COMMENT: Sustainability specialist recruiter Richard Evans’ Talent Nation has tripled in size in the past 18 months and if things work out as planned the company will be at 20 staff in the next year. Doing even better will be the people who have the rare and increasingly in demand skills of nature and economics. For them, says Evans, the top corporates in the big emitting space the sky is pretty much the limit.
Evans recently announced his Melbourne based firm had expanded to Sydney as Evans did a spot of his own recruiting snaring Liz Floyd from Anávo, a global boutique sustainability recruiter to head the office after more than eight years.
That news is indicative of the strength of the sustainability sector in the face of an economy that looks like slowing, especially after yet another interest rate hike this week and an outlook for more.
What’s even more impressive is what’s happening on the nature-positive-meets economics and finance front.
This is the buzz of the recruitment world with savvy heavy-emitting behemoths looking hard and fast for the skills that will leverage (and in some cases birth) the now urgent need for environmental credibility if they want to maintain a social licence to operate.
As more than 130 people heard at Urban Greening 2023 last week the wheels are turning fast on this front and at the top end of the property and development industry leaders are nervous about how they need plan for their future work.
All eyes are on them. The investors want metrics and a bevy of indicators to prove that the property owners are doing the right thing.
It’s not just embodied carbon that needs measuring, (as soon as we work out how to do that), now it’s embodied water. And the big burly thing coming over the embankment is nature – what are property owners doing to protect nature and what are they doing to restore nature?
It’s a big ask.
In this cauldron of rising demands – among many others – Richard Evans and his team have their work cut out for them.
“The demand is relentless at the moment,” he says. “There is so much to do; so much coming down the pipe.”
Especially with the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosure or TNFD or more broadly, the nature positive movement.
Keen to be ahead of the curve are the financial institutions and some of the banks. They need to hire people who can work both sides of the fence – finance and nature.
And that’s not easy. Best place to find them, Evans says, is sequestered somewhere in a philanthropic organisation devoted to nature conservation; someone who also happens to have an economics qualification in their mix.
Government is another source. For instance, Cameron Whiteside who joined Westpac as executive manager of natural capital early last year was previously sector lead, evaluation and analysis in the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment. But the rest of his credentials are worth pondering: he lists cost benefit analysis, program evaluation, policy development, ecosystem services, natural capital, and infrastructure analysis among the mix.
Then there’s his job as director metrics and analytics with Symbietrics in Newcastle, Australia. And before that, he had gigs with Jacobs, in the UK where he worked on low carbon and climate change, plus district heat and energy efficiency policy creation.
There’s more. But you can see what this is going – if you’re well versed in the tech/science/financial world and love nature it’s your time.
Evans says talent is scarce on the ground but there are “pockets of experts” who have been working in this space for some time. “They’ve been the outliers, but suddenly they’re in demand.”
Some have been consulting globally and it’s not a bad place to look. It’s big end of town.
Where have they trained for these skills?
“They seem to have done it off their own bat,” Evans says – people working mainly in government or academia, where funding has not been universities and think tanks, who’ve seen the link between nature and our planetary boundaries.
If they have transactional experience their skills are highly sought indeed.
Evans says coming down the pipe will be demand for big swathes of land that might be naturally valuable as it is, need to be protected, remediated or rewilded. So what’s needed are acquisition teams with strong climate carbon and nature-based skills.
Finding these people is tough. You need to delve into parallel markets; they might be working in carbon markets now and are looking to transition, he says. They might also be sitting quietly inside big energy companies and coal companies with a hankering to switch their impact on the earth.
That’s the best solution of all, says Evans.
Because if these companies go external to meet their needs they might need somewhere in the mid $200,000s to snare their recruit but if it’s someone at the top of their field and has transactional experience it might be more like $600,000 to $700,000.
They’ll need to set in place programs to rewild the new acquisition and re-establish a decent eco system. Then they’ll need to meet the requirements of big league standards such as the International Sustainability Standards Board.
“And we haven’t even scratched the surface of circularity,” Evans says.
Investment banking meets the soft underbelly of the natural world
What’s interesting is that the hard-nosed world of investment banking and finance has discovered that nature somehow has something to do with whether they will continue to prosper in the future and if they do, they’re wondering what the spoils will look like.
At the moment it feels like they’re trying to jam their abacuses into the soft and furry edges of the natural world which abhors straight lines. And it’s not actually working yet.
(If you really want to rock your world, check out the fountain of challenge that Sam Smith from Development Victoria unleashed during her presentation at Urban Greening, with a presentation on Friedensreich Hundertwasser who gave lectures in the nude – to make a point that we are one with nature – and created so much colour and beautiful natural architecture even in retrofitted buildings that leaves people enchanted even today.)
The property world’s job now is a bit like Hundertwasser’s – trying to blend an intrinsic love of nature with the job of keeping us snug in our beds at night. While the rest of the built environment needs to keep the lights on and the trains running, not to mention the water flowing when we need it and the drains doing their job.
(To some of the more sceptical among us it seems like Warren Buffet has discovered A Midsummer Night’s Dream and wants to capture all the little sprites and fairies and put them behind a desk at Morgan Stanley.)
But it’s not so cynical, is it?
The Morgan Stanleys of the world knows there is a reckoning coming.
They used to say that 50 per cent of the world’s GDP comes directly from natural resources, but as KPMG’s Carolin Leeshaa reminds us, every dollar of product produced is 100 per cent dependent on nature
No matter how crazy or impossible the task is we need to knuckle down and find a tool that the world will listen to. And so far, no one has invented a language more common, more understood more easily absorbed into nearly every non-Indigenous culture as money.
Money talks so the job is to use it to translate the keening of a dying planet and give it help.
How much are we willing to pay for that planet? Well, channelling Churchill: “Whatever it takes”.