Charlotte Connell On Climate Tech Solutions And The Authentic Shift Towards Sustainability

Surfer, mother and lousy-but-enthusiastic shower singer, Charlotte is an award-winning sustainability leader.

As Ecosystem Director for Australia’s leading climate tech network, Climate Salad, Charlotte helps climate tech founders globally scale through community, connection and collaboration.

Charlotte founded The Sustainability Collective to democratise sustainability so that all businesses can create positive change for people, planet and a prosperous future. Working with innovative businesses to ensure they’re not just solving customer problems but also creating solutions for people and planet.

She’s also Fishburners Expert in Residence for Sustainability and recently developed the Founder Institute’s first global Sustainability Accelerator program. Also a mentor for the NFP Climate Focused accelerator, Subak.

An advocate for social change, Charlotte volunteers her time as a Director on the Board of international charity One Wave which raises awareness for mental health issues through surfing, saltwater therapy and community. As well as combining her passions for climate and surfing as a board member of Surfers for Climate.

Charlotte discusses the defining features of climate change focused technology and how these initiatives can effectively foster widespread social change.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - To start off, could you share more about your background and what led to your work in sustainability and climate technology?

[Charlotte Connell] - For a long time, I was a bit of a sustainability snob working in the not-for-profit sector, particularly around ocean health. Then in my board role with OneWave, I was very much focused on social good, in terms of improving mental health awareness, starting conversations in community, and then improving the sustainability of our oceans. Climate didn't get onto my radar too much because at the time I thought it was just a bit too esoteric, hard, and too big to tackle. It was during the bushfires, The Black Summer of 2019 (how could we ever forget because it came just before COVID as well), my son who was three at the time was drawing pictures, and he handed me a drawing. With a kid’s drawing, you must ask, "oh, what is that?" It was a koala, up in smoke, surrounded by fire.

I then just thought that nothing else really matters as much as solving this climate crisis, and I think when we solve that, we solve everything else. Climate change didn't cause inequality, but it sure does exacerbate it.

If we help solve the climate crisis, we can help solve a lot of our social issues as well.

I fell into this climate technology area because it really solely did belong to the not-for-profit space for so long. People thought that if you want to do good, you are not going to be making a profit. Interestingly in this climate tech space, the sector that has taken the most amount of time to be affected by the economic downturn and the one that still has a lot of dry powder ready to invest with is business. You can make profit, solve this climate crisis, and unapologetically chase growth to get there.

Seeing your son come home and draw a koala that's literally burning to death shows a really different perspective from earlier generations [in regard to their future].

I grew up seeing koalas in my grandparents' backyard in an urban town around Newcastle. It wasn't just that they lived in the bush. They lived in the suburbs; in the gumtrees there'd be koalas. In the playground we'd see koalas come up to us, that's how I grew up with koalas. Now, looking at that and seeing my son draw that picture I realised, "oh my gosh, you'll never get to do that." They won't get to see them in the wild.

As Ecosystem Director at Climate Salad, what are your observations of key barriers that these founders are coming up against when they're looking to grow or scale globally?

Firstly, I want to unpack what climate tech is, because it's this emerging sector in the start-up community. I think a lot of people go, "it's just clean tech rebranded to climate tech." It's broader, it's more than just solar, wind and renewable energy.

Climate tech are tech-based climate solutions that are globally scalable, and those solutions can be in the mitigation, reduction, avoidance, and removal of carbon from the atmosphere. But those solutions can also be in adaptation, because the climate has changed and is continuing to change already.

We must build resilience in our communities, and how do we adapt to that change? A good example of that is FloodMapp, which is an app that can predict what level floods will rise to with a specificity of down to the street. That's an adaptation solution.

The other part of climate tech is with start-ups in tech, everyone thinks of software straight away. But in technology, there's a lot of hardware in climate tech and hardware is hard, it's capital intensive and it takes a longer amount of time. There's a lot of ‘deep tech’ in climate technology; deep tech is not the nice haves, it's the must-haves. It's transformational and it changes society on a much larger scale.

This is hard; solving the climate crisis is hard, but you must be solving customer problems first and foremost if you are to grow and scale.

