Climate Confident

10 Gigatons a Year: How Nature-Based Solutions Can Reverse Climate Change

Tom Raftery Peter Bachmann Season 1 Episode 136

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In this week's episode of the Climate Confident podcast I sat down with Peter Bachmann, the managing director of the Sustainable Infrastructure division at Gresham House, and let me tell you, this conversation is a goldmine for anyone passionate about building a sustainable future. 🌏

First up, we delve into the world of "Habitat Banks." Imagine turning unproductive farmland into biodiversity havens that not only restore nature but also offer financial returns for landowners. Sound impossible? Peter lays down how it's being done, and you're gonna want to hear this. 🌱

Vertical Farms! That's right, we talk about the role they could play in pushing traditional farmland into more sustainable practices. Peter argues that when vertical farming becomes competitive, it will make room for land to be repurposed into these remarkable "Habitat Banks." It's a win-win for the planet and your pocket! 🌾🏢

One of the episode's highlights is the conversation about Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG). You'll learn about the science-backed metrics like eDNA that are turning biodiversity from an abstract concept into a measurable target for companies. Plus, did you know that we could potentially save 10 gigatons of CO2 emissions per year through nature-based solutions? 🌳📊

Peter also tackles the age-old myth that impact means sacrificing returns. Quite the opposite—impact can DRIVE financial gains. Investors, entrepreneurs, and even skeptics will find this incredibly eye-opening. 💰🌿

For a dash of future food talk, Peter gives us a sneak peek into the untapped potential of alternative proteins. From lab-grown meats to plant-based options, this is the future of food we've all been waiting for. 🍔➡️🌱

So what are you waiting for? Hit play and let's dive into these exciting avenues for sustainable change. Or check out the video version of this podcast at https://youtu.be/4K7a-wTkSv8

Until next time, let's keep pushing the envelope for a better world! 💪

P.S. If you're as thrilled about these topics as I am, please share the episode. We need to make sustainability the talk of the town! 🎙️🗞️

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Credits
Music credits - Intro by Joseph McDade, and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played, and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

Peter Bachmann:

if we did nature based solutions globally, so that's everyone has to play ball, but we could get about 10 gigatons worth of CO2 savings. That's the emissions of the US, the EU and Japan combined from doing nature based solutions at scale. So I think we've spent a lot of time kind of looking at climate and mechanical tools, but actually mother nature has got a pretty big power herself

Tom Raftery:

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Climate Confident podcast. The number one podcast, showcasing best practices in climate emission, reductions and removals. And I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Don't forget to click follow on this podcast in your podcast app of choice, to be sure you don't miss any episodes. Hi everyone and welcome to episode 136 of the Climate Confident podcast. My name is Tom Raftery and before we kick off today's show I want to take a quick moment to express my gratitude to all of this podcast's amazing supporters. Your support has been instrumental in keeping the podcast going and I am really grateful for each and every one of you. If you're not already a supporter I'd like to encourage you to consider joining our community of like minded individuals who are passionate about climate. Supporting the podcast is easy and affordable with options starting just as low as three euros or dollars per month. That's less than the cost of a cup of coffee and your support will make a huge difference in keeping this show going strong. To become a supporter simply click on the support link in the show notes of this or any episode or visit tinyurl. com slash climatepod. Now, without further ado, with me on the show today, I have my special guest, Peter. Peter, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Peter Bachmann:

Hi, Tom. Yeah, look, great to be here. Yeah, so my name is Peter Bachmann. I'm the managing director of the Sustainable Infrastructure division at Gresham House, which is a £8 billion pound specialist asset manager.

Tom Raftery:

Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about Gresham House because I'm not sure a lot of people, well, possibly a lot of people listening to the podcast may not have heard of Gresham House. So what is that? And then tell us a little bit about the fund.

Peter Bachmann:

