Spill The (Green) Tea with Tim Christophersen
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Malin Cunningham
Welcome to Spill the Green Tea, the podcast where we dive into perhaps the most controversial part of sustainability, how to talk about it.
Katie Treggiden
That's right, we're exploring how to talk about your eco-efforts without getting called out. Join us for straight-talking, behind-the-scenes insights and practical takeaways that will help you gather the courage to shine your light in these volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times.
Malin Cunningham
It's a serious topic and we don't shy away from that, but we will bring you uplifting, positive and pragmatic conversations with brilliant guests and in-depth discussions between the two of us, all to give you the confidence to talk about your imperfect efforts towards genuine sustainability.
Katie Treggiden
Because it's not just showing off, sharing your progress helps you connect with clients and customers and inspire others to be more open about where they are on their journey. We need your stories now more than ever.
Malin Cunningham
Welcome to this episode of Spill the Green Tea. Today Katie and I are speaking to Tim Christofferson. He's a forester by training and spent over 20 years at the UN leading on climate and nature action before joining Salesforce as the VP of Climate Action.
He's also the author of the book called Generation Restoration. Coming up you will hear why Tim thinks the offsetting backlash has improved the voluntary carbon market and why businesses should reconsider investing in these projects. Why the dictionary definition of nature as separate from humans is in Tim's words not just incorrect but absurd and the difference between unconditional and conditional optimism and why Tim believes that New York Climate Week this September could mark a genuine social tipping point on carbon markets and nature investment.
I'm super excited this one. Enjoy.
Katie Treggiden
Tim, welcome. We champion progress over perfection on this podcast, so we would love to hear
Katie Treggiden
One guilty eco-confession, something that you do that people might be surprised to hear that you do, just so that listeners understand that we are not some sort of eco-perfectionists, that we are muddling through just like they are.
Tim Christophersen
It's that I not only like meat, but we even have our own livestock on our farm, so we make our own meat.
Katie Treggiden
Wow.
Tim Christophersen
Why that is actually eco-friendly is that the sheep we have, they restore part of our soils here. They're very important for soil biodiversity, and so it's actually, I think, meat-eating is not such a guilty pleasure as most people think.
Tim Christophersen
It's not the cow, it's the how, is a good saying that my friend Peter would say.
Katie Treggiden
Nice.
Tim Christophersen
It's factory farming that we should avoid, because livestock are actually very important for ecosystem restoration, or for landscape restoration.
Tim Christophersen
at large scale. So I actually don't feel guilty about it, but most people would think that if I say, oh, I'm eating meat.
Tim Christophersen
So that's a guilty pleasure.
Katie Treggiden
I love that it's not the cow, it's the how, that's a great expression.
Malin
I'm gonna adopt that.
Katie Treggiden
Yay!
Malin
Great! And, you're actually a forester by training, very interesting background. You spent 20 years, working for the UN, obviously on, climate and nature actions and programs.
Malin
And then, in 2022, you decided to join the other side, the private sector, and today you're the Vice President for Climate Action for Salesforce, the global CRM company.
Malin
Could you just tell us a bit about that journey, and, you know, how and why you went from the UN to the corporate world?
Tim Christophersen
Sure, so at the UN Environment Program at UNEP's headquarters in Nairobi, where my family and I lived, we, I was responsible for the nature side of climate action, so leading our climate finance unit and a lot of global environment facility projects on climate.
Tim Christophersen
Last job also included setting up the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration that we're now in the middle of. It's the decade 2021 to 2030.
Tim Christophersen
Hashtag generation restoration. And, when I was setting that up in parallel, the World Economic Forum was setting up the Trillion Trees Initiative in 2020, and there was a company and its charismatic CEO, Mark Benioff.
Tim Christophersen
behind that company was Salesforce, and they suggested we compare notes on the year and decade and on the trillion trees, and then I just kept in touch with the Salesforce team, was really impressed by them, and they…
Tim Christophersen
kept calling me for advice, so they said, oh, now we've committed to plant 100 million trees. How do you do that? What does it mean? How do you… who do you work with? Where do you go? And they…
Tim Christophersen
they just kept, calling me, and then at some point they said, well, you know, why don't you just come over and set up a nature team here? We're also looking at the task force on nature-related financial disclosures, you could do that, and why don't you just come and work for us? And I have to admit, I thought long and hard about that, not only because I had lifetime employment at the UN, but
Tim Christophersen
Also because I love the UN. I think the UN is one of the most important institutions in the world. If we didn't have it, we would have to invent it, immediately.
Tim Christophersen
And, what enticed me to join Salesforce was the fact that Salesforce has 200,000 plus customers, including 60,000 NGOs.
Tim Christophersen
And we have a trust relationship with all of these customers, all the Fortune 500 companies, because we manage a lot of their data, and…
Tim Christophersen
That means I get to speak with a lot of the sustainability folks, and sometimes the C-level in those companies about things like, what is biodiversity? You know, should we have a water program? What should we do about TNFD? What is… what should our next climate strategy look like? So…
Tim Christophersen
That was what convinced me to join in 2022, and…
Tim Christophersen
it's been a very, very fascinating ride in the private sector with the knowledge of how the public sector thinks, and I believe that we still talk past each other often in the public and the private sector. There's a lot of passing the buck, you know, now the public sector says they're out of money, and the private sector should pay for
Tim Christophersen
Large-scale climate action, but it's really in the public-private partnerships where the success and the magic is, that we should set up more of those.
Katie Treggiden
That's so interesting. I love the idea that they just kept calling you until you effectively were working for them, so there's a moment at which we might as well make this official. It's cute. You mentioned the hashtag for the UN Decade on ecosystem restoration was hashtag generation restoration, which I love as this sort of…
Katie Treggiden
unifying force, you know, in the same way that the buck gets passed between the private and public sector, I think the buck gets passed between generations. There's a sort of sense of…
Katie Treggiden
the next generation are gonna save us, they fill us with so much hope, and the younger generations are sort of going, you guys created this mess, why is it our problem? So I love that, generation restoration as a sort of unifying idea. And you've actually written a book with the same title.
Katie Treggiden
I'd love to hear a little bit more about the book, about the kind of theme, the title, this idea of generation restoration.
Tim Christophersen
So Generation Restoration, you're absolutely right, is everybody alive today? It doesn't matter if you're Generation X, or A, or a Boomer, or wherever you are, it is a joint responsibility. I was already allergic to this, oh, you are so smart, the young generation, you're gonna fix this. When I was 19, and a nature and climate activist.
Tim Christophersen
And, I think the youth today are even less patient with that kind of passing responsibility without passing the power or the resources to actually change things.