These aspiring and incredible entrepreneurs have amazing solutions, but they must be solving customer problems first. You must be able to demonstrate there is demand for your solution, not just a need for it. That’s the difference between climate-based businesses and not-for-profits, yes you can change behaviours, but in the climate tech start-up space, your solution can't require sophisticated behaviour change. It must be something that customers are demanding now, and you have the solution for it.

If the product or service being offered is not as good or better than anything else in the market, we typically see customers say, "we don't want it, it's not solving our needs." If you're not solving that basic need, and thinking that impact will be the driver of customers supporting you, you are likely to be disappointed.

Absolutely. I worked in sustainable seafood for a long time and yes, of course when you ask a seafood consumer, "does sustainability matter to you?" 97% say yes. But when it comes to purchasing decisions, sustainability ranks far below quality, safety, price, taste, and even if their kids will eat this? Then people will think, "oh, it happens to also be sustainable, that's great."

You must solve those customer problems first and foremost.

When you're altruistic and trying to solve the biggest challenge of our time, the climate crisis, you can get caught up in that. But particularly if we're talking to investors, they need to know there's scale for your product, that you have product market fit and there's potential for it to go global.

As the founder of The Sustainability Collective, can you tell us a bit more about the projects and work you're involved in?

It's on the back burner since I'm full time in the climate tech space. I started to find I was just getting too many calls from friends and my network saying, "I want to be in sustainability, I'm going to quit my job, how do I get into sustainability?" I would respond with, "whoa, stop. Be sustainable where you are, transform from within.” Be that change agent that makes wherever you're working right now more sustainable. I really wanted to demystify what it meant, because I think people thought, "oh, we need to do better, we need to be more sustainable or regenerative," but they weren't actually sure how to take that first step.

I really created The Sustainability Collective to have resources and tools to help get there. A lot of the time I was working with construction companies and airports to help them unravel, because all of a sudden their boards and CEO started saying they needed to be sustainable. But how? They didn't know. I helped to start laying the groundwork, and often I would see they were doing this anyway because it makes good business sense, but let's translate that into a sustainability strategy. Let's articulate the benefits of what this means for your shareholders, stakeholders, and customers. It's not rocket science, it's not difficult, and I really wanted to democratise sustainability that way, so all businesses can create a positive change.

How are you seeing the corporate space transform to having a broader interest in sustainability? Do you think it's authentic?

I do, and I think maybe from the outside it looks like it's just happening now. It's been happening for a long time. This wave of change started from a ripple, but it hasn't just happened. It's not just since 2019; this has been happening for a long time. For sustainability we used to have to translate it into something else. This means having trust or a social license to operate. We had to dress it up as other things and use a different currency for what was of importance and value.

I'm seeing this huge shift in impact investing as the literacy levels develop and maturity around what impact is improves.

I would say, do not be afraid of greenwashing, any change and step in the right direction is good. Just make those commitments, step up and keep on moving towards progress. Impact investing changed from being ESG and CSR (de-risking). It used to always be framed negatively with people saying, "okay, we won't do anything bad." But now, we're seeing this shift.

It’s not just good enough to not do bad; you must contribute to solutions. Not only do you have to be avoiding harm, but you need to be creating benefits and contributing [to society].

We see that with the rise of the B Corp, it's not simply enough to just be making money anymore. What benefit are you creating for people, planet, and place?

What are you doing to go beyond net zero with regenerative solutions and not just neutralising your impact, but creating a better world right?

When starting The Sustainability Collective, I reflect and think sustainability at the time was something that you aspired towards, but no one wants to aspire to a status quo. You want to be regenerative; you want to be rewiring, you want to be better and benefitting people. Even just personally, like my family, we would always offset our carbon emissions through high integrity offsets. But now the same amount of money I used for that (which is pretty much the same price as a few coffees, I now instead make my coffee at home) I impact invest with Bloom Impact to contribute to solutions. My own personal journey has shifted from offsetting the bad I do to contributing to solutions. I use that word again ‘democratising’ with impact investing. As someone who's worked in the not-for-profit space for a long-time creating tools and resources I wanted to give out for free, I'm not very good at making lots of money. My idea around impact investing was, "oh, but that's for someone who wears a suit and doesn't look like me." But that's what I love about Bloom Impact, for as little as $20 a fortnight, I can contribute to solutions. You can get started for as little as a hundred dollars.

