The Gender Investment Gap Is Costing Us Climate Solutions

Episode 100 | 29.5.2025

The Gender Investment Gap Is Costing Us Climate Solutions

Despite the rhetoric around data-driven investing, there’s one figure the venture capital world keeps conveniently ignoring: female founders consistently outperform their male counterparts—and yet receive just 2% of available funding. For Carmel Rafaeli, investor and serial entrepreneur, this isn’t just a moral failure. It’s an economic one.

Listen to the full podcast episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

“I invest in women building in climate,” Carmel told us on The Responsible Edge. “Not because it’s charity, but because it’s good business.”

Carmel’s journey is anything but linear. From journalist to fashion executive to founder of a hospitality tech platform, her entrepreneurial drive took many forms—until COVID forced a hard reset. Sitting at her kitchen table during lockdown, she had a moment of realisation: “Whatever I do now, it cannot be about making something for someone just to buy. It has to be about impact.”

That pivot led her to climate tech, angel investing, and ultimately, founding The Table—a non-commercial community of over 225 investors with more than £10 billion AUM, all focused on backing women-led climate ventures. Since launch, 32 deals have been shared, 10 closed, and new models of capital allocation are taking shape.

🛑 The Myth of the Pipeline Problem

Investors often claim there just aren’t enough women building VC-backable climate solutions. Carmel disagrees.

“That’s not true,” she says plainly. “Women are building incredible businesses. They just don’t have the resources—and they’re building differently because of it.”

Women are present in the early stages. Cohorts at venture builders like Zinc or Carbon Thirteen are often 40–60% female. But when it comes to pre-seed or seed funding, the numbers plummet. The result? A false feedback loop that implies lack of ambition rather than lack of access.

🔁 Same Bias, New Money

A recent Trellis article suggested that more corporate capital in climate tech might change the gender equation. But Carmel isn’t convinced.

“Corporates don’t treat women differently. The same biases are embedded—just with a new logo.”

Her frustration is rooted in data. Women-led startups deliver higher ROI, reach unicorn status faster, and maintain stronger fundamentals. Yet when pitching, men are asked about their vision. Women are asked about their risks.

🔧 Fixing the System, Not the Women

So what needs to change? For Carmel, it’s not about training women to pitch better. It’s about rebuilding the structures they’re pitching into.

Here’s what she recommends:

More catalytic capital: Funds like The Table Foundation (launching soon) offer recoverable grants to match investments, reducing the perceived risk.
Visible, shared deal flow: The Table invites all investors—angels, syndicates, funds—to co-invest and share live rounds.
Data transparency: Asking every member to report the gender and diversity make-up of their portfolio and team is one small but powerful act of accountability.

“We’re not subsidising climate tech. We’re subsidising men. It’s time to change the ROI conversation.”

🎯 Why This Matters for Climate Tech

Carmel’s call-to-arms isn’t just about equity—it’s about effectiveness. Climate tech doesn’t have the luxury of letting good ideas die on the sidelines because of bias.

“We need all the innovation we can get,” she says. “We can’t afford to run the same VC playbook and just hope for the best.”

When you fund a narrow slice of society, you get narrow solutions. Mixed teams, diverse founders, and new ideas aren’t just morally right—they’re our best chance at solving the climate crisis.

✊ Final Word

When asked what one thing she’d change about the commercial world with a magic wand, Carmel didn’t hesitate:

“The bias against women.”

She’s not waiting for a wand, though. She’s building new structures. Sharing better data. Opening locked doors. And with every climate-positive, woman-led company that gets funded, she’s proving that impact and returns aren’t trade-offs—they’re allies.

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Play Your Carbon Right: What Sandwiches Can Teach Us About Behaviour Change

Episode 99 | 25.5.2025

Play Your Carbon Right: What Sandwiches Can Teach Us About Behaviour Change

When Gina Camfield, Head of ESG at Aramark UK & Global Offshore, joined The Responsible Edge, we didn’t expect to be talking about football academies, protein shakes, and card games. But like many paths into sustainability, Gina’s story is one of detours and surprising overlaps—each moment building resilience, shaping perspective, and ultimately leading her to rethink how we influence behaviour at scale.

Listen to the full podcast episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

🧠 From the pitch to the plate

Growing up in a football academy wasn’t just about chasing dreams of sport—it was training in discipline, self-awareness, and what Gina calls “foundational resilience.” That same mindset later fuelled her curiosity around nutrition during injury recovery, eventually setting her on a path from performance nutritionist to ESG leadership.