Katie Treggiden
important distinction.
Tim Christophersen
And the…
Tim Christophersen
the generation restoration idea, also how we set up the UN Decade was to make it a decentralized UN Decade that everybody could take on and say, yeah, I want to run with this, and I now work
Tim Christophersen
for a UN effort. There is no, requirement for anything that's non-commercial to get approval from the UN. You can download the logo, you can say, my little restoration project is now a UN decade project.
Tim Christophersen
And in the same spirit, I wrote the book diving a little bit deeper into why we're not making progress, because we've talked about this for many decades now. Listening to your intro, it makes me feel slightly old, but I actually have been working on this for many… for several decades.
Tim Christophersen
And…
Tim Christophersen
the question I ask myself is, why is it that we know so much of what should change, but it's… we're not changing at a fast enough pace?
Tim Christophersen
So, instead of looking at what we need to change in how we do things, I explored how we need to change the way we view the world.
Tim Christophersen
Because the way you view the world dictates everything you do. It dictates how you think, how you…
Tim Christophersen
shop, what you invest in, how you travel. So this way of seeing the world differently is the core of the book, Generation Restoration. It's about a new relationship with and a new understanding of nature, including building ecological literacy. So.
Tim Christophersen
In the book, I talk readers through these basic steps of building ecological literacy.
Tim Christophersen
And I've received a lot of positive feedback. I'm very encouraged also by a lot of other books with similar themes that are now coming on the market, so I think there's a…
Tim Christophersen
general, rise in the consciousness and in the awareness of the need to change something more fundamental than.
Tim Christophersen
You know, just doing recycling, and…
Tim Christophersen
eating a bit less meat. We have to change something fundamental, but that change can make life better for all of us in many, many different ways. That's what the book is about. It's a very hopeful book.
Katie Treggiden
I've just got…
Katie Treggiden
I can't remember the name of, but I will pop in the show notes that talks about the idea of inner prepping, which I thought was a fascinating idea, and she sort of talks about how the revolution is going to happen inside each of us.
Katie Treggiden
Would you mind name-dropping a couple of the other books that have come out that you feel are kind of adding to the movement that you started with Generation Restoration?
Tim Christophersen
Yeah, I just finished my friend Tom Crowder's book called Nature's Echo. So Tom is a brilliant young professor and data scientist, and…
Tim Christophersen
He also speaks in the book mostly about that inner journey, which actually also surprised me, because he's, he's an ecologist, but he does speak about nature's feedback loops and how we're all part of those feedback loops. The central argument of my book is that we're all part of nature, but we've forgotten about that and need to rediscover that.
Tim Christophersen
And there are, there are several books now out with a similar theme, some more focused on how to finance nature. There's a great book in the making that's not out yet, but…
Tim Christophersen
I think it's gonna be called Too Big to Bail, about…
Malin
Yeah.
Tim Christophersen
How we need to change our economic structure to take nature into account.
Tim Christophersen
I love, the book and also the film with the title, Eat More Trees.
Tim Christophersen
Which might… Belgen, brilliant, young…
Tim Christophersen
Belgian entrepreneur called Louis de Jager, who's, speaking about how agroforestry could really hold the key to rebuilding
Tim Christophersen
carbon in soil and biodiversity and nutritious food and reforming the agri-food system. Agriculture basically is to nature conservation and restoration what energy is to the climate, right? We need to really change the way we produce and consume food. So that's…
Tim Christophersen
That's also the focus of a lot of books. There's a great film called Groundswell, I'm not sure if you've seen the trilogy with… starting with Kiss the Ground.
Tim Christophersen
One of my favorite…
Tim Christophersen
movies that I talk about in the book is called Biggest Little Farm, so yeah, there's a lot of…
Malin
Okay.
Tim Christophersen
Great things you can… Amazing, thank you, Lisa.
Katie Treggiden
We'll put… We'll put all of those in the show notes. Thank you.
Malin
That's great. I know you've obviously talked about, you know, this idea of eco or ecological literacy there. Like, Katie and I, we teach carbon literacy as part of the Carbon Literacy Project, and it's like, helping people understand the fundamentals of what's happening.
Malin
And obviously you talked a bit about this already, but could you just explain a bit more
Malin
you know, how you see that combination, like, how… how people can get… feel closer to…
Malin
nature, I mean, ultimately, we're part of it, but, you know, how do we connect with that, you know, without, and also without having, sort of, science degree, how do we wrap our heads around this?
Tim Christophersen
Yes, so the most important thing to start with is that I mean the word relationship very literal. It's not a new, sort of, transactional relation. It is a relationship with nature, as we have with our family, and with other people, with our community.
Tim Christophersen
And that is already in itself a mind shift. If you approach nature or learning about nature with that in mind, it's much more fun, active, hands-on, outside, than, oh, now I have to read a lot of books and become ecologically literate. I've just managed to become digital literate, and I… maybe economically literate, I can read the
Tim Christophersen
Financial Times without having to look up a lot of, acronyms, but ecological literacy, oh, not another thing. But this is about being
Tim Christophersen
In nature, with nature, observing nature, which is good for your health, by the way, and also a lot of fun.
Tim Christophersen
And the way that this starts, this relationship, is as many good relationships start with food, because that's three times a day how we directly interact with nature.
Tim Christophersen
We might not know it, and the food we consume might be heavily industrially processed, so it's hardly recognizable as nature, but it does come from nature. Everything we eat or drink is derived from nature.
Tim Christophersen
Which, of course, also means that the whole world economy is a 100% subsidiary of Mother Nature, because, you know, how would you… it wouldn't even make sense to talk about a world economy if there was no nature.
Tim Christophersen
So, the ecological literacy starts with a few basic questions. Where does my food come from?
Tim Christophersen
Who is my farmer? How did it get to my table?
Tim Christophersen
where does my water come from, is the next question. A lot of people know where…
Tim Christophersen
They'll spend their next holidays, but they have no idea where their drinking water comes from. And that is becoming a really, really more and more important topic, if you look across Europe in particular these days. The next question is, what species do I share this space with? Who else lives here?
Tim Christophersen
around my home, in my garden, in my city, in my city park. What are the urban trees doing for me? Basically, what is nature doing for me where I live?
Tim Christophersen
After you've explored those questions, you will already feel a more connected sense with nature and build a relationship with your non-human neighbors, and then the
Tim Christophersen
The graduation, in a sense, is, feeling
Tim Christophersen
part of nature. That's not something that is intellectual, that is a…
Tim Christophersen
feeling that has to grow, and suddenly you will feel, yes, I am part of this landscape, this landscape feeds me, nourishes me.
