In this episode, I explore provocative questions with Anthropic’s Ambassador for Sustainable AI, Founder & MD of Sustained Futures and former McLaren racing sustainability lead, Katie Neck.

AI may be extraordinarily intelligent. But is it smart enough to understand the planetary resources it depends on?

Katie’s sustainability journey began not with an ESG report, but with a category 2 typhoon at the Japanese Grand Prix. Her response regarding the impact of this typhoon on business, was entirely through the lens of operational risk - freight delays, recording issues, low visibility, guests unable to make it to the venue and demanding money back.

Six seasons at McLaren later, Katie is now working at the intersection of AI, sustainability and the skills businesses need to transition towards a future-fit workforce, against a backdrop of cascading climate and nature risks and opportunities.

The physical reality behind the AI boom makes the dependencies clear: AI needs energy, water, land and infrastructure.

Are those constraints being properly factored into its extraordinary growth ambitions, revenue run rates and IPO valuations?

Could Claude help a business decide where to build a factory — mapping water stress and ecological resilience alongside cost and logistics?

Why don't renewables alone solve the data-centre challenge?

How is China building AI infrastructure?

Katie also challenges one of the sustainability comms campaigns most central messages: “Save the Planet.”

Our Planet doesn’t need saving. It’ll be fine without it. In fact, it’ll flourish. We need the Planet. We depend on it.

What will it take for human intelligence, artificial intelligence and planetary intelligence stop operating in different rooms?

Listen to episode 7 to learn more.

What if a tiny pea could take some of the pressure off the world's standing forests?

Between 2001 and 2022, an estimated 11 million hectares of global deforestation was associated with soy and maize production. These are two crops deeply embedded in the world's animal-feed system.

Drumroll entry for the tiny but mighty grass pea:

High in protein. Able to survive drought and flooding. A nitrogen-fixing legume that can grow in extreme weather conditions and has prevented widespread famine in the Horn of Africa. And early studies already show it can replace some soy, even reduce maize use, in animal feed without compromising animal growth.

There is one catch: the grass pea contains a neurotoxin. Scientists around the world, including at the John Innes Centre, are now trying to breed it out while retaining the plant's extraordinary resilience.

Crack that, and this ancient famine-survival crop holds the potential to interrupt the current devastating deforestation footprint associated with soy and maize, taking pressure off forests while making food systems more resilient to a hotter, less predictable climate.

The humble grass pea now stands at a tipping point – can science work with Nature’s original design to breed out the neurotoxin and make it the plant that could rewiggle the world’s food systems and reduce their related deforestation footprint?

To learn more, listen to rewiggle episode 6: Nature’s Plant, Science’s Puzzle, with Sir Thomas Hughes-Hallet, Chair of the John Innes Centre.

As a boy, Satya Tripathi watched his widowed grandmother give money to women working on the family farm whenever they needed help. Satya decided someone ought to keep track. So, he made a ledger, keeping a record of names, date borrowed, amount due etc.

His grandmother took one look at it and threw it into the kitchen fire. To her, the maths was simple. These women worked the land that created the family’s prosperity. When life dealt them a difficult hand, helping them wasn't a loan to be recovered. It was part of the community bond she forged with her tenant farmers. And they remained loyal to her through thick and thin.

That experience led Satya to drive systemic change in Indian farming models so he could bring prosperity back to millions of farmers who were struggling with depleted soil health and expenses they just couldn't meet.

In India, he helped establish the Sustainable India Finance Facility (SIFF), embedding research and finance into government programs to support the APCNF (Andhra Pradesh Community Natural Farming) project. Together, SIFF and APCNF show how finance can be rewired to create multiple wins for planet, prosperity, farmers and bankers lending to farmers. In addition, consumers will benefit from more nutritious food grown at the same price point, on healthier soils by happier farmers living with greater dignity.

SIFF proved the model works in India. APCNF demonstrated success at scale.

The Transitional Land Karma

The transition of Andhra Pradesh’s land karma is quite moving. From being the first state to embrace the Green Revolution, which inadvertently intensified indebtedness and farmer suicides, AP has become the first Indian state to return to centuries-old natural farming practices.

Backed by science and data, natural farming delivers higher yields resilient to Super El Nino, better incomes, lower costs, and less indebted, happier farmers.

In AP, around 1.8 million farmers are now part of one of the world’s largest natural-farming programmes. And this transition from intensive agriculture, at a cost of US$265 per farmer, has just won the 2026 Food Planet Prize in Sweden.

The numbers are striking: yields up ~11%, net farmer incomes up ~49%, input costs down ~44%.

If you follow the chain further, lower input dependence means less debt and less exposure to global fertiliser prices. Healthier soils can mean greater resilience to drought, which implies resilient national food security, less exposure to inflation, less dependence on imports, more stable government finances and public debt profiles. Everyone wins.

No wonder 48 countries have flocked to Andhra Pradesh to learn from this model, and 22–28 Indian states have pilots underway.

And Satya’s philosophy of transition is refreshingly free of villains. He wholeheartedly invites synthetic fertiliser companies to transition too, if they want to remain relevant.

Citing the example of mainframe computer manufacturers back in the 1960s, he points to the fact that the ones that resisted transitioning to PCs would have been left behind.

No matter how you slice and dice it, the benefits of natural farming shine from all angles.

