Will Richardson opens with a story about his grandmother taken to court in Abu Dhabi for burning beach litter. She spotted a problem but the system punished her instead of fixing it. Richardson argues sustainability fails when the people living with the outcomes weren't in the room when decisions got made.
Chapters
Quick word from our sponsor, 51tocarbonzero.com. If you're a CFO or board member staring down CSRD or Scope 3 and thinking, where do we even start? We at Sustainability Solved would point you to 51tocarbonzero.com. They turn complex, fragmented emissions data into something simple and give boards clear, audit-ready visibility on exactly where the reduction opportunities are. It's not another reporting tool that adds work. It's built so the data holds up when your auditor asks the hard questions. If that's a conversation worth having, get in touch with 51tocarbonzero.com, or just drop me a message and I'll point you in the right direction. Right, back to the episode.
My grandmother was taken to court for burning litter on a beach. This is Sustainability Solved, and this is the first of 7 short episodes about why we are changing Sustainability Solved podcast. It starts a long way away from a microphone. I was with my grandmother in Abu Dhabi. She burnt litter on the beach, and I remember being told about a councillor who saw her burning all this litter, and they said it was against the law to do it. And so they took her to court. She defiantly defended herself because she knew that it was wrong to have so much litter on the beach, and that the council should actually be clearing up the litter, not leaving it to somebody who happened to be walking past. I think that type of conviction I've been brought up with is where all this starts. Now look at what actually happened there. A woman spotted a problem nobody else was dealing with. She acted on it. The system's response was to tell her she was breaking the law, and then to put her in front of a court. Nobody asked her why the litter was there in the first place. Nobody asked her what would have had to change so that she never had to light a fire on the beach again. The litter was the smaller problem. The conversation was the bigger one. And that pattern, the right instinct met with wrong communication, has followed me through 25 years of doing this work professionally. I see it every week. A regulation arrives and gets explained to the people it affects as a compliance obligation rather than a business decision. A carbon footprint gets presented to a board as a number to be defended rather than the management data. to be used. A supplier gets sent a questionnaire instead of a phone call. In every one of those cases, the underlying instinct in the room is sound, and the communication around it is doing damage. So here is what your organization can do with this today. Take one sustainability decision you made in the last year and ask 2 questions about it. Who was in the room when it was made, and who had to live with it afterwards but was not there? If those 2 lists do not match, you have not got a data problem or a technology problem. You've got my grandmother and the councillor in a boardroom in 2026. The fix is cheap. Put the people who live with the outcome into the decisions before you make it. Not into a change management program afterwards. We have helped more than 500 organizations through Green Element over the last 20 years, and now through 51 to Carbon Zero, we work with FTSE, NASDAQ, XTRA, and IBEX listed businesses. The technical answers are always almost available. The gap is always that somebody has Talked at rather than talked with. Climate action is both an obligation and an opportunity, and you forfeit the opportunity the moment you stop listening. Next time, the same family, a cow field in Wales, and the best decision we ever made about it. The written version of this is on Substack, and the link is in the show notes. I'm Will Richardson, and this is Sustainability Solved, and I'll see you next week.
Grab free access to Will's Substack while it lasts. Every week we pull together the top sustainability stories from dozens of trusted sources. Then he breaks down the big issues facing business right now in plain, practical terms. Link in the description.
