Mindy Lubber - The Voice of Sustainable Capitalism

Episode 95 of Cleaning Up was with Mindy Lubber, CEO and President of US sustainability non-profit Ceres. Mindy leads an all-women executive leadership team and more than 160 employees working to mobilize investors and companies to address global sustainability challenges. She has received the UN ’Champions of the Earth’ Entrepreneurial Vision award and twice named to Barron’s Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential women in U.S. finance. She has received the Climate Visionary Award from the Earth Day Network, William K. Reilly Award for Environmental Leadership from American University and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship from the Skoll Foundation.

It was a wide-ranging discussion about the state of climate action by governments and private actors. My three big takeaways were as follows:

• There has been an absolute revolution in corporate and investor engagement on the environment – and on climate in particular – over the past five years. The terrain is almost unrecognizable for those who, like Mindy and I, have been working on this for decades.
• Investors, who have historically been a force for inaction, are now pushing corporates to act more quickly. Their historic reticence and current enthusiasm for action are driven by the same force: fear of risk. Investors in fossil fuel assets, however, are still trying to slow action in order to mitigate the risk of stranded assets.
• There is, however, only so much that investors and the financial system can do. The heavy lifting from a policy perspective has to be done by pricing in externalities and opening up space for innovation in industries and sectors responsible for emissions.

You can listen to the full episode via any good Podcast platform, or watch it here.

Next week’s episode is with Aksel Lund Svingard, skiing legend and Deputy Chief Investment Officer of Noreslab, a Norway-based impact asset management platform in which the Capricorn Sustainable Investment Fund holds a 20% stake. It will live at 6pm UK time (BST) on Wednesday 20 July.