My journey to climate intrapreneurship and the Climate Safe Lending Fellowship
By Jasmina Negrini, Climate Safe Lending Fellow, March 2023
In January, I started the Climate Safe Lending Fellowship, a programme I felt honoured and privileged to be selected for. I’m passionate about accelerating the transition to net zero in this defining decade, and excited to be part of a cohort of 18 global industry professionals representing different businesses and functions, all equally passionate about sustainability.
But let's take a few steps back to my journey so far and what brought me here. My mixed cultural background includes my German heritage, which allowed me early exposure to the concepts of environmental impact and good practices and behaviours to mitigate my own footprint. This included recycling and avoidance of single-use items alongside an awareness of resource scarcity and therefore the need to save water and energy and minimise waste.
For me, the planet is a finite space, where ‘waste’ on one side needs to be ‘value’ on the other, as in natural processes. Unfortunately, the concept of ‘waste’ as a resource is still in its infancy, as we continue to burn waste for it to become the toxic air we breathe, or bury it to grow crops or build homes on. From my teenage years, my awareness grew and while I continued to recycle, repurpose and reuse, I started to feel more urgency to act. At this age, however, I lacked the courage and support to break the stereotype of being labelled a ‘hippy’, something that in those years was associated with greater activism.
I had the opportunity to travel and see first-hand climate injustice and some of the key causes of today’s issues – things that enable our current lifestyle - such as land clearing, deforestation and illegal mining. Indigenous people have maintained the ability to read nature and changes in the natural world which is something we have lost almost completely in urbanised society, and something that has been a great source of knowledge for me through the years.
More recently, I became involved in wider initiatives that provide a bigger impact and ripple effects across communities. For example, a project in north London to convert wasteland into a nature reserve - a space where wildlife thrives, biodiversity is rich and the site is a green haven for people in the community. This experience showed me that it is possible to work with like-minded people from very different backgrounds and ways of life to achieve something that is truly making a change. We explored this concept in the Fellowship as the ‘critical yeast’, i.e. a small group of people, in unlikely combinations, operating in new qualities of relationship.
When I came across the Fellowship, I felt it would enable me to scale up my knowledge and impact, ultimately achieving more strategic leadership to accelerate the change needed for my bank to make the transition. The first few weeks of the programme have been inspiring and immersive, and have generated a lot of healthy discussion and ideas.
My top reflections so far are:
We are still heavily reliant on fossil fuels, which continue to be subsidised. This makes the transition to cleaner energy even more challenging and hinders acceleration of the transition to net zero. The Climate Safe Lending Network’s “Good Transition Plan” and the Insights Report from last year’s Fellowship provide valuable guidance on this.
We need to bridge the gap between the current horizon, which focuses on managing the status quo and keeping the lights on, and the vision we have for the future, which will be achieved through intrapreneurial action and innovation that will not only address environmental issues but social ones as well. Learning about Doughnut Economics from Erinch Sahan, provided a useful framework for assessing where we are against where we want to get to, in building a sustainable economy.
We operate in a highly complex environment and in unchartered territory, which means that prior experience or comparable challenges may not serve as a reference and that we need to find new ways. This is what makes it so valuable to be learning alongside a diverse cohort of peers, building connections and deepening our collective solution-oriented thinking.
The Fellowship so far has provided a wealth of materials and tools to go deeper into self-reflection and I’m looking forward to looking more closely at the necessary changes at the company and system level in the months to come. In particular, I can’t wait to see the progress we make as a cohort, on the specific changes we each seek to drive!
The Climate Safe Lending Fellowship is a six-month leadership development programme to help banking professionals advance the transition to net zero within their institutions. See here to find out more about it.