This Climate Business

Imagine being able to bring climate into long-term financial forecasts - not just this year but 100-years ahead. Canopi is the latest climate tool to come from the climate powerhouse The Lever Room. Rebecca Mills is the founder of The Lever Room, a strategy and technology company working across carbon, climate and nature. Rebecca helped build The B Team, the global initiative founded by Richard Branson and Jochen Zeitz, and now leads Women in Climate Tech Australasia and lectures at the University of Otago.

Vincent attended the Sustainability Business Live conference in Melbourne recently and met an impressive array of experts and entrepreneurs from Australia and New Zealand - all chasing what one speaker called the triumph of the transition. In the next few episodes we'll meet some of these transition trumpeters. First up, Ben Symons, a senior natural capital advisor with Climate Friendly, one of Australia's leading carbon and biodiversity consultancies.
https://www.climatefriendly.com/

Biodiversity credits remain somewhat the holy grail in conservation. Imagine being paid to manage nature - not for farming or mining or fishing - but simply for being, nature. Yet like the holy grail, the promise outshines the reality. Carbon credits have struggled to meet expectations. Various attempts like He Waka Eke Noa and the ETS have failed to link markets to nature.
But a new report by the BNZ, Deloitte and The Nature Conservancy predicts a brighter future. ‘Connecting Nature, Climate’ and Capital says demand for high-integrity nature-based carbon credits is strong and growing – with carbon markets projected to grow from NZ$2.5bn today to up to NZ$35.5bn by 2030 - and that New Zealand is uniquely positioned to capitalise.
Well to explain that outrageous optimism Vincent was joined by authors Louise Aitken of Deloitte and Erik van Eyndhoven of the Nature Conservancy.
The report can be found here.

Jack Bobo is a food futurist and keynote speaker at E Tipu New Zealand Future Food and Fibre Summit. He argues the food system’s hardest problem after climate is social. We all disagree about what food is, how it should be grown and how it should be distributed. It doesn’t have to be this way. In a wide-ranging conversation, Vincent asks Jack to reflect on the future of food to 2100.
Jack Bobo is the author of ‘Why Smart People Make Bad Food Choices’ and is Executive Director of the Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies at UCLA in the United States. He is speaking at the E Tipu New Zealand Future Food and Fibre Summit in Christchurch in May 2026.

Sustainable transport advocate Kirsten Corson tells Ross Inglis that the war on Iran both exposes our dependence on imported oils and offers an opportunity to move away from them.