Sure. So look, Gresham House is listed on the London Stock Exchange. As I mentioned, it has about eight billion pounds, all money really coagulating around the sustainability thematics. So for example, we've got Europe's largest forestry platform. And actually it's about the fifth or sixth largest in the world with forests all across Australia, New Zealand, UK and Ireland. We've got Europe's largest battery storage fund. So it's a fund created to help invest in battery energy storage assets, which helped the grid regulate itself because we've got more solar and wind, which unfortunately it's not always sunny and always windy. We've also got UK's second largest venture capital trust platform or VCT, which is a UK specific tax incentive to forward investment into early stage companies. We've also got quite a large division in social and affordable housing. So we've got listed in our listed funds. We've then got about a billion in public equities, typically targeting small cap, micro cap stocks, and then my division, which is sustainable infrastructure division, and we've got two flagship funds, BCF1 and BCF2, and then now five locally focused and sidecar vehicles to enable investors to invest specifically into regions or into specific assets that we invested to. And I guess just to summarize the strategy of BSEF more generally is we are fundamentally investing into a sustained blip structure, which to us are profitable, real asset based solutions to the big environmental and social problems. This is very much a real asset based solution to try to tackle these problems because there's a huge amount of environmental and social problems that we face, which you probably talk about a lot, Tom. But technology can only do so much and what we are investing in is the real asset solutions, the physical products and services that you need to actually deliver a more sustainable future.

Tom Raftery:

What kind of assets are you referring to?

Peter Bachmann:

Yeah, good question. So we cover assets into main six main thematics. The first one is what we call resource efficiency. And by that we are looking at saying pretty much everything that we make these days uses too much land, too much water, too much chemicals and pesticides, essentially overuses our finite resources on this planet. And what we're doing is, for example, we were building, we have built now, pardon me, the world's largest fully automated vertical farm. So if you're listeners that don't know what a vertical farm is, that is a building which basically has hydroponic watering systems, so it recirculates the water. It has LED lights and it has controlled environment in there. And what that allows us to do is effectively create the perfect Tuscan hillside summer conditions. 25, 26 degrees, gentle breeze, 75 percent humidity. And plants love to grow in that. And what we enables us to do is to grow, for example, at our second farm up in Norfolk, that can grow in four acres, what it would take 1000 to maybe 2000 acres to grow out the field. So 250 to 500 times more land efficient. Because of that hydroponic watering system we use about 95, 98 percent less water than field grown crops. We use no chemicals and pesticides. And then the two really big things that the supermarkets we're working with love, one is that they've got food security. And for any of your listeners in the UK, you'll have seen this, the shortages of salad leaves, for example, over the summer. That is a thing of the past with vertical farming. And then finally, because of the way that we grow and that we harvest, we get about 14 to 21 days longer shelf life. And so that means that avoids that disappointing salad bag that you probably had as well that goes off after a couple of days. But more importantly, it really tackles food waste for the that's a big drag on their profit margins. Less food waste, longer shelf life means less packaging. Less packaging means less plastic into the waste streams. Less plastic in the waste streams means less problems with microplastics. And microplastics is, yeah the really big problem that no one's talking about is causing infertility problems. I've seen some research that says that we might be entirely infertile as a male race by about 2050. So that's a pretty scary stat. And yeah, these are the sorts of things that we need to sort of back out of and say, vertical farming we think could be a great example of the future of food. Currently we're growing leafy greens and yeah. We're definitely not going to save the world by salad bags, but where we're going to next are soft fruits and then we've already started to grow wheat. But ultimately we want to grow soy, wheat, and rice and then you can have a carbohydrate and a protein alternative plant based proteins and that's really then when you can feed the world. So that's an example of resource efficiency. Other ones that we are focused on are things around, for example, digital inclusion. So not everyone realizes how important internet is, but obviously we're doing this via the power of the internet, and particularly a lot of rural economies and rural populations that have good access to good internet. So we invest into connecting up those towns and villages that have been left behind. And that has really tangible benefit, yeah, for every... one pound that we invest, there's about 15 pounds back out in terms of economic, social and environmental value. So, digital inclusion is quite powerful. Other interesting things, I'll just talk about two more examples of what we do. One is, we have a business up in Middlesbrough called Waste Not where it takes commercial and industrial waste that would otherwise be going to landfill. and turns that into a pellet, and that pellet can directly replace coal in the cement and steel industries. Now, they're two of the most polluting industries that we have out there. Huge challenges to decarbonize the heat process, particularly of cement and steel. And this pellet can directly replace coal there. And that single plant creates about 800,000 tons, 800,000 tons of CO2 avoided every year. That's about half a million cars off the road, so we think that's a pretty good example of decarbonisation and also providing a waste solution. And then the final one that we have invested in is a business called the Environment Bank, where we're building these large 50 to 100 hectare landscape scale habitat banks. So essentially turning the least productive land, In England, into these beautiful woodlands, wetlands, grassland mosaics, to almost think about trying to turn the planet back into what it looked like before we came. And we've created a new asset class around investing into these habitat banks, which taps into the Environment Act, which has come in England, which compels all new planning permissions to require at least 10 percent biodiversity net gain. So it's a pretty expansive examples of what we think are really highly impactful infrastructure based assets,

Tom Raftery:

Right. Interesting How do these make money?