Tim Christophersen
Protects me from floods.
Tim Christophersen
and I have to give something back.
Tim Christophersen
Reciprocity has to be the centerpiece of rebuilding a world economy that can be sustained, because at the moment.
Tim Christophersen
It's, you know, there's many different definitions of sustainability. What is it? But there's only one definition of unsustainability, which is it cannot be sustained. It will drop, collapse, fold, be replaced.
Tim Christophersen
And at the moment, we live in an unsustainable world economy. We can build a better one, and I'm sure that ecological literacy is…
Tim Christophersen
one of the core ingredients. And one final note on that, it's…
Tim Christophersen
If you think of the words economy and ecology, they have the same…
Tim Christophersen
ancient Greek root of oikos, which can be translated as
Tim Christophersen
Our common household or our common home.
Tim Christophersen
So ecology is the knowledge of our common home.
Tim Christophersen
And economy is the management of our common home.
Tim Christophersen
how can we… how come we've separated these two things? We're managing this planet without knowing how it really works, what the planetary boundaries are, how things are connected as a living system.
Tim Christophersen
That is reckless.
Tim Christophersen
Yeah, absolutely. So, we need to connect these two things again, the economy and the ecology.
Malin
Yeah, and it's fascinating, just as a… you're just reflecting, like, we stood here.
Malin
well, I don't know what the weather's like in Denmark, but in the UK, it's another really, really cold day. Yeah. And I think, you know.
Malin
the way that the weather has played out in the UK this summer has made people think about these things a little bit more, because we've had to, you know.
Malin
You know, nature is everywhere, and it's dying around us, you know?
Malin
And…
Malin
vegetables, you know, if you're growing your own vegetables, they're really struggling. We can hear about farmers struggling, there's a real water shortage, loads of hosts, pipe bands, etc, so…
Malin
you know, we can dig into some of that a bit more later, but I just think that makes it front of mind in a way that perhaps it isn't normally, when the weather is a bit more kind.
Katie Treggiden
Yeah.
Tim Christophersen
I hope you're right.
Tim Christophersen
I hope you're right.
Tim Christophersen
Some of the headlines I've seen are also talking a different language, of saying, oh, this is…
Tim Christophersen
This is just the new normal, and part of me would wish that was true, but that's factually incorrect. There is no such thing as a new normal in a destabilizing climate. And we… we often underestimate what these degrees that we throw around. You know, the Paris Agreement has the 1.5 degree target.
Tim Christophersen
Nobody knows what that means, because…
Tim Christophersen
But if you think about the average temperature of planet Earth in the 20th century, it was about 13 degrees centigrade.
Tim Christophersen
So what we're talking about is a more than 10% increase in average temperature of a living system.
Tim Christophersen
Your body temperature and mine may be slightly different, but they're around 37 degrees.
Tim Christophersen
You talk about a 10% rise in that temperature?
Tim Christophersen
You're approaching 41 degrees, you're not feeling well.
Tim Christophersen
You talk about a 20% rise in that average temperature, that's the end of the game. We're not built for this, evolutionary, and…
Tim Christophersen
It's the same with Earth as a living system, so we also have to make these things less abstract. Who knows what the 1.5 degree target of the Paris Agreement… why 1.5 degrees? It is when things really become unsafe.
Tim Christophersen
That's why.
Katie Treggiden
that's such a helpful metaphor, because I think, you know, the weather…
Katie Treggiden
in a day, in a week, certainly in a year, bounces around more than 1.5 degrees, so it just doesn't sound significant, does it? But when you put it into the context of your body temperature as another living system, right, that's hugely helpful.
Katie Treggiden
Something that you shared with us, Tim, which I didn't know, is that the We Are Nature campaign in the UK is urging major dictionary publishers to update the definition of nature, to explicitly include humans, and we've, between the three of us, used the phrase We Are Nature a couple of times already during this conversation. And it's something you hear a lot in environmental circles, but I can remember the
Katie Treggiden
The first time I ever heard that phrase, was when I joined something called the Bio Leadership Fellowship, which is a worldwide movement of people who are attempting to do business in a way that's informed by nature more than it's informed by capitalism. And the first time somebody said, we are nature, my reaction was.
Katie Treggiden
wait, what? What? Oh, wait, hang on. Because we sort of have this idea of…
Katie Treggiden
culture and nature being very separate, and humans being part of culture, not part of nature, so I'd love you…
Katie Treggiden
Just to expand on that idea a little bit, explain why the dictionary change is important, but also help people just to get their heads around this idea of, we are nature, nature is us.
Tim Christophersen
I looked at a lot of definitions of nature for the book, and first of all, there's not one definition, which I think is a strength. Everybody can have a relationship with nature that is unique, because it is unique to each of us.
Tim Christophersen
Well, one of the definitions I came across, and I couldn't believe my eyes, I believe it was in the Oxford or Dictionary, was that nature… nature is the phenomena of the physical world collectively, as opposed to humans and culture. So, not only were they saying that we're not part of nature, they were saying, as opposed to us.
Katie Treggiden
Ow.
Tim Christophersen
So, if you think that True.
Tim Christophersen
That is not only incorrect, it is absurd, because where would we be if we're not an integral part of nature? We are actually a collection of a few
Tim Christophersen
billion human cells, and quite a few cells that are not human, and without them, we wouldn't exist, breathe, live. What does that say about where nature starts and where we end, just from our bodies? But the…
Tim Christophersen
the metaphysical relationship we have with the rest of creation is, I think, where this
Tim Christophersen
dichotomy first set in. If you go back to the era of enlightenment, and…
Tim Christophersen
And you know that the men of that time, very few women.
Tim Christophersen
named that era themselves. It was sort of… it wasn't very humble, but…
Tim Christophersen
It, of course, gave us a lot of progress on various fronts, but the main message that still reverberates, that is like the philosophical autopilot of our world economy, is only humans have the divine spark. Only we are God-like. Everything else is here for our convenience and is a thing.
Tim Christophersen
Jane Goodall, who wrote the foreword to our book, when she handed it to my book, if she… when she handed in her thesis of the observation of chimpanzees, she had, of course, described
Tim Christophersen
the male and female with she and he did this and that, and her supervisor crosses all that out and says, it's it. These are all its, these are all things, these are animals. And she insisted to publish
Tim Christophersen
Them with their right gender.
Tim Christophersen
Winning a small but significant victory for non-human life, but that shows how deeply ingrained this thinking was. These are things, they're not… they're not…
Tim Christophersen
like us, and I think it's really time to rethink that fundamental philosophical autopilot, because it's crushing us into the ground.