But what really sets Gina apart is her clarity on a core challenge in sustainable food: knowing what to do doesn’t mean we actually do it.

“There’s a huge gap between intention and behaviour. People say they care—but the label on the sandwich rarely drives their choice.”

Cue the research.

🧪 The carbon-labelling study that stopped us in our tracks

Gina joined us to dissect a study in Science Direct that examined whether carbon labels on sandwiches influenced consumer choices. The results were sobering:

69% of people said they valued carbon labels
Only 27% said it influenced their purchase

The implication? We’re walking into shops with good intentions, but walking out with a BLT.

Why? The study points to a lack of understanding of carbon labels, information overload, and competing priorities like cost and convenience.

“It’s like giving people a nutrition label in a language they don’t speak—and then expecting them to change their habits.”

This “action gap” isn’t new, but Gina believes it’s fixable—with the right internal tools and a behavioural nudge or two.

♻️ From sticker to system: How Aramark re-engineered food labelling

Here’s where the Rory Sutherland part kicks in.

What if carbon labelling isn’t just a sticker for the consumer, but a lever for chefs?

At Aramark, carbon data is now embedded into recipe systems, allowing teams to analyse high-impact meals and reformulate them at the source—quietly shifting sustainability without asking customers to make heroic choices.

This means:

A chef uploads a new dish, and the carbon score auto-generates
Recipes can be tweaked behind the scenes to lower carbon impacts
Communication is handed over to other chefs, not a corporate team

“Chefs want to hear from chefs. They don’t want someone from corporate coming in telling them to cut beef.”

It’s a brilliantly behavioural move. Aramark doesn’t wait for customers to get fluent in carbon labelling—they engineer better choices upstream and make the sustainable option the easy one.

🧑‍🏫 Playing games, sparking conversations

That doesn’t mean the customer gets ignored. Gina and her team have launched a range of engagement tools, including…

🎮 Play Your Carbon Right – A sandwich-themed take on Play Your Cards Right, where users guess whether a meal is higher or lower in carbon than the last

📱 QR codes at points of sale – Linking to full carbon impact explanations

🥇 “A-Rated Dish of the Day” – Turning carbon labels into something people can aspire to, not just tolerate

“It’s about sparking curiosity, not guilting people into change.”

🪴 The big opportunity? Feeding 250,000 people… better

With Aramark serving over a quarter of a million meals daily in the UK alone, the stakes are high. Around 70% of their carbon footprint comes from food purchasing, especially animal-based ingredients.

That’s why Gina’s work is focused not just on reformulating dishes, but on sourcing regenerative produce, rethinking waste, and supporting smaller, sustainable suppliers across the value chain.

“We’re not perfect. No one is. But the scale of the opportunity in food is massive.”

Her ultimate goal? To embed ESG in every commercial decision by default—so it’s no longer a bolt-on, but a reflex.

✨ Final thought: ESG shouldn’t be exceptional

In her “magic wand” moment, Gina didn’t ask for a shiny new label or global policy breakthrough. She asked for something much simpler:

“I’d want ESG to be factored into every decision—automatically. Not an afterthought. Just part of how things are done.”

In a world of short-term targets and endless KPIs, it’s a radical idea cloaked in pragmatism.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s how change really happens: not with slogans, but with sandwiches.

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Why Sustainability Still Needs Its Swiss Army Knife

Episode 98 | 22.5.2025

Why Sustainability Still Needs Its Swiss Army Knife

If you want to understand the moral mechanics of modern business, you could do worse than to spend 40 minutes with Jack Cunningham. A former ESG leader at Marks & Spencer, Kingfisher, and Sainsbury’s—and now a sought-after strategic adviser—Jack joins The Responsible Edge to unpack the complex tension between commercial leadership and corporate responsibility.

Listen to the full podcast episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

And as he explains, today’s sustainability professionals aren’t simply under-resourced. They’re tasked with being polymaths—strategists, diplomats, auditors, and ethicists—all under growing scrutiny and with shrinking support.

“Sustainability is like a Swiss Army knife. It does a little bit of everything,” Jack says. “But unfortunately, it always seems to be the department that gets its legs chopped off first.”

🛠️ The Rise—and Frustration—of the Corporate Generalist

Jack’s journey began not in a boardroom, but in the wilds of the UK’s Peak District, where childhood experiences in nature formed the roots of his professional ethos. After studying zoology and later earning a master’s in environmental technology at Imperial College London, he entered the workforce at a time when sustainability wasn’t yet codified—it was a curiosity, a cost, or a PR side note.

