Economic leader Eve Roodhouse believes industry can harness innovation to address the climate crisis
UN Sustainable Development Goal Number 9 - Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure - Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation
Episode 3 of 'The 17' podcast focuses on UN Sustainable Development Goal 9. It reveals just how interconnected our economic systems are and how complex a task making them sustainable will be. The 3 “I’s” (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) must all work together for a sustainable future to be possible - a huge challenge. According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the current state of affairs looks like this:
Goal 9 raises an important question: Is sustainable industrialisation a valid aim… or a contradiction in terms? Can you continue to grow industry without causing further harm to the planet?
An optimistic expert with broad experience
Eve Roodhouse has experience in delivering national level digital infrastructure and now has a leadership role for an entire UK city (Leeds) on culture and economy. Her skillset is in bringing varied (and sometimes non-aligned) strands together to deliver progress. She has an unshakeable belief that things can get better and that business and industry (if given the support to innovate) can come up with the solutions to deliver a sustainable future.
“Some people would think “My mind is blown - are we ever going to be able to solve all this? We’re all doomed!”… Whereas I look at it and think we’ve got some really brainy people around, we’ve got people who are really committed to solving these challenges. Our question is - How can we go faster? ” - Eve Roodhouse
Eve highlights a few key things that would help us go faster. Digital inclusivity - we must even out (regionally, nationally and globally) reliable and cheap access to the internet. Diversity in innovation - being an entrepreneur is hard, but vital for the innovation needed to meet the planet’s sustainability challenges. Eve argues that it has to become easier for all people, all over the world to have the financial support they need to get new sustainable companies, ideas and products off the ground.
Start / Stop
Each episode of 'The 17' ends with our influential expert guest giving us their Stop/Start - one thing we can all stop doing and start doing right now to help move the planet toward meeting the UN Sustainable Development goal in question.
Eve’s 'Stop' relates to our attitude to industry - she argues we need to stop thinking that business is bad when it comes to the climate. She thinks the exact opposite is true - a properly innovative industrial sector can deliver the solutions the planet needs.
Eve’s 'Start' is about encouraging collaboration and mutual respect between groups sometimes (wrongly in Eve’s opinion) characterised as being on opposite sides of the climate debate. Eve wants campaigners and public sector bodies to start seeing how business and industry can be part of the solution, not seen as part of the problem when it comes to sustainability.
Yorkshire's ambition to lead on Sustainability
Both guest Eve Roodhouse and host Kate Hutchinson live in Yorkshire and they sense that the county is keen to be a leading regional voice on sustainability. Eve points out that Leeds as a city is the perfect size to lead on innovation - small enough to progress quickly but big enough to scale. Eve believes that Leeds and Yorkshire companies can play a vital role in originating new solutions that can play a part in addressing the climate crisis.
The first ever Yorkshire Sustainability Week takes place this coming July and will have an in-person conference as its centrepiece featuring keynote speakers such as Greenpeace's Areeba Hamid. Go to www.yorkshiresustainabilityweek.com to find out more and get your tickets.
Be informed, take action and spread the word
'The 17' is a podcast dedicated to sustainability. It is structured around the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development goals. They represent, in essence, a plan to protect the future of the planet. We all need to know what they are, take reasonable positive actions in our own lives to help... and spread the word.
This new sustainability podcast has made quite an impact. Episode 1 was a hit - hitting Number 2 in the UK Apple Podcasts ‘Earth Sciences’ chart - an amazing result for a brand new podcast.. A new episode of ‘The 17’ is released on the 17th of each month and each episode is themed around a different one of the UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Follow 'The 17' to make sure you are informed and hear from influential experts about what actions to take to play your part in building a sustainable future. Listen every month, subscribe, leave reviews and tell your friends.
Resources
Find out more about Eve Roodhouse’s work in Leeds here: https://invest-leeds.co.uk/
Discover the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals: https://sdgs.un.org/goals
Explore the plans for Yorkshire Sustainability week here: https://www.yorkshiresustainabilityweek.com/
Welcome to the 17. This is a podcast dedicated to sustainability. It's structured around the UN's 17 sustainable development goals.
They represent, in essence, a plan to protect the planet. I'm Kate Hutchinson and I'm the founder of Yorkshire Sustainability Week, and my goal is to help the UK's regions to play their part in delivering a sustainable future.