Katie Treggiden
I don't know if you've been.
Malin
Yeah, that's it.
Katie Treggiden
Chris Packham's series on evolution, because it's on the BBC. But, I mean, that really… so in each… for anyone who hasn't seen it, in each episode, he takes a particular animal and traces its evolution all the way back to the… to the beginning, to Luca, which is the…
Katie Treggiden
I can't remember what it stands for, but it's the… it's the farthest back thing that we're all descendant from.
Tim Christophersen
Yep.
Katie Treggiden
And it just makes so plain how intertwined we are with every other life form on Earth. Yeah, I'll pop up.
Tim Christophersen
Yes, yes, and I've learned from…
Tim Christophersen
my colleagues in the US work culture not to say ever, but. So, yes and…
Malin
Yes, and…
Tim Christophersen
At the same time, we are not animals, so what does that make humans? It's not as easy as to say, oh, we're just a species like any other. We aren't.
Tim Christophersen
because we are, in many ways, unique. It just doesn't mean that we are apart from everything else. We're connected with nature.
Tim Christophersen
And at the same time.
Tim Christophersen
we are now Earth's most powerful ecosystem engineers. There are other species that are ecosystem engineers, you know, elephants, beavers can change the hydrology of landscape, suddenly everything else changes. The vegetation, the…
Tim Christophersen
Composition of the… of the fauna.
Tim Christophersen
We are now Earth's most powerful ecosystem engineers, and that comes with a heavy responsibility. It also comes with enormous pleasure we can gain from being
Tim Christophersen
gardeners of an entire planet. I mean, this entire planet is a garden that we can form and shape, and have done for millennia. I don't know if you've seen, there's an article in Nature last month about discoveries in the Central Amazon, about an entire civilization that was
Tim Christophersen
there 2,000 years ago, with several million people, probably up to 10 million people lived in central Amazonia.
Malin
Wow.
Tim Christophersen
They shaped everything, from which trees were grown, to how the forest was treated. So, the Amazon basin is basically a huge garden. It's not a wilderness. If you trace the distribution of
Tim Christophersen
Brazil nuts.
Tim Christophersen
The largest tree in the Amazon rainforest, amazing tree, has an amazing, amazing biology.
Tim Christophersen
It's basically a map of civilization. It's not a coincidence where these trees grow.
Tim Christophersen
And so we also have to reshape a little bit what we think about this planet, and wilderness as a concept.
Tim Christophersen
We've shaped this planet for many, many thousands of years.
Katie Treggiden
Yeah, and that's a…
Malin
Yes, sir.
Katie Treggiden
There's a lovely example in Robin Wall Kimmerer's book, Braiding Sweetgrass, where she's able to prove that sweetgrass grows more abundantly in the areas where it is harvested and used for basket weaving. And it's that sort of… that reciprocity, that… that…
Katie Treggiden
when we're in good relationship with nature, and I love the idea of a literal relationship, because if two humans, you know, if a human was treating another human the way we're treating nature, that relationship would be over, I hope.
Katie Treggiden
But that idea of actually relationships have to be reciprocal, don't they? And for thousands, if not millions of years, we were able to live in balance and in reciprocity with nature, and as you say, since the Enlightenment, something has shifted. But yeah, that's a really interesting way to think about it, is that we are…
Katie Treggiden
not animals. We are part of nature and interconnected with nature, but we have unique power and therefore unique responsibility.
Malin
Yeah, that's incredible.
Malin
Cool.
Tim Christophersen
I think that relationship with nature, if… because you… you compared it to an abusive relationship, nature's been very patient with us, but I think that patience is now running thin.
Malin
Yeah.
Tim Christophersen
And, of course, we cannot head for divorce. It's not possible for us. It's possible for nature, but not for our species.
Tim Christophersen
So we have to find a better way, and we can, we will, it's inevitable. This is what makes me so hopeful, and also I describe that in the book, all these examples of large and small-scale restoration. Reciprocity towards nature leads to ecosystem restoration.
Tim Christophersen
And we see that now everywhere, in a lot of parts of the world, both huge projects, like the entire High Andes, all of South America, being restored by this amazing group called Accion Andina, an indigenous-driven social movement that is bringing back
Tim Christophersen
the cloud forests, to people rediscovering gardening, and
Tim Christophersen
how important soil is, and people suddenly talk about soil health and soil biodiversity. Ten years ago, you know, soil was just this…
Tim Christophersen
black dirt under your boots. Nobody gave two thoughts to soil, in particular agricultural colleges and universities. It was…
Tim Christophersen
was the era of chemistry and physics. In agriculture, I think we have to shift to the era of biology and ecology in how we think about producing food. Because what produces our food is actually the micro…
Tim Christophersen
biome in the soil. It's not the chemicals we pour into it.
Malin
Yeah, so, so there's a real, like, tension there, isn't it? Like, we talked before about how people, like, on the one hand, like, you know, I was saying how, I feel that people are waking up a little bit because of what's happening around us, and you said you weren't so sure, but you talk about this global awakening, so what…
Malin
Can you just talk about that a bit more, in terms of…
Malin
people understanding that interconnectedness more, and, you know, where are you seeing that? Or is it what you just talked about in certain places, or are you seeing it sort of across the board?
Malin
And how… what shape is that taking?
Tim Christophersen
I try to avoid spending time on Instagram, to be honest, but if you go to Instagram right now and you search for hashtag generational restoration, there's about 150,000 posts of different projects and efforts. If you go to restore.eco, restore without an E at the end, restore.Eco, which is a platform that Tom Crowther, who wrote Nature's Echo, has started a few years ago.
Tim Christophersen
as the sort of LinkedIn of the ecosystem restoration Movement, there's over 300,000 projects now that people have registered, and
Tim Christophersen
There's probably more near you and near any of us than we think.
Tim Christophersen
And that way of not feeling alone in this is really, really important, because it's a powerful… we humans are hardwired for collaboration, and no rhetoric of fear and anxiety and us versus them can…
Tim Christophersen
can, for a long time, overcome that and overwrite that. We always default back to collaboration, and…
Tim Christophersen
This is, at the moment, our only choice, so seeing that there's so many other people doing this already, you can either join them or start your own project and log it on Restore.
Tim Christophersen
That's immensely powerful. So you just look which are the most
Tim Christophersen
Closest projects to you on Restore.eco.
Katie Treggiden
I love that.
Malin
That's great. Yeah, absolutely. And it's like you say, that's definitely what we need, because there is so much negativity and doom out there in general around all of these topics, and it can feel really easy to… it's really easy to feel really overpowered, overwhelmed, and all of that, and that's what gives you hope, isn't it?