Now, two decades on, Jack is deeply embedded in the inner workings of ESG governance. But the job has changed. Dramatically.

Sustainability teams are, he argues, often the first to face cuts. And even when intact, their scope is impossibly broad:

Ensure compliance with a shifting regulatory landscape.
Build internal cross-departmental governance systems.
Communicate externally with credibility and legal precision.
Shape long-term strategy while responding to daily crises.

All with skeleton staff, tight budgets, and intensifying political pressure.

“We’re expected to be crystal ball mind readers, functional experts, accountants, legal gurus—literally everything under the sun.”

⚖️ Green Hushing, Political Polarisation & the Ethics of Silence

One of the most revealing parts of Jack’s conversation centres on communication—or the growing reluctance to do so. Reflecting on a 2023 Axios article about the trend towards subtler ESG messaging, Jack doesn’t dispute the phenomenon, but he adds a more human angle.

Green hushing, he argues, can be soul-destroying. Not just because it silences companies, but because it silences the people within them trying to do the right thing.

“Not being able to say something can be heartbreaking. There aren’t many regular places for people in sustainability to get their stories across.”

This isn’t about silencing fluff—it’s about losing the stories and case studies that drive peer-to-peer innovation and cross-sector learning. And while Jack believes internal collaboration will endure, he warns that without external communication, public understanding will continue to fragment.

“We need to encourage better decision-making by consumers. We can only do that if we talk and engage and communicate.”

🧭 The Say-Do Gap & Brand Activism

Jack’s insights into brand alignment are refreshingly nuanced. While there’s clear fatigue with companies hopping on every social cause, Jack resists the idea that corporates are purely cynical or performative.

He identifies a more structural problem: companies are increasingly reactive—nudged by NGOs, employees, trade groups, even rivals—into engagement. That’s not inherently bad. But it raises big questions:

Are we aligning with this issue because we believe in it, or because we fear being left behind?
Do we have the systems, strategy, and budget in place to act on it?
Will this be a sustained commitment or a one-month campaign?

“There needs to be a little more pragmatism and seriousness about what the company is going to be able to do before it says what it’s going to do.”

Jack isn’t calling for less ambition—he’s calling for more integrity.

🎯 The Magic Wand? Give Sustainability the Tools It Needs

Asked what he’d do with a magic wand, Jack doesn’t hesitate. He wouldn’t conjure up more pledges or frameworks. He’d give sustainability professionals what most already have to beg for: adequate resources.

“I’d wish my colleagues had the tools, the budgets, the buy-in. We can’t keep expecting strategic transformation from underfunded teams.”

It’s not just a plea for fairness—it’s a warning. Without structural investment, the very people tasked with delivering long-term value will burn out before they ever reach the summit.

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How the Interiors Industry Can Make Sustainability Irresistible

Episode 97 | 18.5.2025

How the Interiors Industry Can Make Sustainability Irresistible

In a world obsessed with novelty, how do you make reuse glamorous? That’s the question quietly driving Mirry Christie, founder of sustainability consultancy B·ABLE, as she champions systemic change within one of the most style-obsessed—and waste-prone—industries: interiors. As a former Marketing Director turned impact strategist, Mirry is helping businesses redefine success by making sustainability an integral part of their brand, culture, and commercial value.

Listen to the full podcast episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

“People still think sustainability is a cost,” she tells The Responsible Edge. “But it’s a strategy for long-term relevance.”

🛋️ Sustainability’s Image Problem

Let’s be honest: in the interiors world, luxury has long been defined by newness. A redesigned kitchen, a showroom-fresh sofa, or a perfectly curated look. As Mirry explains, this traditional mindset often clashes with a planet in crisis.

“Sustainability still gets shrugged off as second-best or second-hand,” she says. “But increasingly, it’s becoming an additional value add—something people are proud of.”

The challenge? Convincing both clients and interior designers that responsible design doesn’t mean compromising on beauty or luxury. That requires education, better data, and most importantly, better storytelling.

ultimate-safaris-namibia-Wau9IlCzqZw-unsplash

🎯 Key Challenges in Sustainable Interiors

Mirry pinpoints five friction points currently hampering progress:

📦 Packaging & Waste – Furniture needs serious protection in transit, often creating mountains of non-recyclable waste.
🛋️ Big Format, Big Emissions – Think sofas, dining tables, lighting—hard to move, store, or dispose of sustainably.
🔥 Sofa Safety Regs – UK fire safety rules make recycling upholstered furniture a nightmare.
🧾 Transparency – Designers are often in the dark about supply chains. Brands need to give them better product data.
💰 The Perception of Cost – Many still believe sustainability must be more expensive, which simply isn’t true.

