Journal

Up very early to take train and Drain (Waterloo & City line) to Bank station, ahead of an event at the very top of The Gherkin. Watched the sun come up in the east from the top of the Gherkin. The event was hosted by Tech Nation and a range of other organisations. Our CEO, Louise Kjellerup Roper, co-chairs their Climate Committee.

We kicked off with my fireside chat with Elisa Moscolin, EVP for sustainability at Sage Group. Our theme – and that of the event – was the rise of CSO (Chief Sustainability Officer) and the challenge of Sustainability Leadership.

Early on, I recalled being taken around the building by the then site engineer, Sara Fox, a formidable Texan managing 200 male construction workers, while some of the glass was still going in. And, some time later, I had also chaired a long-ago Nestlé dinner atop the Gherkin when their Shared Value Advisory Council, of which I was a long-standing member, came to town.

One highlight today, I think for most of us, was the concluding address from Sir David King. Bracing, to put it mildly.

Flew in yesterday afternoon to Shannon Airport, ahead of today’s site visits with Eire’s electricity provider, ESB. Stayed at the Clayton Hotel in Limerick, my bedroom window overlooking Steamboat Quay – with ships moving in and out.

This morning, after an early breakfast, we were taken by minibus to see a salmon hatchery near Parteen Weir, plus the release of a tanker full of eels that had been netted upstream of a dam and hydropower station which would otherwise have mashed a fair few of them, and were now being released to make their way back down to the Atlantic.

The scale of the Ardnacrusha hydropower station, when we got there, was slightly mind-numbing – particularly given that it opened as long ago as 1929. Then we headed across to Moneypoint, which was even larger – but still burning coal.

More hopeful was the Green Atlantic hub now evolving here. We walked around the Synchronous Condenser, designed to balance the electricity grid as ever-increasing quantities of renewable energy are used. Lots to think about when we get home.

Spent most of today at Rothschild & Co in St Swithin’s Lane, as part of the first edition of their 3-SPACE initiative exploring how to fund and scale social, environmental and sustainability ventures. Held in their Sky Pavilion and orchestrated by Richard Brass. One of the most extraordinary serendipity engines I have yet encountered, with a huge number of refreshed older connections and totally new ones in the space of some eight hours. Amazing process.

In very late last night, with train services severely disrupted by Storm Ciaran, from Anthropy23 at The Eden Project. A significantly easier ride though, at least for me, than we had with Anthropy22. The Volans team was further augmented, contributing to at least four sessions (Louise’s on leadership, mine on securing peace and sustainability, a Bankers for NetZero event and the launch of Sacha Dench’s film ‘Flight of the Swans‘), along the way we hosted lively dinners in the Rainforest Biome and at the Cornwall Hotel & Spa.

My session ran for an hour on 3rd November, with three panellists: Scilla Elworthy of The Business Plan for Peace, Lt-General Richard Nugee of the Ministry of Defence, and Colonel Rosie Stone, Human Security Advisor at the MOD. Many thanks also to my friend and colleague Thammy Evans, with whom I did a Carnegie Europe paper on the future role of the military in relation to the climate and biodiversity emergencies, for her help in hooking in Rosie.

I worked up a draft summary of the session earlier today and circulated it to our panellists and team members, with an agreed version due to be submitted to the Anthropy team shortly. Also plan to post a summary once we have an agreed version. Part-way through the session I asked the 200-plus strong audience three questions:

1. Who had served in the armed forces? Perhaps a dozen hands went up.
2. Who was working for the defence industry? One or two diffident hands went up.
3. Who thought the theme of our session was relevant for future Anthropy events? Virtually every hand in the huge room shot up.

With the help of team member George Hopkins, we did another series of video appreciations of the event. The first can be found here, the second here. We will be posting summaries and assessments on the Volans website and through various other channels in the coming days. But here are a handful images that capture some of my own experience of this latest iteration of an extraordinary event.

Heartfelt congratulations to Anthropy founder John O’Brien and his team.

On our penultimate day in Jordan, we visited the Citadel and the Roman Theatre, alongside their museums. We were also steered around the old quarters of the city by Iain Stewart, who I first came across via his BBC series on geology and by speaking at a virtual conference on mining and minerals he chaired for Britain’s Natural History Museum. he now holds the Jordan-UK El Hassan bin Talal Research Chair in Sustainability at Jordan’s Royal Scientific Society.

Iain and his wife, Paola, took us under their wing, among other things steering us uphill to Amman’s Rainbow Street and then on to Trinitae’s Soap House. Fabulous scents and soaps. Inadvertently, we were slightly late back for the last supper with our Exodus group, but it seemed to go down without too much of a storm.

Overall, I couldn’t recommend the Exodus 12-day tour of Jordan more warmly. There were occasional glitches, of course, with the Gaza horrors raging in the background, but the trip more than satisfied the desire to visit the country that ignited when my original nuclear family went briefly across the border with Israel back in 1959, when I was nine and we were living in Cyprus.

Without being greedy, I can’t wait to go again.