What general advice would you give to impact-led entrepreneurs who are working hard to take their enterprise, start-up, app, or solution to the next level?

Have a global mindset from the very start.

Australia is an incredible area to build and to innovate in. We feel the impacts of climate change more acutely than a lot of other regions, which makes us perfectly positioned to innovate solutions. But those solutions and problems don't stop at borders. Have that global mindset for your impact and for your vision from the very start.

At Climate Salad, we're all about taking those companies global. We run global trade missions and incubators. Think big from the very start, and remember that advice I brought up before, your idea cannot require sophisticated behaviour change. It must be something the customers’ needs or wants right now.

You need to be solving customer problems first and foremost before you can take on the global challenge of the climate crisis.

What inspiring projects or initiatives are really creating some great positive social or environmental cultural change?

It’s so funny that it has taken us so long to do, but I love the idea that when we think of our First Nations people who have been on this continent for over 70,000 years, the oldest, continuous running culture on the planet. We're finally saying, "oh, hang on, maybe we should start integrating some of this First Nation’s knowledge into these climate tech solutions?" Funny that!

I love seeing the solutions that are coming out thinking that to go forward we first must go backwards in time. Rain Stick is an incredible start-up out of Cairns, and the founder is a First Nations person who's integrating his Indigenous knowledge into this solution. He observed that after a lightning storm, the plants grow faster and more robust, and it's electrifying the soil for better mushroom and growth yields. It's incredible; it's combining CSIRO knowledge with First Nations knowledge into this incredible, scalable climate tech solution.

Another one I just love is Goterra founded by Olympia, who thought there's got to be a way to be more sustainable in how we manage our crops.

When thinking about how to do this, they thought, “there's waste over here, there's food produced over here, let's make this circular.” Her solution involves using black soldier fly larvae to digest food waste, which reduces carbon emissions. Then the soldier fly larvae become a high protein stock feed for animals, and there's also this wonderful social element to the project. She's in regional Australia, and she has a mission to mostly employ people who are on the spectrum of disabilities, so she's doing this amazing social good with her company that's a climate tech solution. There are a few other companies which are like that, where the founders only employ people who are neurodiverse. It's giving this wonderful social positive change to the workforce as well. I don't want to say who it is in case that's not widely spread knowledge, but it's incredible to see these climate solutions which are also creating social good. Xylo Systems is another enterprise founded by First Nations woman Camille and Jada, who are using First Nations knowledge, cloud, and tech software to measure and manage biodiversity.

That's a real area that we haven't valued in the past, but natural capital and nature-based solutions are going to have huge potential in the future. It's only just starting to be realised.

It's also great to see so many incredible female founders within the climate tech community. In tech in general, only around 10% of founders are women, but in the Climate Salad community, we are looking at around 40%, and I see that as being because they see a place where they belong. They're impact driven, but also women are more adversely affected by climate change, so again, that makes them perfectly positioned to innovate solutions when they are so intimate with the problem.

What books, resources or podcasts would you recommend to our listeners?

I can’t recommend any movies; I think the most watched show in our household is Bluey! I cannot recommend [enough] Dr. Rebecca Huntley's book How to Talk About Climate Change in a Way That Makes a Difference. It’s a great read, she's an incredible social researcher, speaker, and leader in this space.

The other book I really love, because it has the mindset of ‘there is a problem, let's work on a solution’, is Speed & Scale by John Doerr. I love it because it has the same 'let's solve this' mentality, and it basically whittled it down to objectives and key results that fit onto a napkin. It's just a practical, inspiring, and motivating read, because you realise, we don’t need more solutions, we have the solutions on hand. What we need is for them to be successful; you need them to scale. We need to mobilise finance towards them and buy from them. I encourage anyone who's listening, if you haven't come up with a world changing idea to be the most impactful entrepreneur you can, that's okay, we have enough of them. What you can do is lean in and help them, so if you find Camille from Bloom Impact, Camille from Xylo System or another climate tech company that inspires you and you love the solution of, then pitch in. Help them, buy from them, invest in them, or connect them with someone who's going to help them go further. We can all play our part; I love that message in that book because it really is about how anyone and everyone can make a difference.