Tim Christophersen
Yeah, hope… hope and optimism, and I think optimism is… Is not a,
Tim Christophersen
It's not something that happens to you because of how the data that you receive is interpreted. It's something that you have to cultivate. It's an inner attitude. And we can only… we can only make progress and really change this if we're optimistic.
Tim Christophersen
If we're…
Tim Christophersen
pessimistic, we rob ourselves of the agency to make a change. And you see that in the climate disinformation that has spread, that has shifted straight from, oh, this isn't really happening, it's denial, it's not human-caused climate change, to…
Tim Christophersen
Oh, now it's too late to do something about it.
Malin
Jump in.
Tim Christophersen
Meeting straight over the middle bits of all the solutions that exist.
Tim Christophersen
Which is, of course, a deliberate communication strategy. I mean, I'm not a communications expert, but…
Tim Christophersen
Even to me, that's a bit too…
Tim Christophersen
blunt. It doesn't work, you know, this is not… it's not logical, and you can… hopefully the newspapers that write that kind of stuff will reconsider, because it's not…
Tim Christophersen
first of all, it's not true. And secondly, it's not helpful.
Katie Treggiden
Yeah.
Malin
No.
Katie Treggiden
It's fascinating to watch, actually, as you say, this idea from, it's not happening to it's too late, and it's like, hang on, what happened to the bit in the middle where.
Tim Christophersen
What happened to the pit in the…
Katie Treggiden
Yeah, it's fascinating, but I think it's interesting that you said you try not to go on Instagram too much, because I think it's very easy.
Katie Treggiden
to get kind of sucked into that doom spiral and lose that sense of hope, and I absolutely agree, it's something we need to cultivate. Malin and I both work primarily in business-to-business communication, and something that we've both seen
Katie Treggiden
is a shift… well, one of the things we've seen is a massive green hush, so everybody stopped talking about this altogether, but those who are still talking about it, those brave browns, as we've termed them, one of the things we've seen is a shift away from…
Katie Treggiden
A rhetoric around reducing harm and reducing impact.
Katie Treggiden
Towards one of actively doing good, what you might call a nature-positive strategy.
Katie Treggiden
So, if a brand's net impact is good, then they want to be increasing that impact, which I think's a really interesting shift from a, you know, Malin and I are both communication strategists, and that's a really interesting kind of communications shift.
Katie Treggiden
But I'd love you to help
Katie Treggiden
us to articulate what is a nature positive strategy? Because obviously, you know, we've talked about this difference between carbon literacy and a broader ecological literacy, and we need to see that same change, right? It's not just about reducing carbon, it's about being nature positive. What does it actually mean, and how can you measure and disclose it effectively from a comms point of view?
Tim Christophersen
I did a LinkedIn post a few years ago where I compared nature positive to an Impressionist Monet painting. You know, it's like, it's like a lot of dots. When you stand too close to it, doesn't make any sense. You're like, what is this supposed to be? You have to take a few steps back and look at it from…
Tim Christophersen
the right distance. Nature positive is not something that any individual or city or company can achieve, because you can be nature positive when your neighbor is still…
Tim Christophersen
Withdraws all the groundwater for a new data center of agriculture.
Tim Christophersen
It is an all-of-society effort. So in Salesforce's Nature Positive Strategy, we talk about our contribution to an all-of-society effort, which is both what we can do as a company, our own footprint.
Tim Christophersen
It is then leading, what we call leading restoration at scale, so forming the Forest Futures Alliance at the World Economic Forum, leading other companies into…
Tim Christophersen
commitments, such as the Symbiosis Coalition, where we brought together Google, Meta, Microsoft, and now McKinsey and other companies have joined to purchase at least 20 million tons of high-quality nature-based removals from the carbon market. So these are nature restoration projects that produce carbon credits.
Tim Christophersen
So these kinds of commitments, they send a signal to society at large. And then our last part or pillar of the Nature Positive Strategy is empowering our customers through
Tim Christophersen
Our technology, but also through education in,
Tim Christophersen
taking steps towards a nature-positive world. For example.
Tim Christophersen
signing up to the Task Force on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures, where we help them to
Tim Christophersen
to develop their methodology, two years ago. So these are all things that companies can do. It is also relevant for individuals, because that shift that you described from, oh, you have to stop
Tim Christophersen
Doing this, to… oh, there's a really great, fun, rewarding activity out there that you can be part of, together with your family and your community.
Tim Christophersen
what would you rather do?
Tim Christophersen
One is a spirit of sacrifice, the other is a spirit of, hey, wait a minute, over here is the better life. This is better food, this is more healthy soil, these are more healthy ecosystems, clean water in abundance, energy in abundance.
Tim Christophersen
How can we get there and talk about the positive world that we need to create, rather than…
Tim Christophersen
than always chastising ourselves of, you know, what we should do less of. Both is needed, and we should definitely stop using fossil fuels, I'm not saying that, but rather than… rather than…
Tim Christophersen
Just bashing the fossil fuel industry.
Tim Christophersen
Just build something better, which is happening, though.
Tim Christophersen
Renewable energy and solar and wind are so much cheaper now, and with solving the battery storage issue is one of the things where Salesforce invests a lot of attention now. You put those things together, it's the cheapest, most abundant, most reliable
Tim Christophersen
form of energy, and it is winning. There's no doubt about it. This is now pure economics.
Tim Christophersen
Of course, we have to remove the $5 trillion or so of fossil fuel and harmful agricultural subsidies that our governments are still pouring into the old system to somehow keep it working.
Tim Christophersen
Let's redirect some or all of that money to what is actually working better, which is the economy of the future, a bioeconomy, the restoration economy.
Malin
Absolutely. And, you know, part of that is obviously why the fossil fuel lobbies
Malin
a bit frantic, and why some of that messaging is out there, isn't it? Because, you know, they're pushing back.
Malin
against it. And there's… so, obviously, you talked about restoration, et cetera, and this nature positive thing, and linked with that is, the word offsetting. So, obviously, we're in the comms space here, and, offsetting is something that's become really controversial, and there were some
Malin
really bad actors, I'm sure there still are,
Malin
But these… the negative headlines around the assessment that, you know, businesses and people have retreated from investing and supporting some of these projects.
Malin
So I'd just be really interested in hearing what, you know, what the balance is here. Like, how does it work when it works well, and how can businesses talk about it in a way that is transparent and open, so it doesn't sort of go into the greenwashing, but doesn't greenhush either, i.e. we're not… we're not… we're talking about it because it's important.
Malin
But in a way that is actually real, rather than made up.