Each episode of the 17 is themed around a different, one of the UN's 17 sustainable development goals. A new episode drops on the 17th of each month, and each time I'll be joined by a new guest who has real expertise and influence related to one of those UN goals. We will explain and analyze the goal itself, look at the current situation, and discuss what actions we can take at an individual, regional, and even global level to make progress.
It's episode three and we're tackling Goal nine, which is industry innovation. And infrastructure, build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation. Our guest, this episode is an expert at the intersection of people, tech and progress. She's implemented new and vast IT infrastructure in the health sector and is a powerful and passionate voice on inclusivity.
Her current role at Lead City Council is Chief Officer of Culture and Economy. This means. She leads on everything from international relations to citywide initiatives on business economy, policy and innovation. Ive ruo welcome you to the podcast.
Thanks Kate. It's lovely to be here. And wow, that introduction made me sound very grand.
Well, I've been working with you now for a couple of months on Yorkshire Sustainability Week, and it has genuinely been such a, such a pleasure working with you and I'm really, really pleased to have you on the podcast. So thank you for coming. You're very welcome. So you've delivered massive, complex digital infrastructure.
You've designed initiatives to promote innovation across the whole of the city, and now you are responsible for leads economy. Why do you think the three eyes of industry innovation and infrastructure are so co-dependent?
The reason why I've kind of ended up in the role that I've ended up, which was accidental, I didn't plan to be in this role, is because at my heart I'm a geographer, and as all good geographers know, we live in really, really complex ecosystems.
Just as we, you know, nature is a complex ecosystem, I. The environment that we create as humans, our social geography, our, our economic geography, it's complex. So in, in the context of those three things existing together, if you are, uh, developing industry, you have complex interdependency into infrastructure, going back centuries, why have we got leads in the location that it is?
Because it's on a river. We needed power and water from that river to grow our industry, and those dependencies still exist today. You know, our, our industries need access to the grid and they need access to power. We need access to, uh, skills, and we need access to transport, to be able to transport goods if we're manufacturing, but also to transport labor.
So those dosings are completely independent. But then where does innovation come in? Well, actually, as a human race, we're always progressing and we're responding to the challenges that we see, and it's our natural tendency to grow. And in the context of what we're discussing today, one of the biggest challenges we're facing now is addressing the climate emergency.
And it's only through that intersect between innovation, industry and infrastructure that we're gonna be able to tackle. Those challenges as we move forward into their next few years and the decades ahead.
Yeah, definitely. I completely agree. I think one of the things that really genuinely excites me is this sort of the opportunity that is there to be able to reshape the world that we have right now and actually re-look at the way in which we operate.
And what are you seeing with the businesses that you work with across Lu City region in terms of the way that they're adapting in line with. The challenges that we face with climate
change, the main thing that really strikes me is the level of optimism. So I think when you start to look at the size of the challenge, and we'll come on to discuss that a bit more, you can become overwhelmed with the the huge range of things that we need to try and tackle.
Whether you're looking at things like retrofitting old buildings, whether you're looking at how you change your manufacturing process to be able to remove carbon from that process, but what I see is actually a huge amount of optimism about businesses wanting to tackle that. First of all, and secondly, innovation in how they're doing that.
And there's some great examples across the region of organizations that are doing that. So take, um, SIT U for example. Sit U is an organization that has a site that's our climate innovation district here in Le and they've built a whole manufacturing process to create houses that are zero carbon passive houses and creating a whole community that allows people to live in a really low carbon.
Way, and they're changing the standards of the sector. One of the interesting things, again, that we can get into a bit more though, is that they're creating opportunities in their supply chain through what they're doing. And at the moment, some of those opportunities can't be fulfilled by businesses that are located here either in our region or actually in the uk.
And they're having to bring things in from the continent, which is not what they want to do. And so there, there are, I think opportunities for us that we haven't really tapped into yet to really try and drive forwards an even more sustainable approach in Yes, in that kind of sector, but in several other sectors
as
well.
It's across the board, isn't it? It's not just within the built environment that we're seeing those, those skills need to transfer over into the uk and particularly into Yorkshire. I think we're seeing it across the board in every single industry as we move. Into a completely new economy as I see it.
I hear too often, particularly in the work that I do in economic development, people just talking top level about green skills, which I actually, you know, maybe it's a bit controversial.
I find that a bit unhelpful. I do a lot of work with the digital sector, and the parallel I would make would be that there are digital businesses and people who have. Particular digital skills that operate in digital business businesses like software engineers, and then there are jobs that require digital skills.
