2025 hasn’t been the easiest year. Amid ongoing genocides, Trump becoming US president again, and the EU backtracking on some of its most innovative policies, it feels like progress on sustainability matters has been slow, even non-existent. Meanwhile, billionaires are becoming richer, artificial intelligence is taking people’s jobs and attention spans, and the climate breakdown continues at a pace. Notably, last year the Earth reached its first tipping point, meaning that warm water coral re...
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2025 hasn’t been the easiest year. Amid ongoing genocides, Trump becoming US president again, and the EU backtracking on some of its most innovative policies, it feels like progress on sustainability matters has been slow, even non-existent. Meanwhile, billionaires are becoming richer, artificial intelligence is taking people’s jobs and attention spans, and the climate breakdown continues at a pace. Notably, last year the Earth reached its first tipping point, meaning that warm water coral re...
2025 hasn’t been the easiest year. Amid ongoing genocides, Trump becoming US president again, and the EU backtracking on some of its most innovative policies, it feels like progress on sustainability matters has been slow, even non-existent. Meanwhile, billionaires are becoming richer, artificial intelligence is taking people’s jobs and attention spans, and the climate breakdown continues at a pace. Notably, last year the Earth reached its first tipping point, meaning that warm water coral re...
Water scarcity is already one of the world’s biggest risks, so why do we treat long showers as inconsequential? In the UK alone, we send more than two billion litres of shower water down the drain every day. Water scarcity is already one of the world’s top systemic risks, yet most solutions still focus on infrastructure and regulation. This week on Shaken Not Burned, we explore a different lever: human behaviour. Felicia talks to Carly Hunt, head of strategic partnerships at Showerkap, about ...
We are a podcast, but we have to admit: images can speak more than words. A powerful visual can tell a story, evoke sensations, and even inspire action. And isn’t that an essential tool in communicating about climate and sustainability? Yet, for one reason or another, we resort to cliches: a polar bear on melting ice, a blue marble image, hands joining together over some greenery. Sure, they are cliches for a reason – but which are the alternatives, and how can they capture the attention of o...
PFAS, or forever chemicals, are one of the most urgent but misunderstood issues in environmental health. This group of nearly 15,000 man-made substances are used to make many products more durable or waterproof, but they don’t break down. Instead, they accumulate in our water, our soil and even our bodies. While we don’t yet have a full picture of their impacts, we know that they have been linked to health issues, such as increased risk of cancer and immune disorders. So, how do w...
Carbon markets are intended to be the backbone of climate finance – but they’re often criticised for being opaque, inefficient, and riddled with credibility issues. This week, Giulia talked to Alex Taylor, co-founder at KlimaDAO and Carbonmark, about the messy reality of the voluntary carbon markets, from opaque pricing, questionable credit quality, middlemen capturing most of the value, as well as why so many people doubt the whole system. KlimaDAO tried to use blockchain to make the m...
Europe talks a big game on marine protection but, beneath the surface, the picture is far more fragile. This week on Shaken Not Burned, Felicia speaks with Professor Callum Roberts, one of the world’s leading marine biologists and lead scientist on the Convex Seascape Survey. His research reveals a climate risk we almost never count: what happens to the carbon stored in our seabed when it’s torn up by trawling. The ocean floor is one of the planet’s largest natural carbon stores, lockin...
Let’s dive into a part of climate action that too often sits behind the scenes: the hard work of making impact measurable and decision-ready. Sustainability teams may spend years drowning in data, frameworks and reporting demands, yet businesses still struggle to answer the simplest question of all: what’s the best choice to make? This week, Felicia speaks to Nick Catania, co-founder of ClimatePoint, a company that is building bottom-up tools that trace impacts through the full life cycle of ...
What does it really mean to be net zero? In a world overflowing with climate claims, standards are becoming the new currency of trust, as they set technical definitions and create common ground. This week, we’re exploring something that could reshape how the world defines and delivers climate ambition: the new ISO net zero guidelines. Our guest is Noelia Garcia Nebra, head of sustainability at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). ISO’s purpose is to bring credibility to...
The Conference of the Parties, or COP30 this year in Brazil, can seem remote – bureaucratic, elite, hard to connect with. But it’s also one of the few spaces where solidarity can still take shape. The same is true of philanthropy: when it’s built on listening and trust, not hierarchy or control, it becomes a bridge between people and resources rather than another layer of power. This week's guest is Raysa França, climate justice educator and philanthropy advisory manager at Impatience E...
