Bertarelli Summer2024 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 74
ECO NO M ICS
|
RE W I L D I NG
It’s scary to be open
and transparent about
what you do.
Dax, the same question to you: What is your background in biodiversity?
Dax Dasilva: So I come from the business and tech
world. I founded a company called Lightspeed in
2005. We do retail and hospitality software, as well as
e-commerce software. I took the company public on
the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock
Exchange and it grew to where it is today—it’s 3,000
people now. I transitioned from being the CEO for about
16 years to the chairman just last February. At that point,
I started the Age of Union, which is a conservation organization. And while that’s not my full-time job and I’m
new to the conservation space, I’m really enjoying it.
I grew up in the beauty of British Columbia and in
Canada, and I became a conservationist when I was
17. I watched the old growth forests being cut down
and I joined those protests, so I knew, even though
I’d started computer programming at 13, I knew I’d be
coming back to conservation. So I took $40 million in
2021 and put it across 10 “boots on the ground” conservation projects.
There are these incredible changemakers at the
heart of these projects, including local indigenous
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to take that 4 percent to 100 percent. It’s not to say
that people are doing bad things—we just don’t know
what they are doing. There’s a downside to not knowing
what corporations are doing, when they might be doing
fabulously interesting and important things.
I want to start by asking all of you to tell us about your
involvement in biodiversity now, and the restoration
efforts you are part of. Jan, can you tell us about your
work at Lancaster University?
Jan Bebbington: I’m director of something called
the Pentland Centre for Sustainability and Business.
We look at businesses and how they’re championing
sustainable development outcomes. Corporations are
undertaking support for biodiversity restoration. Some
of this is in a philanthropic sense. But at Lancaster University, we’re doing a project together with our ecologists to look at how businesses are addressing restoration in their own line of work, either because they rely
on the natural environment—so they’re using restoration to make sure they can continue their business—or
because they have impact upon the environment, and
they have decided that restoring it is part of their deal.
So one of the things that we did is we looked at the
100 largest companies listed on the Forbes 500 across
10 sectors. And all of them were providing some information about their environmental attractions, while
66 percent of them told you about their restoration
activities. So we know on paper now that companies
are getting involved in restoration and producing—
most likely—good outcomes from it. Because here’s
the thing: When we asked them about something they
were doing, do you monitor it? Only 34 percent said yes,
we monitor it, and just 4 percent produced information
that might allow someone to check their work. I’d like