“There are huge opportunities for brands that get ahead of this,” she argues. “If you build with transparency, you build loyalty, and that builds long-term commercial value.”

🌱 Meet the Green Room

To help tackle some of these barriers, Mirry co-founded The Green Room with Jules Haines (of Haines Collection). What began as a casual pub chat with a few industry peers has grown into a thriving forum of over 50 interiors brands—big and small—committed to sharing knowledge, cutting corners (ethically), and ditching the industry’s culture of secrecy.

“No question is too stupid in the Green Room,” Mirry jokes. “We get everyone round the table—literally and figuratively—to learn from each other.”

Roundtables, webinars, open-source guides: The Green Room is what the interiors industry desperately needed—somewhere to find inspiration and practical help.

🔮 What’s Next? (And What Keeps Her Going)

At B·ABLE, Mirry works with SMEs across industries, but interiors remains close to her heart. Her goal? Empower teams to act, not just outsource sustainability to one poor soul in the comms department.

“99% of UK companies are SMEs. They don’t have ESG teams. They need simplicity, structure and clarity—and someone to help them communicate it all properly.”

She hopes the long-term legacy of her work will be a generation of brands that don’t just market responsibility—they practice it, collaboratively.

And if she had a magic wand?

“I’d change the perception of sustainability. It’s not a tick box. It’s a growth strategy. It’s your best chance to thrive.”

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Why SMEs Hold the Key to a Greener Future

Episode 96 | 15.5.2025

Why SMEs Hold the Key to a Greener Future

It’s easy to imagine climate action as the domain of sprawling corporates, global brands, and powerful institutions. But according to Kat Christopoulos — Chartered Energy Engineer, sustainability consultant, and Head of ESG at Cloudfm — that’s not where the real leverage lies.

Listen to the full podcast episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

In a world teetering on ecological tipping points, Kat is betting on something smaller, more agile, and often overlooked: the SME.

“Each small business is part of a bigger business,” Kat says. “And if we’re going to shift the system, this is where it starts.”

🧩 Why SMEs Matter More Than You Think

Kat’s experience spans some of the biggest names in finance, tech, and facilities management — from Barclays to ISS. But it’s through working with small and medium-sized enterprises that she’s seen the most rapid, tangible change.

SMEs:

Are closer to their people, suppliers, and communities
Can make big changes without long bureaucratic chains
Often have leaders directly involved in sustainability decision-making
Can drive transformation up the supply chain, influencing bigger players

“I helped a relocation company switch from diesel to hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO). Overnight, they cut emissions by 90% — and it took one conversation with the CEO.”

📉 What’s Holding SMEs Back?

Despite the potential, many SMEs are still lagging behind. The barriers Kat identifies are both structural and cultural:

❌ Limited budgets
❌ Lack of in-house expertise
❌ Unclear standards or frameworks
❌ Misconception that ESG is a luxury, not a necessity

She argues that the watering down of CSRD reporting requirements for SMEs is a missed opportunity. “Ironically, they’re the ones who would benefit most from frameworks like double materiality. It helps them understand where they should act — and why it’s not just about carbon, but risk, resilience, and opportunity.”

📈 Small Businesses, Big Influence

Kat is clear: action at the SME level doesn’t just result in smaller footprints. It creates pressure from below, challenging larger corporates to evolve.

“It’s not just about compliance. It’s about value creation. SMEs can offer sustainable products and services that make their clients’ ESG strategies easier.”

Think: sustainable relocation services, circular supply chain solutions, low-carbon facilities support — all being developed by nimble, purpose-led SMEs.

🌱 A Personal Model for Systems Change

Kat now balances her consultancy work with local sustainability projects in Spain — including drought-resilient garden design. The personal connection with nature keeps her work grounded and energised.

“There’s no growth in the comfort zone. You have to do the hard thing. That’s how change happens — in businesses and in life.”

And what does her magic wand moment look like?

“If I could change one thing, it would be to instil ethics and a sense of responsibility in every business leader. That’s when real change happens — when leadership walks the talk.”

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