Peter Bachmann:

And you know, I think at the core of all of this they have to make money Yeah, my motto is if it's not profitable, it's not sustainable. So for example the vertical farming business the key thing there is that we can sell a product that is at or below the price of field grown crops, but yet we are 1,900 times better from a carbon perspective. So it has 1,900 times carbon benefit against imported field grown crops, it has great food security, it has shelf life extensions. So it has this product, all these sustainability benefits, but it's the same price as field grown crops. So which one of you in the supermarket are you going to buy? Yeah. And that's where we talk about impact can actually drive financial returns. Because in this case, if you can get the economics, right, you could be on parity with the alternative, less sustainable products. When you have all these sustainability benefits, retailers consumers are always going to want to buy this more sustainable product. And that's really how we think about everything that we do we have to be able to essentially monetize the sustainable impact by giving them a product that is better, provides better value, but has all these sustainability credentials, but at or below the price of the less sustainable alternative. And I think, you know, we've looked at other business models and seen other businesses out there that have tried to charge a significant premium for sustainable products. And I think, that may be okay for a small early adopter cohort, but that's not going to get to mass adoption. And everything that we think about is how do you get to the stage where every single person, like your hairdresser, your doctor, your garbage collector, they're all buying these sustainable products. And that's really when things will make a real difference. You have to get mass adoption to get the level of change that we need.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. The vertical farms challenge generally is that they are, they require lots of energy, right, to light up all those LED lights. And that has to date limited their rollout. As far as I can tell, it seems to be the main challenge. How are you dealing with that?

Peter Bachmann:

Yeah, you're right. In the sense that energy is a really big part of the cost base for vertical farms. It's probably in the order of 70, 80 percent of most vertical farms cost base. And the reason that we've even been able to get to where we are is that when you look at the cost of led lights and the efficiency of those led lights, they have just plummeted in price and the efficiency has just gone up massively. So even say five years ago, I would have said that vertical farming would have really struggled to make the economics work. But now with the cost improvements, efficiency improvements, the LED lights, that has been one aspect of the big helping hand call it that the other part is that what we're doing is we're funding either onsite or next door, essentially our own solar projects and on future projects, we're going to be putting in batteries and wind turbines as well. So we're looking to generate 100 percent of our energy from renewable sources that we will fund ourselves. And then what that allows us to do is effectively, renewables are coming down in price. Like you'll have seen the cost of solar and wind, not wind as much, but solar has come down a lot in recent years. So we have what we think is effectively declining cost base in vertical farming with the access to renewables. And therefore, we think we're in a pretty good place to actually, we're already at price parity with field grown crops, but with declining costs in terms of renewables, efficiency gains in the LED lights, we think we've actually got a declining cost base generally. Which when you compare to, say, fuel grown crops, they've only got upward sloping costs in chemicals, and people, and land, and things like that. So, energy is a really big part of how we think about it. Obviously Gresham House has got a huge pedigree in renewable energy. We've got a big battery farm. We've got hundreds of megawatts of renewables as well. So, I think having that renewables mindset is really key. I've done 15 years in renewables. The founder of vertical Fisher Farms is also got a lot of pedigree in renewables, so energy is a really key part, but get it right with renewables, you can manage it and actually, we think it'll come to our, become part of our advantage over time as the cost of renewables comes down.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. And just to clarify, it's not that you're, it's not that you guys have this vertical farm, it's that you've invested in someone who has developed it, is that it?

Peter Bachmann:

Yeah, so our fund typically takes majority equity stakes in businesses. So in this case, we have taken with majority owner of Fisher Farms. But what we've done is we've gone probably earlier than other investors. So when Tristan came to us in 2018, he had been growing leafy greens in a shipping container. And from that, we had enough growing data to say, actually, yes, let's go and build a medium scale commercial plant, which is in Staffordshire, that's essentially Farm 1. And we then use the next few years to go and take that initial idea, call it that, and develop it into a fully automated offering. And then based upon the data that we got out of Farm 1, we then built Farm 2, which is seven and a half times bigger. We think the world's largest fully automated vertical farm. So we are both funded, but also partners because we've gone probably earlier than most other investors. My own background, I've had a number of years as a developer as it has our team. And I think to go and get the change that we need to be going earlier. You know, we need to be fundamentally taking ideas. We need to be building new things from scratch. That's the only way that you can claim additionality. But we need to be supporting these ideas and structuring them into a way that they then become institutional investable, like institutional graded assets. And then once you get to that, you show some track record, that's how you're going to be able to mushroom these platform businesses and really scale up. So vertical farming, for example, we're in the process now of over the next few months, Green Lighting Farm 3, and then we'll probably be looking to do Farms 4, 5, and 6 into Canada, because that's another interesting market for us. They've got a huge amount of green energy that's on their doorstep and at relatively low cost. So we are very much a partner and, you know, we have substantial owners. We sit on the board. I sit on the board of Fisher Farms, for example. Yeah, these are really exciting platforms, but they take money and they take patience and they take a lot of guidance to get them to where they need to be.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, interesting. You mentioned they're fully automated. How big a a factor is that in keeping the cost down as well?