Lawyers are trained to spot legal risk, but what if a lawyer can credibly justify that Nature-related legal risk can also reveal financial opportunity?

In Episode 4 of rewiggle, Legal Eagle, David Alfrey — Managing Partner and General Counsel at Pactum Capital, Co-Founder of The Impactors, makes a compelling case for why Nature is moving rapidly from the margins of legal thinking into the core of business strategy. 

And the examples are striking: 

1. A cosmetics business worth close to $1 billion discovers that a key ingredient will soon become illegal. Walk away from the deal? Or invest in replacing it — and turn a legal risk into a new business opportunity?
2. A data centre may have permission to operate — but what happens when nearby communities start losing access to water?
3. And when choosing a supplier, should the cheapest bid always win? Or could paying a little more today be a cost-effective insurance policy against tomorrow’s potential litigation, regulation and reputational damage?

David introduces the “Daily Mail rule”, explains why a company’s social licence to operate may matter as much as its legal licence to operate. He challenges lawyers to take action early, not when the house is on fire. 

Perhaps the biggest rewiggle is to accept that Nature isn’t simply another compliance issue for lawyers to manage. We could be facing one of the biggest opportunities to rethink risk, resilience — and where value comes from.

 🎧 Come listen to the conversation on rewiggle Episode 4: Legal Eagle for Nature

 Useful link:

TNFD: Asking Better Questions on Nature for Legal Counsel starring David Alfrey as a guest

The Impactors

Building Blocks of Nature as Infrastructure

What happens when a blockchain entrepreneur turns his gaze to Nature?

When floods stop trains, drought disrupts production or degraded landscapes threaten a £700 million order book, nature risk becomes financial risk.

In the latest episode of rewiggle, I speak with the brilliant Walid Al Saqqaf, co-founder of Rebalance Earth, about a different way of thinking about resilience — and investing in Nature.

There’s a fundamental problem with how we currently think about business resilience:

You can protect everything within your organization’s boundary walls. But you’re still exposed to the external landscape and catchment.

Your neighbours may depend on the same roads, power infrastructure and water supply — and face the same floods, droughts and other environmental hazards.

What if resilience becomes a shared investment?

From oysters cleaning millions of litres of water per day to the West Yorkshire Pension Fund investing in nature-based infrastructure through Rebalance Earth, this is a conversation about a provocative rewiggle:

Stop asking finance to care about Nature. Show finance why Nature matters to the assets, revenues and returns it already cares about. Show business why Nature is infrastructure.

Listen to rewiggle Episode 3: Building Blocks of Nature as Infrastructure

Useful links:

West Yorkshire Pension Fund 

Rebalance Earth  

Bordeaux’s Historic Wetlands Drained

Can a zoologist really influence where trillions of dollars flow?

Yes. His name is Andrew Mitchell.

Founder of Global Canopy and one of the original architects who helped weave Nature into the DNA of global finance, Andrew has spent decades translating between worlds that rarely speak to each other — science, conservation, government, and business.

From learning the language of red‑combed Sussex chickens on a Jersey farm to co‑creating the blueprint for the Taskforce on Nature‑related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), Andrew has mastered the art of Google Translation for Nature.

His story reminds us that when we learn to speak another world’s language, we don’t just enter the room — we empower ourselves to change the conversation, and in his case, entire systems.

And now, Andrew draws confidence from the revolution that has arrived: Nature Tech. Nature has been innovating for billions of years. Continuously upgrading its software. Zero patents. Open innovation labs. The opportunity is turning that intelligence into returns.

From chickens to capital, Andrew’s story is a lesson in translation. It sunlights a transition already underway, of organisations translating Nature’s billions of years of intelligence into the blueprint for what they build and innovate next.

🎧 Listen to discover: →

How a zoologist learned to speak finance

How an idea became the TNFD

Why translation can spark systems change

What the Nature Tech revolution means for the future

Useful Links for Further Information:

TNFD

TCFD

Little Book of Nature Business (co authored by Andrew Mitchell)

TNFD Discussion Paper on Nature related Opportunities

Bloomberg NEF When Opportunity Blossoms

Andrew Mitchell photo credit: Matt Porteous.

In this introductory episode, Neha Dutt is interviewed by Shivanghi Aggarwal at Cassiobury Local Nature Reserve, against the backdrop of the rewiggled wetlands of the River Gade.

Neha shares why she made rewiggle — and why she believes we need to rethink what it means to move forward.

At the heart of the conversation is a simple idea: what if we could create a win-win world, in partnership with Nature? A world where resilience isn't about protecting one system at the expense of another, but about understanding the connections between them and building mutual resilience. Because every organisation across every sector depends on Nature in ways that are often invisible until they aren't.

AI and data centres depend on vast amounts of energy and water. Pharmaceutical innovation and product sourcing depends on the extraordinary biodiversity of rainforests.

Supply chains, communities, economies and ecosystems are all connected — whether we choose to see those connections or not.

The opportunity through this podcast is to make those links visible, understandable in plain, practical language, as a starting point for better questions, better decisions, better business and better outcomes.

This conversation explores what it might mean to rethink human enterprise through that lens — to spot the dependencies, understand the impacts, and find the opportunities where people, prosperity and planet can reinforce rather than undermine one another.

Perhaps the biggest opportunities for resilience lie in the connections we have yet to recognise.

Welcome to rewiggle.