Tim Christophersen
This whole space has made a lot of progress, and I'm spending a lot of my time there, so I'm happy to talk about this. There are three things that are important, that are important here. The first is, it is about reduce and invest. It's not about either investing in carbon credits or reducing your carbon footprint.
Tim Christophersen
Reduce and invest, and data has shown that the companies that also invest in carbon credits are those companies that also decarbonize their
Tim Christophersen
supply chains faster than other companies.
Katie Treggiden
That's really interesting, because that'.
Malin
Yeah.
Katie Treggiden
What did you hear? You sort of hear about…
Tim Christophersen
And it's not what you.
Katie Treggiden
Yeah.
Tim Christophersen
But that is what the data says. And the second point is the voluntary carbon market has made enormous progress in the last 3 years in particular, last 5 to 3 years.
Tim Christophersen
I would say that, article of a project that didn't make a lot of sense, and that scared a lot of companies into doing nothing, spending nothing.
Tim Christophersen
Was in the long term helpful because it triggered a whole range of
Tim Christophersen
voluntary carbon market reforms. This market is now so transparent, it's so easy to access, it's so clear with guidance and methodologies and rules. There are rating agencies that can rate the quality of carbon projects for a company. We use, we subscribe to these rating agencies.
Tim Christophersen
So there's no more excuse for action. The third is that
Tim Christophersen
inaction is now our biggest collective risk. So if a company can afford to spend a few million pounds, or dollars, or euros, or even just a thousand.
Tim Christophersen
on doing additional climate action through carbon credits, they should do it, because I've seen many of these projects that are so useful for nature, for climate, for technology. Salesforce also has $100 million committed to
Tim Christophersen
CDR, carbon dioxide removal technologies, like enhanced rock weathering and
Tim Christophersen
And carbon capture and storage, but we focus a lot of our attention on nature-based solutions.
Tim Christophersen
And the projects are triggering so much innovation, so much local improvement of livelihoods, many of these nature projects are in the Global South.
Tim Christophersen
that it is
Tim Christophersen
essential that more companies step up and buy these carbon credits now. This is not about offsetting. The term is compensating for some of your ongoing emissions that you cannot reduce right now. There's a body called the Science-Based Target Initiative that
Tim Christophersen
gives guidance to companies about this, and they've just opened, not, you know, not the floodgates for all carbon credits, but they've cautiously opened to more of those credits you can buy, in addition to what you do already. You, of course, have to have a
Tim Christophersen
Solid decarbonization plan. But then, in addition, you can invest money in those projects that actually drive climate and nature action.
Malin
Yeah, exactly, and that point is so important, isn't it? That I think when it was talked about initially, and where a lot of the backlash came from, is that people were using it instead of doing, you know, something else. They were just using it as a… as a, you know, accountancy or maths
Malin
exercise to look like they were reducing their emissions when they weren't really. They were, you know, doing the tree planting or whatever the projects were protecting.
Tim Christophersen
Yeah, and there are no laws against that. At that time, there were no law… there was no law saying if you… if you passed a gas station, and they said, oh, for one extra cent or penny, you can offset your liter or, your whole, gallon of
Tim Christophersen
fossil fuels. Of course, that didn't make any sense. The masks didn't work out, but there are now laws against that, both in the EU and elsewhere, against that type of claim, so that is not happening anymore, and I think the companies that are left in the voluntary carbon market are really serious on both reducing and investing.
Katie Treggiden
I think that's really interesting, because I, was running an online education platform a couple of years ago for people who wanted to become more sustainable, and offsetting, as it was known at the time, had almost become
Katie Treggiden
taboo. Like, it was just… nobody would say it, nobody would do it, it was instant red flag. So to hear how much the market's moved on is really helpful, and I hope… I hope some of our listeners will take that on board and take another look at it, because I think there's definitely been a hangover from some of those bad actors.
Katie Treggiden
I'd love to talk to you about
Katie Treggiden
how we move from this kind of state of fear and inaction that a lot of people are in over this stuff and a lot of the other things we've talked about, into the optimism that you've said is required for action. I use the phrase defiant hope a lot, so this idea that the sort of…
Katie Treggiden
the natural response, and the response that perhaps certain people are trying to engineer us to have is one of hopelessness, and so that to choose hope is an act of defiance, but then we must act on it. But what advice would you give someone
Katie Treggiden
say, who's in a comms role, who is stuck in, kind of, fear and inaction, like, it's best just to keep our heads down and not do anything and not say anything so we don't get called out. How do those people move towards a more optimistic and brave place?
Tim Christophersen
Courage triggers more courage, so keep that in mind. Whenever you do something that is seen as courageous by others, it will empower them, it will encourage them.
Tim Christophersen
So, from the moment that you do something courageous, you're no longer alone.
Tim Christophersen
And optimism, I like the definition of Paul Romer, the economist of
Tim Christophersen
conditional and unconditional optimism. I write about… I use this example in the book. Unconditional optimism is a child waiting for presents. You sit around, you say, well, something will happen.
Tim Christophersen
Not very useful for us right now, because if we just sit around and wait.
Tim Christophersen
It's not gonna end well, but conditional optimism is like a child wanting to build a treehouse in the yard, and they just run around, and they…
Tim Christophersen
they…
Tim Christophersen
gather so much enthusiasm amongst their family and friends, and say, well, come and join, and if we all pitch in, we can build something really cool, until everybody says, okay, I'll come, and then suddenly, you are building something really cool. That is conditional optimism. As you say, you have to be optimistic, but then you also have to do something about it.
Tim Christophersen
And that is… what we urgently, urgently need. So please, for anybody who's in the environmental movement out there.
Tim Christophersen
Imagine we're winning, because then we will win. This is how the future is created. Don't believe in doomism. Just ignore it.
Malin
That's, yeah, that's fascinating. And in fact, when we had our pre-chat, you were talking about New York Climate Week this, this year, which is 22nd to 24th of September. And you're reckoning, you reckon that this is going to be a social flipping point.
Malin
or tipping point, even, towards positive things. What makes you think that, and how will that… play out.
Tim Christophersen
So I believe in… in…
Tim Christophersen
collective intelligence of our species. Of course, I have to, because otherwise, what is the point of being human? We have to… we have to evolve and learn and adapt, and we… and we will. Part of that social tipping point that I see is that in the carbon market, there is now a perfect alignment of people saying, oh yeah, well, maybe this is now improved, and all these errors are fixed, and…
Tim Christophersen
99 out of 100 projects are great.
Tim Christophersen
So, why am I still on the sidelines? There's no… there's no more excuse with the new guidance, with all that transparency.
Tim Christophersen
With the new Science-Based Target Initiative.