Peter Bachmann:

It's a big factor. You know, we've seen other offerings out there. For example, there's one in the Middle East that claims to be the world's largest. It's bigger because it's got a huge amount of space left over for people to do a lot of the manual work. So from seeding to harvesting and the like. With us being fully automated actually means that literally every process from the seeding, to the tray going out into the growing racks, to coming back into the harvesting reseeding cleaning, and then going back out. Being able to do it fully automated is incredibly efficient from a space perspective. We move about a thousand trays a day. Just to give you some perspective and actually one step that you might like Tom is if we, our trays are about one and a half, two meters by one and a half meters or so, if you stack them just like on their side, so not even like lengthwise, just sitting down on their flap sides. If we stacked all of the trays that we have in farm two up, it would actually be three times the height of the Shard. So that just kind of gives you a scale of quantum that trays that we have in the vertical farm, which we need to move and we move about a thousand trays a day. Just to manage all the different crops that we grow and cycles and moving them from early stage to later stage and the like so try to do that with people. It becomes incredibly complex and I don't actually think that would even be possible. You know from logistically trying to manage that people movements, the space people need it's incredibly difficult. So we think the only way to get vertical farming cost efficient and continue to improve in cost is to have it fully automated

Tom Raftery:

And as you said, that's leafy greens. What about the challenges of, as you mentioned earlier, the soft fruits and the grains?

Peter Bachmann:

Yeah, so soft fruits we have grown a number of the different soft fruits at Farm 1 to try them. We can get them to work. We probably, we think that we're just trying to now crack the market with leafy greens. So once we've got that, we'll probably then go into soft fruits the next year or two. We, we've already started to grow in Farm 1 and we can get it to work. So we know that it grows from start to finish through that. In terms of the UK at the moment, the cost base is probably a little bit too high in terms of the electricity cost. But I mentioned that we're looking at Canada. In Canada, the power price is about 3p per kilowatt hour versus it's about 25p in the UK. So with that kind of quantum difference, we can get soy, wheat and rice to grow economically day one. And that's probably what we're going to be looking at when we move into to that market. So, you know, there's a lot of exciting developments now where we can go and find access to green energy, but then have some of these low power prices. The, I guess, the accessibility for this type of soy, wheat, and rice crop, then mushrooms immediately and that's really what we set out with the vertical farming business, really to get to a place where it can do soy, wheat, and rice. Then you can genuinely replace or at least supplement plant based proteins. And yeah, as you probably know, the dairy industry consumes about 8. 7 billion people's worth of calories every year. That's just from the cows on this planet. And if you added up all their burps and farts, they're probably about third in terms of GHG emissions as a country. So, just the emissions of the cows are behind the US and China. So, you know, we need to start to tackle these things. And that's why I kind of, I mean, vertical farming is not the panacea to everything, but it certainly can tackle quite a lot of these problems at source. And I think we just have to genuinely be looking at everything that we can do to decarbonize every industry. And for me the biggest challenge I see is that nothing is happening fast enough, but there's just not the impetus you know, these COP processes aren't resulting in binding targets or anything that's compelling real change. So, you know, that's the thing that I guess, I worry about. But I think that with things like what we're doing, we are, these are commercially viable without any subsidies. And that's the trick now is to find those problems with the big enough challenges and the big enough costs inherent in them. So in such that when you fix them, there's quite a big reward. And that's, I think, how we try to think about how do you move forward in this world where we need change, but where there isn't perhaps the government incentives or mechanisms to compel change quick enough.

