Will Richardson is overhauling Sustainability Solved from monthly to weekly episodes with rotating guest hosts. He argues poor communication, not lack of science, is the biggest barrier to climate progress, and says AI makes weekly production affordable. The podcast now covers food, business advocacy, small business, and climate risk through different messengers each month.
Chapters
Hey, thanks so much for listening. I would love to be able to help you more on what it is that you are listening to and why you're listening to, to me. If you could click on the link in the show notes, that would be awesome because it will help me define what it is that we should be talking about on this podcast. We have never been short of answers in sustainability. We've been short of ways to be heard. This is Sustainability Solved by Will Richardson, and this is the last of 7 episodes on why I am changing Sustainability Solved podcast. There are 6 parts to get here: a beach in Abu Dhabi, a cow field, a chicken suit, a job I turned down, a ticket around the world, and one sentence from Dr. Avis Hall. And this is what they add up to. I had a master's in environmental management, and that was when I ended up setting up work as a sole trader working for myself. And that was the start of Green Element. 20 years more and 500 organizations later, one of the UK's first B Corp environmental consultancies, a carbon accounting platform in Compare Footprint, and then in November 2025, the whole thing integrated into 51 to Carbon Zero. Today I'm head of ecosystems here, and we work with FTSE, NASDAQ, XTRA, and IBEX listed organizations with 100% audit pass rate and a data process that runs 42% more efficiently than traditional consultancy. And all the way through my working life, I have seen that it is communications, not the science, Not the technology. We designed a reed bed and a solar thermal shower in a Welsh cow field 30-odd years ago, and it still works perfectly. Not even the business case, which now writes itself. 74% of our client base have grown revenues over the last 3 years, and nearly two-thirds of those did it while reducing their relative emissions. Going back to my grandmother and being told off for doing what she was doing, the way that they were communicating to her about what it was that she was doing wrong, the way that we have always communicated is badly. We are just not very good at it. We seem to close our ears off. The clearest recent proof of the opposite is the National Emergency Briefing. It crossed a line we rarely see in climate communications, not because of the science. The science has always been there, but because of how it landed. 10 of the UK's leading experts briefed over 1,200 politicians and leaders from business, culture, faith, sport, And the media, and the film that came out of it has since been screened in over 3,500 venues. People who could never have engaged with Sustainability Briefing are watching it. They've shared it. They've talked about it. That is not a data gap being closed. That is a communication gap being closed. So here is what's changing. First, as many voices in the room as possible. Instead of Charlie— Charlie Luxton— and myself covering every topic ourselves, we are bringing in guest hosts, specialists who each run a miniseries of 3 or 4 episodes in their own field. They bring the expertise and their own network of guests. We provide the platform. The production and the audience. Some people listen to some people. Sometimes those some people never get to hear the other people because they never get exposure to them. So, I am trying to bring as many voices into the room as possible so that we all get exposure to as many experts in sustainability as we can, and we understand what it is that we can do and how to reduce our emissions and make the world a better place. If you have switched off from me, and plenty of people reasonably have, then me talking louder will not fix it. Somebody else talking will. Second, here are the 4 series to start with. We've got Seb Munden, and he's talking about food and drink, packaging and materials, and citizens' choice. Food waste is one of those few genuinely uncontroversial areas of this work. Extender produce a responsibility in how collection costs quietly removed from council tax to the shopping bill, and how we help make sustainable choices that feel like the best option rather than a compromise. Ben Tolhurst, Director of Business Declares, is hosting a series on why businesses find it so difficult to speak out on climate, nature, and social breakdown? Speaking out is one of the most important and most infrequently used things a business can do. Businesses have huge reach and influence, and what they say is listened to and matters. Ben talks to Sam Baker of Business Leaders for Peace about research drawn from more than 60 interviews with business leaders, to Donna Ockel about the National Emergency Briefing, and to Rachel Pryor about whether humor can create a safe environment in which to speak out at all. Lizzie Rivera from Live Frankly is talking on thinking big and small, what role small businesses actually play. What the point is if this is not solvable in the way we hope, and how anybody changes their minds. That last one includes our own chairman, Neil, who spent his career in management consultancy and only started rethinking things when his daughter told him he was a part of the problem. And Sophie Taysom is talking about climate risk. Real assets and insurance. What nature-based interventions in cities actually return. Converting empty commercial units into homes where councils recoup investment in 16 to 17 months. And retrofitting heritage buildings without wrecking the fabric. 4 hosts, 4 networks, 1 platform. None of those conversations would have happened in a monthly episode with me asking the questions. Third, weekly, not monthly. The first episode of the new format lands in the middle of October. A monthly podcast asks people to remember you exist. A weekly one becomes a part of the week. Fourth, And I want to be straight about this. AI is the reason this is affordable. We had a genuine choice: stop the podcast or use AI in production instead of expensive production companies. We used to be weekly and we had to abandon it purely because of cost. The advent of AI has made weekly production affordable again. That is a budget fact. Rather than a technology boast, and I would rather say it out loud. I do fundamentally believe that we need people in the production process of a decent podcast, and so we are looking for sponsors of the podcast in order to bring and pay for production to happen. The quality of the podcast is Paramount for me and Charlie, and we truly believe that people can accelerate and improve production qualities way faster at the moment than AI. And fifth, we're designing against switch-off. People like change and people lose interest. A new host every 3 to 4 months means a different style every few months and a different style every week. The variety is deliberate. It is there to keep people listening rather than quietly drifting away, which is what is happening to a lot of climate communications over the last decade. We've made more than 225 episodes and built an audience of over 30,000 listeners across 30 countries. That is enough of a sample to say something uncomfortable. The episodes that changed people's behaviors were almost never the ones with the best data. They were the ones with the right person saying it. So the change is simple: fewer monologues, more voices, more topics, and more depth. Less me, more us. And what your organization can do today. Take your climate message and give it 3 messengers this quarter, not 3 different channels, 3 different people with genuinely different styles talking to genuinely different parts of your organization or your market. Then measure which one actually moved something. This is the experiment we are running publicly with the main Sustainability Solved podcast. And you can run the same one inside your own business for the cost of a few conversations. Climate action is both an obligation and an opportunity. The obligation has been clear for 40 years. The opportunity has always been in the room. We just keep having the wrong conversation about it. That's the reason why we're changing the podcast. New format running weekly from the middle of October. The written version of all 7 parts is on Substack, and the link is in the show notes. I'm Will Richardson, and this is Sustainability Solved by Will Richardson. I'll speak to you in a bit. Bye.
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.