Tim Christophersen
guidance companies can now invest more, and I think they will. So, at the same time, the supply of these great
Tim Christophersen
carbon and nature-related projects all over the world. The quality and the quantity of them has grown by leaps and bounds. I have so much respect for all these eco-preneurs who are making it their life's mission to build these projects. These are super smart people who could be
Tim Christophersen
making millions on Wall Street doing business as usual, but they've chosen to restore the mangroves of Senegal or elsewhere.
Tim Christophersen
And they deserve that kind of funding that now has to come, and I think that social tipping point is coming. But in the one thing I've learned about the private sector is this enormous herd mentality. It's like a huge…
Malin
Yep.
Tim Christophersen
flock of… Animals. I won't say which animal.
Tim Christophersen
Huge flock of animals. You don't want to be caught out by the wolf, who's sort of chasing the whole herd sometimes. You don't want to be out ahead, either, because then you get single out. Where you want to be is sort of somewhere in the… safely in the front 10%.
Tim Christophersen
once that whole flog moves, then things can happen very, very, fast, so we have to create that kind of FOMO again of being left outside of carbon markets. And the last point why I believe this is happening is
Tim Christophersen
physics. I don't know if you've seen the film The Big Short.
Tim Christophersen
And Christian Bale, he plays an investment broker who discovers the subprime mortgage crisis in the 2008 financial crisis.
Tim Christophersen
he discovers that this is all worthless junk, basically, in what underwrites that major economic structure. The same is happening with climate change and nature now.
Tim Christophersen
this current system that we're in cannot be sustained. We need to do something, and part of that response has to be that nature restoration
Tim Christophersen
and climate action, like carbon dioxide removal, becomes one of the most important industries of the century, because we have to draw down carbon back into the atmosphere. That's a physical necessity. So that market will come.
Tim Christophersen
It's just a question of when it will come, and I think now is when we will have that tipping point, when people realize, oh, there's actually great technology that has a lot of other benefits, like planting healthy forests.
Tim Christophersen
That can help us do this, so why don't we do it?
Malin
Yeah, and maybe the coming together, or people… Feeling some of the pain.
Malin
And the fact that the technology is there, and, you know, that side of it is ripe as well, maybe that's…
Malin
you know.
Malin
Kind of the perfect storm in a good way.
Malin
That would be… That will… that will trigger it, basically.
Tim Christophersen
It is a hypothesis, we'll see if it happens by, you know, Climate Week, or maybe by COP31, which is the next
Tim Christophersen
Climate Conference of the parties, which will happen in Turkey in November, but it will happen, because we need market mechanisms as part of an overall solution for the climate crisis, and the carbon credit market is coming of age. It's really now so solid, so well…
Tim Christophersen
governed, regulated, not yet in most cases, but there are a lot of compliance markets emerging now, where this is a regulated market that you have to opt in, if your company fulfills certain criteria, so there's a lot of…
Tim Christophersen
money that will move through that system, because markets… the one thing they're good at is an effective and efficient allocation of capital to solutions. So we have to include market mechanisms as part of overall climate action.
Katie Treggiden
Yeah, it's interesting that you used the phrase, why not? And I think at some point, it just comes down to that, doesn't it? Everything aligns, and we get to that point of, well, why on earth wouldn't you? So, fingers crossed for New York Climate Week that that's the moment when it happens.
Katie Treggiden
Well, Tim, you certainly made me feel more conditionally optimistic, so thank you for that. We have reached our quickfire round. I think I know what your answer is going to be to the first question, but the first question is, is hope
Katie Treggiden
A cop-out, or vital.
Tim Christophersen
It's vital, and even more vital, is… is optimism.
Katie Treggiden
conditional optimism.
Tim Christophersen
Conditional optimism.
Katie Treggiden
I love that distinction. What book is on your nightstand at the moment? What are you reading?
Tim Christophersen
I listen to most of my books as audiobooks. The one I'm listening to currently is The Neuromancer by William Gibson, which is apparently the book that Elon Musk has read and is a blueprint for him to
Tim Christophersen
take over the world, so I'm… I wanted to understand what… what he's thinking. It's a… it's a science fiction novel. I love science fiction.
Katie Treggiden
I love that that hasn't made you run a mile, that you've just gone, okay, I need to understand this. That's a… that's a good attitude, I think. Give us an example of some great sustainability comms that you've seen recently. Who is talking about this stuff well?
Tim Christophersen
I… in the beginning, I mentioned Peter Bick, who's a state of… Arizona State University professor, and he's run a 10-year multidisciplinary research project on…
Tim Christophersen
multi-paddock grazing, so how can you graze livestock in a way that is
Tim Christophersen
good for the carbon, good for biodiversity, good for people, good for farmers. It's called Roots So Deep, you can see the Devil down there. It's a four-part documentary. It's a great title! It's absolutely brilliant! So he's a brilliant storyteller about a topic that, until a few years ago, didn't really interest anybody. It was the common ground, the soil beneath our feet. It's… it's fabulous.
Katie Treggiden
I mean, that title alone has me hooked. Malin, what have you seen that's good in terms of sustainability comms recently?
Malin
Well, so I've been to see the, the UK Emergency… National Emergency Briefing, quite recently.
Malin
And they talk about, Copenhagen as an example in that, Tim. I don't know if you're… are you aware of the National Emergency Briefing for the UK? Yes? You're nodding? Yes. Yes, have you… have you seen it?
Tim Christophersen
I have. Yes. Very short and punchy document.
Malin
But… and they use the Copenhagen, cloudburst management plan as one of their, sort of.
Malin
positive examples, and I just thought it was quite interesting. Obviously, you're based in Denmark.
Malin
But also because, you know, we've talked about how, you know, we're in the middle of this heat wave, certainly here in the UK, that's, like, the key topic at the moment. But obviously, there's loads of stuff happening all over Europe in particular, which is also where we are, so…
Malin
the fact that the Danube is struggling, we've got, you know, we've had all these wildfires, and so on and so forth. So I thought, this is a positive story.
Malin
where, you know, the local, council and the government in Copenhagen have actually tackled something quite successfully, and you… if you live there and you know something different, please tell us, but it sounds incredible, so…
Malin
basically, great comms piece and engineering. So in short, there were some, what we're calling, monster reigns in 2011,
Malin
Which flooded the whole city, I think it was nearly a billion, yeah, billions, billion pounds worth of, damage in the city, low insurance claims, etc.
Malin
basically because the, the sewers and rainwater all went down the same way, and it just flooded everywhere. And this project set out to
Malin
sort that out, fix it, but in a way that was quite different. So, I think, in short, Copenhagen is now, like a big sponge. I think that's how they talk about it, and,
Malin
Day-to-day, you've got parks, and, you know, like, open places like you would in any city, but actually, if you have another deluge like that one, they will turn into lakes.