Working in sustainability means getting the story right. We may have crunched the numbers and estimated the risks of biodiversity loss in a certain area, or the opportunities arising from decarbonising a certain sector. But if we don’t communicate effectively with our stakeholders, there is a real risk that all of this effort will go to waste. This is particularly true when interacting with stakeholders requires navigating cultural differences. So how can storytelling help enable ...
Every day we read new headlines about climate extremes, yet behind the noise lies a quieter, more corrosive threat: misinformation. In this week's episode of Shaken Not Burned, we explore why climate misinformation isn’t a communications issue or a social-media nuisance, but a systemic business risk that can destabilise economies, erode public trust, and undermine effective climate action. Our guest, Harriet Kingaby, co-chair of the Conscious Advertising Network, explains how misinformation s...
This week, we are talking about the turbulence surrounding ESG and sustainable finance. The question we’re exploring: is the backlash against ESG a crisis, or a necessary correction? Joining us is Professor Thanos Verousis, an economist and researcher on sustainable finance at Vlerick Business School. Together, we unpack why ESG is under fire, what went wrong, and how finance can evolve to meet the challenges of the 21st century. It is tempting to see ESG as the future of finance or to dismis...
Think about the products you use every day at home. The hand soap. The cleaning spray. The sponge for the dishes. The face cream. The toothpaste. Why do you buy certain brands, with certain packaging and certain ingredients? Whether it's because they were the products of our childhood, or the advertising has convinced us, or the price is just too convenient, we may not spend much time questioning our purchase decisions. It feels like consumers are pushed towards disposable items t...
Is ESG really “dead,” or are we asking the wrong question? Perhaps, we should examine what it takes to run a truly responsible business in today’s high-risk environment. This week, Giulia is joined by Steve Kenzie, executive director of the UN Global Compact Network UK, to explore how the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative is pushing companies beyond paper commitments and into real accountability. It is tempting to think that ESG acronyms, ratings, and disclosure framewo...
At the heart of Shaken Not Burned is sustainability literacy. But not in the sense of teaching acronyms or repeating headlines. What we mean is something bigger: the skills to understand how systems really work – and how to change them. The same skills that help you spot greenwash or untangle climate policy are the ones we all need to face today’s challenges: misinformation, polarisation, geopolitical shocks, even the cracks in democratic norms. Here’s the thing: we don’t need more theories t...
What does it take to scale real-world climate solutions fast? In this episode, we explore what happens when you treat climate action like an engineering challenge, not just a moral imperative. Joining us is Nick Wirth, aerodynamicist, engineer, and former Formula One team owner turned cleantech entrepreneur. Today, he’s applying high-performance engineering to supermarkets, trucks, and buildings through Wirth Research, saving clients energy costs and cutting emissions with every install...
Let’s step out of the ESG echo chamber and into a much bigger conversation: what are the real limits of our planet and how close are we to crossing them? Life on Earth has remained stable for the last 12,000 years, but that stability is starting to unravel. It’s tempting to treat climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, and land use as separate “issues,” each with their own strategy, timeline, and department. But that’s not how Earth works, and businesses that think that way are flying b...
From climate volatility to food insecurity and antibiotic resistance, the global food system is at a breaking point. Industrial agriculture contributes up to 25% of global emissions, drives biodiversity loss, and strains farmers with volatile prices and precarity. It’s clear we need to change how food is made, not just how it's consumed: one bold solution is clean agriculture. In this week’s episode, Felicia speaks with Jim Mellon, entrepreneur, investor, and executive chairman of Agron...
The world needs to plug a biodiversity finance gap worth $700 billion per year to effectively protect and restore nature, according to the United Nations. This issue is garnering more attention as sustainability efforts have evolved from reducing carbon emissions to protecting nature – moving from ‘do no harm’ to taking positive action. A turning point was the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, to which most countries agreed in 2022, defining biodiversity commitments, pushing fo...
There’s no denying that continuing to treat the natural world as we do will lead to ecological breakdown. We don’t seem to take into account how our consumption of natural resources affects the planet – which, ultimately, may stop providing those resources in the first place. UK economist Kate Raworth has developed a model, called doughnut economics, which provides an alternative system where humans can thrive without breaching planetary boundaries. In her landmark book, “Doughnut Econo...
2025 hasn’t been the easiest year. Amid ongoing genocides, Trump becoming US president again, and the EU backtracking on some of its most innovative policies, it feels like progress on sustainability matters has been slow, even non-existent. Meanwhile, billionaires are becoming richer, artificial intelligence is taking people’s jobs and attention spans, and the climate breakdown continues at a pace. Notably, last year the Earth reached its first tipping point, meaning that warm water coral re...
