Sustainability is on the agenda of business leaders around the world. Many corporations and executives want to make a difference to the sustainability cause but often lack frameworks on how to prioritize their actions and investment as well as the business examples that show how sustainability objectives and business success can be aligned. The INSEAD Business Sustainability Series, led by Professors Karel Cool, the BP Chaired Professor of European Competitiveness, and Atalay Atasu, the Bianca and James Pitt Chair in Environmental Sustainability, is designed to enable and inspire discussions on business sustainability. It explores how to align sustainability and business objectives. As we gear up for season 3, take a read of the highlights from season two which ran from 13 June 2024 until 14 November.
Here is part 1 of our recap covering the first of the two of the four sessions:
Session 1: Satellite and IoT Technology as Accelerators of Sustainability
The first webinar, Satellite and IoT Technology as Accelerators of Sustainability, featured cutting-edge technologies aimed at accelerating business sustainability. Hosted by Professor Karel Cool, Co-Director of the INSEAD Business Sustainability Programme, the session brought together experts who discussed the role of satellite imagery and IoT technology in addressing environmental challenges. The session featured three speakers:
Stéphane Germain (MBA’94J), CEO of GHGsat
Koen Verweyen, CEO of Aquarius Spectrum
Zachary Brown (GEMBA, 2022), CTO and Co-Founder of Creattura
Stéphane Germain spoke on his company’s efforts to scale the monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions from space. With 12 satellites currently in orbit, GHGSat offers its clients in the oil and gas, coal mining, and landfill sectors facility-level insights into their emissions, particularly focusing on methane and carbon dioxide. This critical data enables these industries to understand, manage, and ultimately reduce their emissions. In 2023 alone, GHGSat’s satellites monitored emissions across over 4 million square kilometers in 85 countries, identifying 378 million tons of CO2 equivalent emissions. This monitoring capability helped GHGSat’s customers cut their emissions by 6 million tons of CO2 equivalent—comparable to taking 1.5 million cars off the roads for a year. Over the past couple of years, GHGSat has experienced rapid growth and aims to expand further with the ambitious target of mitigating 50 million tons of CO2 equivalent emissions through its customers. This scaling effort is bolstered by an evolving regulatory landscape in the European Union and globally, reflecting a heightened recognition of methane’s significant role in climate change—being over 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere.
Also speaking on leaks, Koen Verweyen spoke on acoustic leak detection in water networks.
With an estimated 35% of distributed freshwater lost due to deteriorating pipes, his company Aquarius Spectrum’s technology provides an innovative solution to detect and address these leaks. Utilizing advanced sensors and AI computations in the Cloud, the system identifies the unique acoustic signature of a leak, pinpointing its exact location and size. This allows water utilities to prioritize repairs more effectively, thereby reducing maintenance costs and extending the lifespan of their networks. The impact of this technology is significant, resulting in substantial reductions in water waste. Since its creation, Aquarius Spectrum has contributed to saving 28 billion liters of fresh water (the equivalent of 10,000 Olympic swimming pools!). Smaller but not negligible side effects from saving that volume of water are energy reduction (19.8 million kWh) and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
Zachary Brown compliment the two other speaks by exploring the reduction in methane emissions in rice cultivation, which traditionally reliant on field flooding, leads to methane production by anaerobic bacteria, contributing to 12% of global methane emissions. The climate finance start-up Creattura aims to reduce this greenhouse gas source while maintaining rice yields and offering financial incentives to smallholder farmers. Creattura’s approach is based on three key components. The first is an irrigation method known as Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD), which reduces the days fields are flooded. This technique maintains rice yield, conserves water, and decreases anaerobic bacterial activity, thus lowering methane production.
The second component involves leveraging technology to promote AWD adoption and ensure transparency among stakeholders. IoT devices installed in fields measure water levels, feeding data into an AI model that interprets satellite images to confirm AWD use and estimate methane reductions. The third component involves selling the avoided methane emissions as carbon credits. The revenue generated is shared with local farmers practicing AWD, providing them with financial incentives, and also funds for further training to encourage widespread adoption of AWD. Creattura’s methodology exemplifies how incentive structures can be aligned with climate change mitigation goals, offering a sustainable and financially beneficial solution for farmers and the environment. Despite being in very different sectors, the three companies share some challenges and emerging trends. One significant challenge is the lengthy process of building trust and driving technology adoption. Convincing stakeholders to embrace new technological solutions can be difficult, particularly when they are unfamiliar with these innovations.
Nevertheless, technology is seen as a crucial driver for the impact these companies aim to achieve over the next five years. It is expected to facilitate the broader adoption of their solutions and extend their applications to new contexts. For instance, Creattura might apply its technology to more crops, Aquarius Spectrum could address oil leaks, and GHGSat might enhance its focus on carbon dioxide. To leverage technological advancements, Stéphane and Koen discussed exploring ways to integrate data from strategic partners and third parties, providing broader insights to their clients. Machine learning is already pivotal and is anticipated to become increasingly crucial as data combination and interpretation evolve into competitive advantages. Although Generative AI (GenAI) is not yet central to their offerings, the speakers are considering its potential and have begun small-scale experiments. Collaboration also emerged as an essential factor for these companies, which operate within complex ecosystems involving numerous players, including public organizations. Effective cooperation is seen as vital for navigating these environments and maximizing their technological and business impacts.
Session 2: New Materials as Accelerators of Business Sustainability
The second webinar, held in September 2024, explored the pivotal role of new materials in reconfiguring the global economy.
Michel Van Hoey (MBA’02D), Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company and Head of the New Material Hub
- Dr Molly Morse, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Mango Materials
- Mark van Nieuwland, Vice President, Bovaer® (a division of DSM-Firmenich) and TIME100 Climate Leader
Bates Marshall, Chief Executive Officer, Ambient Photonics
Across the case studies presented by the speakers, several recurring challenges emerge in the development and commercialisation of sustainable material solutions. They spoke about the higher production costs since as novel materials often remain more expensive to produce than their traditional, carbon-intensive counterparts. This led to the speakers raising the point that there is significant upfront capital investment required to initiate and scale production infrastructure. They also spoke about how the integration within complex supply chains of sustainable materials needs alignment across multiple stakeholders and stages of production. This also needs to be coupled with global storytelling to ensure market acceptance. The effective communication of the benefits of these innovations must transcend national boundaries and cultural contexts to gain broad adoption. Addressing these systemic barriers is essential to accelerating the transition towards more sustainable industrial ecosystem.
Stay tuned for more insights from Season 2 of the Business Sustainability Series in part 2…
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