Tom Raftery:

Yeah. You mentioned as well that the vertical farming is hundreds of times more land efficient. There's got to be, I mean, one of the things I've been saying in talks I've given about vertical farming is that it is absolutely necessary, not just vertical farming, but also the likes of clean meats as well. They're both vitally important so that we can return all the land we've taken back to biodiversity and therefore, you know, use the land to increase that, I don't know, is it 70 percent of biodiversity we've lost since 1970 or something ridiculous like that? That's crazy, yeah. So is that something you're thinking about as well rewilding as George Monbiot puts it?

Peter Bachmann:

Yeah and George is a, I'm a huge fan of George's thinking. So I think you're very much on the right track listening to him. Absolutely. You know, we... vertical farming is a great way to take a less efficient piece of land and turn it into something that can create a huge amount of land efficiency. Because I think the problem that we've got now is that, for example, the UK is 72 percent monoculture in farmland, and quite a lot of that was only profitable or viable because of subsidies. And that isn't the right way of using land, and we see tons of land out there that's huge amount of chemical used to just get it to be marginally productive. And what we're thinking about so the business that I mentioned, the environment bank, we're taking that least productive land out there. So the stuff that's not growing food can't really be done it can't you can't really be doing anything else with it. And we then turning it into these habitat banks. So for us, almost the worse the land is to start with, the better it is from our perspective to create more biodiversity from it. So absolutely. I think in the way that we think this is going full circle, so vertical farming will somewhat displace the least productive farmland in various countries, because at a point, that least productive farmland won't be able to compete with vertical farming to produce. But what we can then do is take that least productive land and then turn it into these habitat banks. And these habitat banks then, you know, are a great way to use the land and also provides a very good income stream for the landowners and allows them to offset some of their incomes that they would otherwise get that they wouldn't have otherwise got from the land. And this is all about trying to use our land and all of our finite resources in the most efficient way. And I think we can find a way to tap into that and always find the most effective, most productive way to use a piece of land or a finite resource that's got to be good for the planet and that's I think that's I think we try to follow

Tom Raftery:

And explain how does the landowner earn money from this land bank?

Peter Bachmann:

Yeah, so we would typically lease the land or sometimes we buy the land from that farmer And so what we typically looking for is 50 to 100 hectare blocks of their farm where perhaps they weren't doing anything with it. Sometimes you know, we take land that's got tree stumps and yeah literally the least productive land and we then enter into a long term lease with them and we pay them a fixed annual rental for that land and then in some instances we'll pay that landowner to help manage and maintain that habitat bank over the 30 years as well. So it's a nice income stream for them. It's. We can typically give them substantially more than what they could otherwise earn from ELMS or the Environment Land Management Scheme or other equivalent I suppose land support schemes out there. And ultimately then they, if it's a leasehold situation, they then end up at the end of the 30 odd years with a beautiful woodland, wetland, grassland mosaic. So it's a pretty nice thing for them to have on their estate. And what we're actually finding now is that planning authorities, once they know that we've got a Habitat Bank, they're encouraging new development to go alongside those Habitat Banks because then there's going to be 30 plus years of beautiful green space. So this isn't that you're going to go kick a football there, but just being close and have access to actually proper grassland wilderness type spaces is great for people's mental health and health. And the other big thing with these Habitat Banks is that because they're large and concentrated, they have a big accelerator benefit. So in terms of the amount of flora and fauna growth, you're going to get a lot more when you've got 50-100 hectares for the birds and insects to come and build their families rather than small little nature strips, which yes, some of the risks that we see with BNG not being done at scale.

Tom Raftery:

Sure, and how are you making money off the land banks?

Peter Bachmann:

So we generate a BNG unit or Biodiversity Net Gain Unit, and that's in accordance with DEFRAs so the UK government department DEFRAs created a BNG metric, DEFRA metric 4. 0 is currently where we're at. And that basically says, okay, this is what the land is today. This is what we're going to put into it in terms of interventions. And this is the amount of BNG units we're going to generate from that. From that unit that we generate, we then sell that to the developers who are going to need that to meet their planning obligations. Or we can meet, we can sell it to corporates who want to become nature positive. They want to meet some of their TNFD obligations. Or for example, they're in a regulated asset sector where they're going to have to start, for example, the water companies are going to have to start reporting on their impact on nature by 2025. So there's a lot of political and regulatory push for corporates to start to become nature positive. So from that Habitat Bank, we can either create units that help people meet their planning obligations, or for corporates to meet their desire to become nature positive.

Tom Raftery:

This is a very immature space as yet, I want to think, measuring and reporting particularly on biodiversity gains. How are you tackling that?

