Breaking The Fever

In this episode, the first in our miniseries on climate finance, we speak with Ivan Frishberg, James Vaccaro, and Marilyn Waite about the banking sector and what it would take to scale its ambition and impact on helping to stem climate change.

We discuss:
· Incentives for banks to keep financing fossil fuels industry

· How banks can motivate their clients to improve climate performance

· The existential crisis the sector faces over the next decade

· Measuring the alignment of banks’ portfolios with climate goals

· How to get banks to say when they will divest from fossil fuels

· What shareholders and investors are doing to motivate banks to pursue climate goals

· How regulators enable long term harmful behavior such as the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure

Ivan Frishberg is the Director of Impact Policy for Amalgamated Bank, the U.S.’s largest B Corp bank and a member of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values. Ivan leads Amalgamated’s impact efforts by spearheading and proactively engaging in strategic initiatives at the bank, such as carbon and climate commitments.

James Vaccaro is the director of Re:Pattern, which works to catalyze business transformation and business-model innovation in service of positive social impact. James is a strategist and systems thinker with a background in sustainable finance. He acts as a Special Advisor to Triodos Bank. As part of a former strategy role there, he designed and facilitated learning, development, strategy and innovation programs to accelerate progress in sustainability sectors across Europe.

Marilyn Waite is a Program Officer in Environment at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Marilyn manages the foundation’s grant-making on climate and clean-energy finance with the ambitious goal of addressing climate change by accelerating the transition to a climate-friendly economy. Her grant-making mobilizes private capital investments in low-carbon and climate-friendly energy infrastructure and systems, seeking to redirect finance from high- to low-carbon activities and encourage wiser energy investments.

In this episode, Charles Hecker and Michele Wucker revisit their risk assessments from early 2020 and share their perspective for the year ahead. From political division to rising inequalities, from climate to debt:
- 2020 avoided the worst
- 2021 will be very challenging on all these fronts
- not every society is rising to the occasion and showcasing resilience; trust in institutions and personal agency are both needed for success.
- with the pandemic, we've all become daily practitioners of risk management.

In this episode of the podcast, we speak with Jessica Long about the global imperative to eliminate waste in the economy, and the progress people have made on this front—in companies, industries, cities, and nations.

We discuss:
- Sustainable growth
- Changing a “take, make, waste” linear economy to a “take, make” circular economy
- Modifying products to allow consumption to grow sustainably
- How sustainability will permeate organizations akin to widespread digitization
- Concrete signals of sustainability successes
- Avoiding politically polarizing approaches to sustainability

Jessica Long is a sustainable and responsible business expert. She is a former Managing Director with Accenture and has over 15 years of national and international experience in strategy, technology, and complex-program delivery within the corporate, government, and development sectors.

As Chair of the CFTC’s Climate-related Market Risk Sub-Committee, Bob Litterman led the publication of a critical report that framed climate as a systemic risk to the US economy and reaffirmed the necessity of putting a price on carbon. We discuss Bob's trajectory from risk pricing guru to climate advocate, the growing consensus for climate action among US financial leaders, and how to break the political deadlock with US policymakers.

In this episode of the podcast, we speak with Marsha Ershaghi Hames about how COVID-19 has shaped and continues to shape, the way corporate leaders respond to challenges not only to their business models but also how they are evolving their dialogue with their own workforces in a new era of employee activism.

We discuss:
Supply chain changes
Good leadership over a remote workforce
The adaptability of leadership
Activating robust DEI efforts amid the pandemic
Who gets to shape an organization’s moral narrative?
The promise of younger employees to shape better conversations
The future of corporate governance

Marsha Hames is a partner at Tapestry Networks, a stakeholder strategy firm that designs a variety of collaborative meetings, for senior leaders in a given industry, in order to help advance positive economic and societal outcomes. Hames leads Tapestry’s corporate governance practice, offering advice on issues related to culture transformation, board leadership, and stakeholder engagement. She also serves as an expert fellow on USC’s Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making.

Uzodinma Iweala is the CEO of the Africa Center, a cultural institution in New York City that serves as an intellectual hub for ideas about culture, business, and policy related to the continent. A physician and the author of two novels, most recently Speak No Evil, about sexuality, race, and cultural dislocation, and Beasts of No Nation, about an African child forced to become a soldier (which became a feature film released on Netflix), Iweala is well placed to reflect on how race, culture and class have shaped the COVID-19 crisis and life, in Africa as well as in the United States.

In this episode, Breaking the Fever hears from Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist recognized for his work on biosphere-atmosphere interactions and climate impacts of Amazon deforestation. We speak about Covid-19, about the Brazilian people, the rainforest, biodiversity and climate, cattle and deforestation, and about changing global attitudes and the solutions investors, governments, companies and consumers from Sweden to China can promote.

What does it take for people and organizations to navigate uncertain times? Margaret Heffernan https://www.mheffernan.com/ took Breaking the Fever on a wild ride on the occasion of the US September release of her latest book, Uncharted. A timely, astute, energizing. much needed conversation.

Ayin Jambulingam, a culture and leadership consultant based in Malaysia, explores the historical, political and cultural factors driving the Covid-19 response across Asia. We explore how political leadership and structures have affected the trajectory of the virus, whether lessons from Sars have helped drive a more robust response, and the strengths and weaknesses of collectivist and individualist cultures in managing systemic risks.

Listeners may also be interested in this related article from NYU professor Christina Fang: https://www.ethicalsystems.org/an-organizational-scholar-explains-how-to-learn-from-covid-19/.

In episode 15, Rob Brotherton, a psychologist and science journalist, discussed the pandemic and conspiracy theories.