And pretty much that's every job now. Yeah. And all of us need to have digital skills. We need to think about green skills in that way too, right? So there's gonna be more and more skills that are needed in businesses that are really driving forward, sustainability that are specifically connected to that.
But then actually, Every job is going to require us to have a degree of knowledge and understanding about sustainability, but we all need to start to take responsibility bounces about some of that.
So we, I wanna do a deep dive into where we're at in the Widert situation. So we'll dive into the UN sustainable development goal.
Number nine, industry innovation and infrastructure. The aim here is to build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation. So here are some facts about the current situation. According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs globally, only one in three small manufacturers have access to loans or a line of credit.
Manufacturing growth is increasing globally, but stalling in less developed countries. High tech industries are far more resilient crises than low tech industries. The least developed countries have huge challenges in providing universal and affordable access to the internet. All countries need to upgrade infrastructure and retrofit industries to make them more environmentally sustainable.
Eve, how big is the overall challenge here?
It's enormous, isn't it? If we were just thinking about the challenges, we could soon become very anxious and, and feel as though we can't do anything about this. Because if you take access to finance, for example, so we live in a high income country and yet we know that many of our businesses.
Particularly small medium enterprises probably don't have the capacity to borrow the money that they need to in order to achieve net zero in their business model or to achieve some of their sustainability goals, particularly post covid, where they probably borrowed heavily to get through Covid and did borrowing that they weren't intending to do and they're having to pay that money back.
Access to digital is even an issue here for our communities. We have. Over 170,000 people that live in what's defined as the 10% most deprived of neighborhoods in the country here in Leeds. And many of them don't have access to some of the basic kind of digital provision that you might imagine. For example, can you afford a broadband connection?
And we'd uncovered through Covid that a lot of families might not have the kit that's needed to support their children to learn online cuz they can't afford those things. Yeah. Take that challenge and you know, and then, and, and a kind of another example, cause we talked about retrofit. When you're going through what the aims are, we've been doing some really innovative work in our housing stocking leads.
We have a huge amount of what's called back to back housing. There is a door for one person's house on one side and a door for someone else's house on the other. And the backs of the houses touch each other. So there's no garden and there's no backyard. And they're in a terrace. Now we're one of the only cities in the UK that have.
Such high levels of this housing stock, that presents a real challenge in terms of our aspirations to achieve net zero. But we have been doing some groundbreaking work to retrofit those buildings, but it's the tip of the iceberg. And again, this is in a really forward thinking core city. In a high income country, if you take some of those challenges into lower income countries or newly emerging economies, and you think about the challenges that they face, then the scale of the challenge, you know, really starts to hit you.
Where's the finances from the World Bank to support, um, newly emerging economies to get some of these things right as they grow? Where is the finance gonna come from? And I suppose the good news for people that are listening is that this is something that is very much a live debate in that financial institutions are, are wrestling with, but it's not resolved.
I mean, when you listen to the, the discussions that had an international level, the challenge is always that the richer countries are not necessarily yet giving as much as is gonna be necessarily needed to be able to achieve what we need to collectively achieve to be able to address climate change.
But, Going back to sort of, let's be hopeful we can do things in our own roles and in our leadership roles, um, in and in, in what we do on each of these areas set out in this, in this goal. So if I go back to the digital inclusion in leads, we have an incredible program called a hundred percent Digital Leads.
And that. Program provides support through third sector organizations to help skill people up to get the digital skills that they need, and to be able to give them access to the particular kind of equipment they need to be able to get online through a tablet lending scheme in libraries. And we've also worked with BT to make sure that we've got full fiber connectivity reaching all parts of our city to make it commercially viable to connect up all of our communities to full fiber.
So we've got an amazing level of full fiber coverage, which is really important for all of our communities. As well as industry and for innovation. So there are very real things that can be done through leadership for
me. I wanna understand from your perspective, is there such a thing as sustainable industrialization or do you think those two things combined are actually a contradictory
term?
So that's a really great question, and it's one that we've wrestled with when we're thinking through our economic policy. Uh, leads to council. So when I joined the council in 2018, I inherited an inclusive growth strategy, which was very helpful. Coming into a new job, having a very clear strategy, it really focused on the fact that we wanted to address the inequality that existed in the city, but it didn't actually really overtly speak to sustainability and the climate And the council actually went on in 2019 to declare a climate emergency.