Peter Bachmann:

So I think we start from the fact that we've got this Defra metric, which is a scientifically based tool that says As I said, land intervention, this is the BNG unit out, and actually the founder of the Environment Bank is a chap called Professor David Hill, and he was a big part of the architecture group for that BNG tool, and he's been pushing for government to push BNG into law for the last 15 years, so that is the fundamental principle, there is a very defined scientific tool to determine How do you get the number of BNG units in the first place? And then after that, we're using tools such as eDNA, which is pretty amazing. You literally just take a piece of soil from a habitat bank and you look at it before you do anything that'll be able to tell you the number of species of animal and plant life that are there today. And then you do periodic sampling after that. And that can tell you the level of plant life and animal life that's increased. And then you can do things like bioacoustics, which are literally, you have a special listening tool on site, and then that can listen to all sorts of very complex sounds, and that can tell you the level of organic and plant life improvement on a particular site. So they're two examples of, I think, some pretty robust tools that can allow you to show, do BNG well, you can really create some huge impact. Yeah. My stat that I always love to quote is that there's some great science out there that says that if we did nature based solutions globally, so that's everyone has to play ball, but we could get about 10 gigatons worth of CO2 savings. That's the emissions of the US, the EU and Japan combined from doing nature based solutions at scale. So I think we've spent a lot of time kind of looking at climate and mechanical tools, but actually mother nature has got a pretty big power herself. And we should try to harness that.

Tom Raftery:

And is that 10 gigatons a once off or is that 10 gigatons per annum?

Peter Bachmann:

Every year, per year. And the other really cool thing is if we could get to that level of biodiversity protection and enhancement, there's actually a natural cooling effect. They think it's actually up to 0. 5 degrees, which again is pretty mind bending because Yeah, there's no chance we're not going to break 1.5 and I think it's highly unlikely that we're ever going to even stay below 2 at our current rate. So having the prospect that we could maybe cool ourselves by half a degree is pretty compelling as well.

Tom Raftery:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Peter, we're coming towards the end of the podcast now. Is there any question I haven't asked that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Peter Bachmann:

I think a few things. I think we touched on some really big macro thematics and some of the specific ideas. I think for me, generally, nothing's happening fast enough. And I think you and your listeners, anything that we can do to try to accelerate change is really necessary. And I think one of the key parts of that is really understanding that impact can drive financial returns now. And, you know, in the past impact was almost a dirty word in the financial investment community, because it meant you had to sacrifice returns and that's never going to get the scale of capital that we need to go and make change happen. So I guess I want people to understand now that hopefully I've given you some examples where impact can drive returns and therefore hopefully that paves a way for the really large pools of capital to come in and to commit to investing in these sustainable infrastructure type solutions which can ultimately create tangible real world solutions to these big environmental and social problems. And that, for me, is the part that, you know, we just need to get that message out there. I think unfortunately, climate, to some extent, has kind of hasn't had the best PR firm. Things like COVID had a huge amount of air time over the last few years. But from a relative perspective, COVID was a speck in the ocean compared to the problems that we face with climate, nature, emergencies and social problems. So it's just trying to get it back to front of mind that yes, there is big problems, but there are also some really tangible solutions to tackle that today.

Tom Raftery:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, that's why I set up this podcast was to highlight those solutions for precisely that reason. They're not getting enough airtime. So cool. Peter that's been fascinating. If people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Peter Bachmann:

You can find me on LinkedIn Peter Bachmann on LinkedIn or you can find me through Gresham House website there, but look, I'm always happy to talk more and I'd love to have a chat and Tom if you could ever get George on the line, it'd be really cool to talk about some of his ideas because he's got some really good thinking around alternative proteins and the like. And that's another thematic that, you know, we think that in that resource efficiency topic I mentioned earlier alternative proteins and essentially how to decarbonize the food industry is a really powerful thematic. One that no one's really tackling enough yet. But yeah, there's plenty of other places we could deep dive into at some point in the future, Tom.

Tom Raftery:

Great great. Super Peter, that's been fascinating. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Peter Bachmann:

My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Tom. Real pleasure.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to Tom raftery@outlook.com. Or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please, don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks, catch you all next time.

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Climate Action Show Artwork

Climate Action Show

Climate Action Collective
The Climate Question Artwork

The Climate Question

BBC World Service
The Energy Gang Artwork

The Energy Gang

Wood Mackenzie
Climate One Artwork

Climate One

Climate One from The Commonwealth Club