can leave ideas for topics for upcoming podcasts, speaker suggestions, feedback on episodes, or create your own topic for people to chat about

3 back episodes including:

• The inaugural episode with SAP Executive Board member Thomas Saueressig where he introduced SAP’s Climate 21 initiative, after which this podcast is named (btw, climate21.org)
• Episode 2 featured Shell Executive Committee member, and director of their Downstream business Huibert Vigeveno where we discussed Shell’s plans to decarbonise. As one of the world’s largest emitters, I felt it was important to have a rep from Shell on the podcast. In future episodes I hope to also talk to senior executives from other companies in this space
• Episode 3 featured Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Officer Lucas Joppa, and if you’ve not already listened to this episode, I urge you to do so. It was excellent to hear from Lucas all of the initiatives Microsoft are undertaking to go carbon negative, and suck from the atmosphere all the emissions their business has been responsible for since they first started operations in 1975

This may be the end of 2020, but it is not the end of the podcast obviously, I’ll be back again in January with some great new episodes such as:

• Paul O’Connor EVP Head of EMEA ESG Debt Capital Markets at JP Morgan talking about how the investment markets are rapidly moving money away from carbon intensive assets
• Prof Stephanie Bertels, Director, Centre for Corporate Governance and Sustainability SFU Beedie School of Business / Founder, Embedding Project
• Auke Hoekstra - Program Director NEON research at Eindhoven University of Technology — leads a team of 35 PhD researchers investigating power grids, and the electrification of transportation - he’s also debunker-in-chief of ICE FUD on Twitter!
• Rodi Basso - CEO of the E1 Series and
• Mark Miller - Mark was involved in the creation of the CARB and EU ETS Emissions trading platforms
• And more

2020 news

Bad year? Well some good news this year too which may have been overshadowed by the pandemic 24x7 new coverage

• Coronavirus caused a drop in CO2 emissions globally of the order of around 8%
• Reduced demand has dropped the price of oil
• Financial institutions started to take into account the risks of climate change 
• Companies & countries committed to drastic climate emissions cuts 

Finally, an ask - if you got value from this podcast, over this holiday period, please introduce a friend or colleague to this podcast. If they are unfamiliar with how podcasts work, show them how to subscribe and listen to podcasts on their phone. 

Also, if you could go to lovethepodcast.com/climate and leave a rating for the podcast, it would greatly help grow the audience for this podcast, which will help me to land even more great interviewees for even better episodes next year, so everyone wins!!!

And with that, I wish you happy, healthy, and safe holidays, and I’ll catch you all in 2021

And if you want to know more about any of SAP's Sustainability solutions, head on over to www.sap.com/sustainability

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Music credit - Intro and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

Microsoft has a stellar track record when it comes to climate emissions. Microsoft rolled out an internal price on carbon in 2012 - something most major companies today have yet to do.

And in January 2020 Microsoft announced its plan to become carbon negative by 2030, and by 2050 to remove from the atmosphere all the carbon Microsoft has been responsible for emitting since it began operations in 1975.

Given these audacious commitments, and the stated aim of this podcast to share successful climate emissions strategies and stories, I reached out to Microsoft to ask if their Chief Environmental Officer Lucas Joppa (@lucasjoppa on Twitter) would come on the podcast to share some of their thinking. Fortunately, he agreed to, and here we are!

This was an amazing podcast to make. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, and I learned so much. I hope you enjoy listening to it.

If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

And if you want to know more about any of SAP's Sustainability solutions, head on over to www.sap.com/sustainability and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover the show. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Music credit - Intro and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

Fossil fuel companies are in large part responsible for the current climate emergency we find ourselves in - both through the products they produce, and through delaying climate action by governments for as long as they possibly could.

Things have changed for the better more recently though. With the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement, with the global rise of renewables, and with an ever increasing number of climate-related disasters, fossil fuel companies (most of them at least) are starting to realise they need to transition to clean energy, and help their customers change too.

It is in this context, and seeing Shell's goal of being a net zero emissions energy business by 2050, I invited Huibert Vigeveno a member of Shell's Executive Committee and Director of Shell's Downstream operations to come on the podcast to talk to us. He very graciously agreed. Listen to what he had to say.

I have also reached out to executives from BP and Repsol to come on the podcast.

I really enjoyed making this podcast. I hope you enjoyed listening to it. If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

And if you want to know more about any of SAP's Sustainability solutions, head on over to www.sap.com/sustainability and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover the show. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Music credit - Intro and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Climate 21 podcast - thank you for your interest.

This is a podcast which aims to talk to senior executives, climate scientists, and other interested stakeholders to share successful climate emissions reductions stories/strategies to help inspire others on this important journey.

For this first episode I invited SAP Executive Board member Thomas Saueressig to come on the podcast to talk about SAP's Climate 21 initiative (after which this podcast is named), to explain the thinking behind it, how it can help significantly reduce climate emissions, and where we go from here. I can't overstate how significant the potential of this initiative is, which is why I'm excited to kick off this podcast, and the discussions that follow.

Why Thomas? Well as head of Product Engineering at SAP, this is very much his baby. Also, it was Thomas who introduced Climate 21 to the world at our Sapphirenow event in June of 2020 (after a preview of it at Davos at the start of the year), and it was Thomas who wrote about the need for Climate 21 here.

So, if you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

And if you want to know more about any of SAP's Sustainability solutions, head on over to www.sap.com/sustainability and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover the show. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane!

Music credit - Intro and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, where-ever you are in the world. This is the Climate 21 podcast, and I am your host, Global Vice President for SAP, Tom Raftery.

Climate 21 is an initiative by SAP to allow our customers calculate, report, and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

The climate 21 podcast will showcase best practices and thought leadership by SAP, its customers, partners and competitors (if they’re game) in emissions reductions. 

I will be interviewing climate change experts, executives from companies rolling out the best climate initiatives, and other stakeholders in the space.

Subscribe now to be sure you don’t miss an episode 😀