So just about a year after. The strategy was launched. So we're going through the process at the moment of refreshing the inclusive growth strategy and we're really embedding into it addressing the climate emergency. And so in those discussions we've been having that debate, well, you know, can you have growth and still tackle the climate emergency?
Is growth always bad? My take on it is that, Actually, if you're going to innovate and you need to tackle some of the solutions we've got to address through the climate emergency, then you're going to have growth. Inevitably, that's what will happen. Great example might be, there's a brilliant startup in leads called Tread.
They've got a great approach to a banking card. That means you can calculate your carbon footprint, et cetera. Well, they're a growing business. They're gonna employ more people, they're gonna make money, and that's great. As that is economic growth. They're a brilliant business, but without them disrupting the concept of what a banking card can be, then that change wouldn't be happening.
I personally don't see growth at that term as an overly negative thing. I think what we really, really need to be concerned with is clean growth and a fair transition. I
agree with you completely that, you know, growth doesn't have to be a bad thing, but for me it's like how can we look at what we already have and reuse it?
So how, you know, it comes back into this circular economy piece of how can we embed circular economy into the way in which we operate? How can we be using the amount of waste that we've got to actually have a purpose again? Yeah. And things like that. You know, how can we use all of that to create infrastructure?
I think that's a huge
opportunity. You're going to have businesses that are interested in wanting to tackle climate emergencies, but a business needs to remain competitive. So they're gonna look at, well, does it make business sense for me to invest in this way? The national incentives need to be there from a government perspective in terms of whether that's a stick in terms of regulation, but potentially a car as well in terms of financial incentives.
And there's been a number of things that have been around that have supported businesses to do something. So for example, grants to trial, electric vehicles. We ran one of those in leads and many companies trialed a vehicle and then went ahead and purchased electric vehicles following on. But I would say there's not enough of that, particularly for SMEs.
I mean, in our country, our economy is powered by SMEs and that's pretty much the same, the world over. So you've gotta figure out how are you gonna get those SMEs to be able to. Do what they need to do to move into kind of having a, uh, a zero carbon approach to what, what they do. The reality of that as well is that some of those businesses are gonna go out of business.
What they do now is not gonna be compatible with a green economy. I think there's some interesting things through the lens of economic development and business support, which says how do you kind of support those businesses to understand how they might pivot into a new business model and use the skills that they have in a new area.
How do you put things in place to support them to do that? And that's about innovation with existing businesses rather than new to market. Innovation, how do you support that kind of shift?
So we experienced that through the pandemic. So you know, the team that are behind the podcast and the team that are behind Y S W are the Secret Event Service.
And we are an events agency. So our job became illegal when the pandemic hit and we had to adapt and we adapted quite quickly. So we were a young team and we were all digital natives. So it was very easy for us to turn to the online world and to discover what was there and then adapt to it. And, you know, that ultimately saved us as a business.
Um, Led to two very great years actually through the pandemic when most of the event agencies were really suffering. How do you think that will shape over the course of the next 10 years? 2030 is this sort of goal year, isn't it? Yeah.
Thinking internationally, nationally, regionally, and locally, sometimes change only happens because of regulation.
There's a piece about the pace at which the UK government wants to go and the regulation they put in place and how that pushes businesses to move. And you see that in relation to, for example, diesel cars and petrol cars. And so you see that regulation and setting the date is driving people to move to electric cars.
The issue is that of course, we're not catching up with the infrastructure. We're not keeping up with the infrastructure, which again, kind of shows you the size of the challenge that we are facing. So I think it's that combination of. Regulation helps to kind of shift and push people's behaviors, whether that's it consumer behavior and demand, or whether that's industry and how they they operate.
But the thing that occurs to me as well, we haven't talked about yet when we're talking about this, is universities, you know, universities have a really, really important role to play in the UK and supporting businesses and industry to innovate. Tell me more
about what your perspective is on what's happening within the unis.
So I've got 16 year old son and funnily enough we were, we were looking at courses for university a couple of months ago cause we were thinking about a-level choices and it was fascinating actually cuz he's interested in the intersect between geography and economy. And when you start looking this, you can even see the courses that have sort of been there for a couple of years and then they've refined them and created new courses, which is this response to this whole space of sustainability in green finance.
