A chubby feline is the star of an awareness campaign for the B Corp certification that says your business is getting real about sustainability. B Lab's Australia and NZ CEO Andrew Davies tells Ross Inglis about fat cats and how B Corps are making progress even in difficult times.

Think Like a Forest is a beautiful short film about NZ’s ngahere or native forest and is now showing on TVNZ On Demand, PureAdvantage.org and soon Air NZ In Flight Entertainment. Produced by Pure Advantage as part of its Recloaking Papatuanuku programme, the film is fronted by Sam Gibson aka Sam the Trapman. Pure Advantage’s Simon Millar joined Vincent for a chat about the film, pines and thinking about forests.

https://pureadvantage.org/think-like-a-forest/

The annual Climate Change and Business Conference is the biggest corporate meet-up on the climate agenda, attracting delegates from industry, politics and NGOs as well as overseas high-noters. This year’s event featured Lord Adair Turner, of UK Energy Transmissions Commission, Wang Xiaolong, the China ambassador to NZ and Cynthia Houniuhi, who led an historic delegation of Pacific youth to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) this year.

Alec Tang of KPMG and Joanna Silver of Westpac were both at the conference and joined Vincent to discuss their reactions.

What would a journalist from outside New Zealand find if they ran the ruler over our current climate policies? Australian writer Royce Kurmelovs has done just that, and he tells Ross Inglis that the answer can be rendered in two words: quiet quitting.

Why is it so hard to invest in nature - not for extraction but for nature itself? We invest in human health. Why don’t we invest in nature health? Well, increasingly we are trying. Nature Based Solutions are embedded in our National Emissions Reduction Plan and in the Climate Adaption Plan - but adoption and action are slow. Just ask anyone trying raise money for conservation, predator control or green infrastructure. Investing in nature is not happening fast enough or at scale.

Robin Mitchell is the founder of advisory firm Nature Positive. He is an international biodiversity management expert who advises governments, corporates and finance industry on nature climate strategies.

If you reckon our national strategy for reducing emissions is short on ambition, Jessica Palairet agrees. Jessica heads Lawyers for Climate Action which, together with the Environmental Law Initiative, is taking the government to the High Court for a judicial review of the plan. She tells Ross Inglis what's wrong with the plan and how the law can help fix it.

What does it take to build a globally significant clean tech or sustainability innovation from New Zealand? To answer that, you’d be best to talk those already doing it right? That’s exactly what the Next Wave report has done. It talked to 44 leaders of breakthrough innovations to establish the barriers, the rewards and the opportunities for more innovation in cleantech, climate tech, nature and community. And we need it, with climate and nature under threat like never before. How do we accelerate the solutions? Vincent is joined by the co-authors of the Next Wave, James Griffin from the Sustainable Business Network and Dr Kate Prendergast of the University of Canterbury.

New Zealand's dairy sector has an awful environmental record, but what if we decided to do dairy differently? Iwi-owned Miraka is figuring out how to produce lower-emissions export dairy based on the principles of kaitiakitanga. Miraka's Brendan Haigh explains.

In June, the government announced nine pilots to trial a voluntary nature credits scheme - the closest so far to a biodiversity credit. Led by Act MP and Associate Minister for the Environment Andrew Hoggard, the government says it wants to establish ‘a market that is durable, measurable and transparent to help farmers, landowners, iwi, and conservation groups unlock new income streams for looking after nature on their land.’ One of the nine is the Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari Biodiversity Credit project an international trade-ready biodiversity credits scheme developed by advisory firm Ekos. It launched officially launch on 24th of June and Vincent is joined by Ekos found Sean Weaver and Sancturary Mountain CEO Helen Hughes.

Government announcement here

Ekos & Sanctuary Mountain media release here

Everyone’s got an idea for a business at some point in their life. Laura Nixon did something about it. A hygienist, troubled by the volume of plastic waste in the dental sector, Laura founded Solid, which replaces unrecyclable plastic tubes with toothpaste tablets and powder in glass jars. Solid’s product lineup includes the world’s first in-store toothpaste dispenser, and teeth whitener.

Solid was a finalist in the Sustainable Business Awards and was included in the exciting SBN Next 95 list of innovators.