“That’s genius!” - Charlie Luxton in response to Gbemi’s revolutionary new idea… In this episode of our Anthropy special series recorded at the Eden Project, we speak with Dr. Gbemi Oluleye from Imperial College London. Gbemi brings a refreshing academic perspective to how businesses can make sustainable transitions affordable. As a lecturer at the Grantham Institute, she leads research on making sustainability economically viable for the manufacturing sector while also running executive education programs for sustainability officers. Gbemi discusses the need for convergent thinking, offers a sobering assessment of how late the sustainability movement started, and proposes a revolutionary new metric to track how planetary degradation impacts human productivity.
🎯 Key Takeaways
1. It's not just the cost, but how we see costs
- We tend to view sustainability as a burden rather than risk mitigation
- Poor accounting practices fail to consider whole system value
- What appears as a cost to one business may be value to another in the supply chain
- Example: Housing retrofit costs are viewed as a burden rather than as societal savings
2. Convergent thinking is the most valuable business skill for the future
- We've moved from multidisciplinary to interdisciplinary and now need convergent thinking
- Current education creates divergent thinkers who operate in silos
- Universities are restructuring around global problems rather than traditional disciplines
- Holistic perspectives are essential to extract economic value from sustainability
3. The sustainability movement started too late
- Materials like rubber, iron, steel, and cement were invented centuries before sustainability was considered
- We've "had years to do rubbish" and now face urgent pressure to fix it
- The delay makes the challenge harder, though opportunities still exist to catch up
4. We need a metric for planetary impact on human productivity
- Current metrics focus on human impact on planet, not how planetary degradation affects people
- A "Gbemi scale" would measure how environmental changes affect individuals
- People connect more with health impacts than abstract concepts like sea level rise
- Linking sustainability to personal productivity could be a game-changer for business adoption
5. Businesses need safe spaces to discuss implementation challenges
- Sustainability rhetoric vs. business reality creates a significant disconnect
- Companies put on a show of knowing what they're doing when many don't
- CSO teams often operate separately from core business functions
- Executives lack time to integrate sustainability into existing responsibilities
⚡ Quick Wins & Actionable Steps
1. Adopt whole-system accounting practices in your organisation
2. Create cross-functional sustainability teams
3. Connect environmental metrics to human impacts
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🎙️ About Our Guest
Dr. Gbemi Oluleye is a lecturer at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, where she leads research activities focused on making sustainable transitions affordable for industry and the manufacturing sector. She translates her research into executive education programs for chief sustainability officers and sustainability leads, helping them implement strategies in cost-effective ways. Gbemi also teaches Masters students at Imperial on creating sustainable futures, focusing on both the economics and innovation required to drive change.
👫 Credits
- Hosts: Will Richardson, Charlie Luxton
- Production: Soundquake
- Exec-Producer: Sam Hamilton-Turner
- Producer: Jake Lee-Savage
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