It's so exciting. It is. I kind of wish I could. One of these degrees that's coming through. So what are the universities doing? Well, I think first of all, if I talk about leads because I know it better than other places, we are incredibly lucky in leads. We've got, you know, some brilliant universities here that serve some really, uh, you know, provide lots of different opportunities leads.
University has world leading capability. In addressing the climate emergency, a number of their academics are directly involved in the I P C C, for example, that deep research and expertise level. We are incredibly lucky and leads to have that. And then of course, leads back at university has expertise, particularly in the built environment and carbon and its impact in the built environment.
Um, David Glue at the. Leads. Beckett University is a real expert in that field. So from a research point of view, you've got great capability, which is really important. The practical application of that and converting that into innovation is important. On the skills side, yes, of course you're seeing some courses through, but I still think there's a lot that needs to be done cuz it's a bit chicken and egg right on the skills front.
So if we are clear about what we need, Then organizations that are in that sector, colleges can say to parents, look, there's all this work that's gonna be there for your kids. Get them to do this course. It goes right down to that very detailed level of why would my son or daughter want to learn to be a heating engineer for a heat pump, not a boiler, because they need to be able to see it's gonna be job for them into the future.
The other thing that we've kind of exposed is the lack of kind of senior. People that are really expert in sustainability. To be honest, we haven't reached a sort of conclusion about how we tackle that right now. Where I think that conversation is going to go is about how we're gonna skill up our existing leaders because we can't sit around waiting for people to go through some of these brilliant courses we were just discussing.
We're gonna have to skill up some our existing leaders. Yeah, and I include myself in that.
So when I came out of university, I worked for a sales training company and did all of my sales training through that company. And they were brilliant and they taught me exactly what I needed to know in terms of how to sell.
And what it made me think was what are the organizations that can take graduates? At graduate level and skill them in sustainability and then place them in jobs. And I couldn't think of any organization direct that I know of personally. So if there, if you are listening and you will run an organization like that and get in touch.
Cause I wanna know you, you know, and that we want
to know those people. Do you know that's happened in the digital sector because of demand for skills in leads, for example, there are organizations like. Um, north Coders and Generation UK who've created kind of bootcamp models where you go through a bootcamp to develop particular skill sets, which an employer needs, and then you, uh, you get a job at the end of it.
I'd certainly think there's a marketplace for, for a similar. Similar thing in a number of areas in green skills. Um, and there are some helpful parallels. We were talking about it earlier, about the parallels around the maturity of understanding digital skills. Same, I think here that there are business opportunities.
So some of those people that have been running those boot camps for digital might think about how they could look at this area.
It's really interesting for me watching it as somebody who's adapted my business model to be more focused on sustainability and watching others who are making the same move.
For me, there's two drivers, right? Which is number one, it fits all of my purpose drivers in, in every way, shape and form. That's, you know, is really, really important to me to make a difference to the world that I live in and all the rest of it. So that's number one driver. But number two, this is a huge business opportunity.
Yeah. This moved to a sustainable future. Doesn't mean walking away from capitalism. It's sustainable capitalism. It's working within the same model that we have now and adapting that capitalist model to suit the new world that we're building. That's how I see it. Anyway, your
point now is an interesting world.
Often you do get the, oh, business is bad. Mm-hmm. You know, business is bad when it comes to climate change. Well, I don't see it that way at all, and my interactions with business leaders give me a lot of confidence because most of the business leaders I meet are really focused on what they can do, whether their, whether their business is focused on addressing the climate emergency or not.
Many of them are focused on what they. Can do and how they'll lead their business to make it sustainable.
So why is digital inclusion so important to the growth of the sustainability
community? The reason why you need to consider digital inclusion is, is really if you look at the other side of the coin in terms of like digital exclusion if you like.
So what are the consequences for communities, businesses, or individuals that don't have access to digital technology? First of all, in high income countries, So much of the services that are designed both by public and private sector now are digital first. So if you don't have the skills or you don't have the ability to be able to access those services, then you are going to get a different service, sometimes a more expensive service than others who can.
So that is giving you a disadvantage. Compared to others. Think about even job applications. You know, every job you apply for now, no one sends a paper copy in. If a company is doing online interviews for screening, do you have a quiet place in your house to be able to do an online interview? Do you have the right kit?
The reason why digital skills and digital inclusions are so, is so important, It's because we really can't afford to leave a massive chunk of our population out of the ability to be able to A, innovate and bring forwards ideas to solve the problems we face because we need everybody in that world. But B, we can't afford to have a transition that leaves people behind as we transition into a green economy, because that's not fair.