Malin
and they will sort of come away from the basements and the city center in a way that doesn't happen in other cities. And it just sounds incredible. And one of the things I really liked about it from a comms perspective was that they weren't, sort of, promising to solve it
Malin
forever, in terms of it's not a foolproof system, but it's a system. They talked… they created something that's visible, i.e. they're not sorting things out, they're just under the surface that people can't see, which is why they're bought into it, and I guess…
Malin
Because of that big issue, in terms of the flooding, people were open and willing to…
Malin
Changed things, and changed how they were, so they… the decisions came through.
Malin
So you're… you're nodding, that's good.
Tim Christophersen
I love the concept of the sponge cities, which is, of course, biomimicry at infrastructure level. You look at what nature is doing in a flood, and you transfer that to infrastructure. Also reminded me of another great saying, that if you don't like the costs of climate action, try in action, because that billion in damages in 2011
Tim Christophersen
It was just a bill from climate change, so compared to that, the costs that we have to invest to get our infrastructure and our societies ready are fairly minor, and we… the longer we wait, the more expensive that gets.
Katie Treggiden
So interesting. I'm also… we talked about, kind of, personal actions, and I'm also thinking about, people are replacing their concrete drives with these, sort of, more porous surfaces that plants can go through that mean the rainwater also has somewhere to go. You mentioned, Tim, that you are a big fan of audiobooks. What is your favourite podcast?
Tim Christophersen
I love rewilding the world with Ben Goldsmith. Ben is a wonderful human being. He started this podcast a few years ago to tell the story of these large-scale restoration efforts that were happening across the world, and that nobody was paying attention to. Really good news stories that can inspire others. I love Ben and his podcast.
Katie Treggiden
Amazing, we need more of those. And finally, what's your top tip for communicating imperfect progress towards genuine sustainability with confidence?
Tim Christophersen
Well, that's sort of my day job, so I would say…
Tim Christophersen
I would say the key ingredient is authenticity. If you go out there, and I speak on a lot of panels, and you say, you know, we've got it all figured out, everything's awesome.
Tim Christophersen
Nobody believes that, first of all. It's usually not true. But what people do believe is that we are…
Tim Christophersen
We are figuring this out together with other companies, with our stakeholders.
Tim Christophersen
For our 100 million trees that we're planting, for example, we're now focusing those on the watersheds, where we actually have water dependencies as a company.
Tim Christophersen
That's not a perfect science, but we are seeing the benefits of that, and you have to be able to tell that story, also with sometimes saying, oh, we don't know… yet.
Tim Christophersen
Or, we made a mistake, which also happens, but you have to be authentic about how you communicate.
Katie Treggiden
Amazing. And I think that, in a nutshell, is a beautiful note to end on, so thank you so much, Tim. It's been a joy talking to you, and I hope everyone will go out and read your book.
Tim Christophersen
Thank you so much.
Tim Christophersen
Take care.
Katie Treggiden
That was awesome. Thank you, Tim. So good.
Malin
really good.
Katie Treggiden
I've been feeling quite doomy lately, and I feel positively inspired now.
Tim Christophersen
Well, now the next step is to go out and do something about it.
Katie Treggiden
Yeah, absolutely.
Tim Christophersen
And you were doing a lot already in what you do. Communications is so important in… in… in all of this, and…
Tim Christophersen
I think we, we all need to learn to be better communicators. I hope to have this discussion…
Katie Treggiden
get your hands in soil, though. I'm in the process of trying to rewild my garden, and it's probably doing more for my, kind of, sense of
Katie Treggiden
conditional optimism than anything I do professionally, just putting in a pond, and planting a hedge, and turning a gravel drive into a biodiverse lawn, like, all that stuff is… and seeing new creatures arise.
Malin
given.
Katie Treggiden
garden as a result. Like, that stuff is doing more to feed my soul than.
Tim Christophersen
Seeing how fast nature responds is giving me the most hope in that, because we, on one of the plots here on the farm where we plant a lot of trees, it was a…
Tim Christophersen
maize field, it was a monoculture crop field a few… four years ago, and now with all the trees and the… we walked there the other day, and it was just so full of butterflies.
Katie Treggiden
Mmm.
Tim Christophersen
And these were not… would have not been there, were not there, 4 years ago.
Tim Christophersen
And just seeing how quickly nature responds is… nature is waiting for that signal from us, so the intention that we bring…
Tim Christophersen
is also important.
Katie Treggiden
We had a hummingbird moth in the garden this week, which was…
Tim Christophersen
Yeah, so amazing.
Tim Christophersen
Yeah.
Katie Treggiden
They're so cool. Yeah, incredible. And apparently they're partly here because of climate change and because it's getting warmer, but I was like, yeah, but she chose my garden, so…
Malin
Exactly.
Katie Treggiden
They must be doing something right. Amazing. Thank you so much, Tim.
Tim Christophersen
You're welcome. And if there's anything I can do to amplify when this is out, I guess you'll let me know, then…
Katie Treggiden
Yeah, we'll produce…
Katie Treggiden
We'll tag you in on the things we share, but we'll also produce some assets for…
Katie Treggiden
Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever you'd like to share those, so that would be brilliant, thank you.
Tim Christophersen
Wonderful. Yeah, I really enjoyed that. Thank you so much.
Katie Treggiden
Thank you.
Malin
Thank you. Take care.
Tim Christophersen
Bye bye.
Katie Treggiden
We have been Katie Treggiden and Malin Cunningham, and this has been Spill the Green Tea. Please leave us a review and share this episode with anyone you think might find it helpful. And let's get people talking about this stuff.
Malin Cunningham
Thank you my co-host, author, journalist and consultant, Katie Tregidden. Katie is on a mission to share true stories of imperfect progress towards genuine sustainability, and to help purpose-driven brands talk about their eco-efforts for clarity, credibility and confidence. Katie has a brilliant resource called Green, Not Greenwashed, that will help you do just that.
You can find a link in the show notes.
Katie Treggiden
And thank you to my co-host, Malin Cunningham is the founder of B2B comms consultancy, Hattrick. They help businesses build commercial credibility and a competitive edge through standout PR, thought leadership and carbon literacy training. And Malin has a fantastic guide for sales and marketing professionals called Green or Greenwashed?
Great minds think alike, what can I say? And you can find a link to that in the show notes too.
Malin Cunningham
And a final thank you to all our brilliant guests and to Kirsty Spain for editing and producing this and every episode.