We have seen inequality grow in all major cities that. Results in tensions and issues. And the reason why we are so focused on closing that inequality gap is because it's good for the economy, it's good for health, and it's good for social cohesion. All of those things mean that as we work through addressing the climate emergency, we have to have in mind how that is gonna be addressed.
Transition and digital is a really, really key. Part of that?
Yeah. Fundamentally important, isn't it? With everything, even the world that we operate in now, ultimately every job is in some way, shape, or form a tech job. Hybrid working is all well and good, but it's actually quite exclusionary. It sort of is counting on this world in which you will have a.
Spare room that you can go in and make a study out of, and you can have an area otherwise, you know, ultimately what you have is young people working from their bed. Is that what you want from a professional job? Is that what you were expecting from the world of work that you are coming into? So digital inclusion is a, is a fundamentally important part of the big puzzle
really, isn't it?
Yeah, ab, absolutely.
Okay. So. Regionally speaking then we've talked a lot about what's happening in leads, but tell me a little bit more about what's being done locally in terms of the innovation ecosystem here in the city, and how more people can get
involved. Oh, it's such an exciting place to be in leads in terms of our innovation ecosystem.
So we've been on a really exciting journey over the last five years, and it was driven a lot by our participation in the Massachusetts Institute. Of technology REAP program. So the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is based in Boston. M i t Reap is regional entrepreneurship accelerator program.
Boston's been really successful in innovation and m i t at the heart of that. So the M I T Reap program takes cities together to kind of benchmark, uh, their innovation ecosystems and to really explore like what it is that. You need to do to drive forwards and accelerate the growth of innovation Driven enterprises is what they call them.
We might call 'em high growth businesses in the uk, but their lingo is innovation driven enterprises. And now when we went to participate in that and the place was secured by the University of Leads, We had to follow their five stakeholder model. So you have to take corporates, entrepreneurs, public sector, universities, and risk capital.
And there's a real power in that because together you have to really understand your innovation ecosystem. It's not just the public sector, it's not just universities. It's not just a corporate. And you have to put entrepreneurs right at the heart. And when we went through that process, we really. Became comfortable with something, which I felt when I started my job at the council, people weren't comfortable with.
And that is the breadth of our economy in leads. So for anyone that's not familiar with leads, we have an economy that is broadly the same as the UK economy as a whole. It makes our economy very resilient, but it means that people go, what do we stand for? What do we stand for? Get a bit stressed about it, which I don't know why.
So it was useful going through a MIT read because it made us realize that actually. That's our superpower. The breadth in our economy means that leads is an absolutely fabulous place to innovate, and that's why the digital sector is arriving here. So take if you're innovating in health, right? We have one teaching hospital trust.
We have one council, and we have kind of one integrated care. System to work with. So it's easy if you that that's who you work with. If you, if you're in London, you're like, which, which hospital do I pick to work with? How do I navigate this landscape? So it makes it much more straightforward for people to come to test a product and to scale that product.
So we, we got comfortable with that. And then the second thing we got really comfortable with, Is our focus what? What's our innovation vision? And our innovation vision is to stimulate innovation that creates a healthier, a greener, and a more inclusive world. And that's what we are going after in leads.
We wanna have the most diverse set of entrepreneurs anywhere in the world. And I say that. With true commitment and ambition, and that will take time because you have to remove the barriers to be able to become an entrepreneur because you know Kate. Yeah. When you're setting up a business, it's high risk, and if you haven't got access to capital, that's really, really challenging and it's quite lonely.
Yeah. So there are a lot of things that we need to do to tackle all of those things. So that's how we develop this really, really clear vision. And then what we've been doing since then is really nurturing our innovation ecosystem. One of the areas more pertinent to this discussion as well is, um, green finance.
How do you take into account climate change in the mortgage process and the level of nuance we might require in the future to determine what types of houses are mortgageable versus not based on flooding implications and so on. So it's absolutely fascinating. That is
fascinating. Yeah. Gosh, it's, it's definitely complex, isn't it?
There's so many different
areas. Yeah. Again, I think you and I are optimistic, aren't we? Yeah. Because I think some people would read all this and go, my mind's blown. Will we ever solve any of this? We're all doomed. Whereas, you know, I look at Anna, I go, wow, this is really interesting. We've got some brilliantly brainy people around.
Yes, we've got some people who are really committed to trying to solve these challenges, and I guess our. Question is, how can we go faster? Yes,
a hundred percent. And that is, do you know what I, I'm gonna give you some really heavy praise now cause you really do deserve it. As you know, lead City Council in your role as leaders are phenomenal at backing the business community.
You genuinely
are. I think that's right. And I'm, you know, we might as well have a loving back because you know, what you're doing with sustainability week is a really, really fantastic thing because, Talking again about this thing about good versus bad business versus campaigners. We can't have that. We gotta really collaborate going forwards.
And what's really brilliantly refreshing about the York Sustainability Week is it's like, it's so business led, a lot of what you're doing, and I'm sure that off the back view, there'll be lots of things that come out of it in terms of some of the collaboration and networks that evolve. As I said, I can sense businesses want to be.
Really engaged in this, and it's how we kind of drive some
of those things forward. Once the economy writes itself, when we start to look at this new way of working and this new model of the economy, which I am convinced is coming, I'm convinced that there will be some really big shifts in the way that we operate in the economy at the moment.
I think, you know, we're, we're on a course for. Success. Yeah. Let's do our best to actually answer the question. How do we work towards achieving goal number man nine. The UN 17 Sustainable development goals. Build resilient infrastructure. Promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.
If you're gonna be in charge of it, I want one action point at every level. Please. Globally.
Globally. We've gotta get our act together on that Really. Big financing point that I talked about earlier. So the World Bank and the support to the World Bank through the higher income countries to make sure that there is financing available to help lower income countries and newly emerging economists.
Okay. And National. National. So I'm actually gonna pick innovation nationally, right? I think that we really, really need to. Back regions to innovate, but through national support. Does that make sense? We've spent a lot of time in the podcast talking about some of the great things we've been doing on innovation, but we've done it on a relative shoestring in terms of funding.
So the government have put some money in through the investment zones opportunity that's coming through at the moment, but I'm convinced that actually the right thing to do would to be. To invest in regional innovation ecosystems and to put the trust in them in those partnerships to really drive innovation.
Cuz we've proven in leads that we can do it. And the same innovation ecosystems exist. Believe me, in Liverpool, in Manchester, in Birmingham, in New Castle. They're different cuz we are different cities, but they exist. And I do think that locally we know our economies and we can really drive that innovation.
So, Backers, I guess. Brilliant.
I agree completely. Right. Okay. And then going into regionally, I
think the priority for us regionally in this region is transport. And I'm surprised actually, it's taken us this long in this podcast to get to that being from leads. Um, for anyone that doesn't know we are the only European city without a mass transit solution.
Um, and that doesn't do us or the region any favors in terms of our productivity and our potential for the future. So I think regionally our priority has to be securing, it's a, I'm cheating a bit cuz it's a backwards forward thing to the previous one, which is it's got to be about securing the funding we need nationally, um, to be able to deliver on real transformation of that, that transfer infrastructure that we need.
So I'd put the mass transit in there. I'd put continuing to invest in active travel as we've done over the past few years in, in leads and other parts of West Yorkshire. And I'd put in there investing in train links across the north.
And our final question is always at an individual level. So it's stop and start.
So the idea is that you ask everyone listening to stop doing one thing and start doing one thing right now that will help from today. If you could do that, what would the, what would both of those things be? Let's start with stop. So
I'm gonna stick with my theme that we've been picking up through the discussion, which is stop thinking that business are bad.
And my, my other side to that is start looking at how business can really solve the pro problems. And I suppose that message is primarily to people listening who might be from the public sector or from the campaigning side of looking at their climate emergency. So stop saying. Business equals bad because I firmly believe that it's only by working in partnership with business that we're gonna be able to solve the big challenges that we face around climate emergency.
So thank you to my guest, Eve rude house. Thanks Eve. And thank you for listening to the 17. We really appreciate your support. We're a new podcast looking to grow, so please hit the subscribe button on your podcast provider and please do leave as a review and tell all of your friends about us too.
Remember, if you want to find out more about your Oxford Sustainability Week in July, head to our website, your oxford sustainability week.com. On there, you can also get tickets to the conference, which will feature keynote's features. From the likes of Ariba, hammed from Greenpeace, right through to John l Kington, who was the guy who created the ferrys uh, people, planet prophet, and the triple bottom line.
That's all for now. We are back on the 17th of July for episode four of the 17th. Thank you for joining us.