Steve (host):
Welcome to the 23rd Wonderspace Journey. It's great to have you on board. My name is Steve Cole and since September 2020 I have been asking the same 6 questions to people from around the world. The questions revolve around life and wonder, places of reset and stories of hopefulness, which I think we need more than ever. The setting for all of our interviews is a virtual window seat on the space station 250 miles above earth where we see everything from a different perspective.

Steve (host):
This week our journey will take us over Africa and to experience these views with us In this ultimate window seat we welcome Martin Rich who is a sustainable investment specialist and the co-founder of FutureFit Business. A shorter version of this episode together with footage of this journey across Africa can be found on our website, ourwonder.space, where you will also find the previous 22 episodes. I start by asking Martin, from this seat to 150 miles above Earth, which city or country would you want us to fly over and why?

Martin:
I'm just loving the view from up here. I think the first thing you'd actually have to do is get me to turn around because I'd be spending so much time looking out at the stars. I just love looking up at the universe and to be able to do so from up here would be amazing but that isn't answering your question. I, there's so many places, but I would 0 in on the west coast of Africa and the little country of Sierra Leone. And specifically, right on the corner, a tiny little place called Bonta Island.

Martin:
That country has a special place in my heart in that it was the first time I went to a developing nation. I was doing some work with Christian Aid at the time and we went to visit a couple of the projects down there, specifically around peace and reconciliation. So this was just over 10 years ago. The horrific civil war had ended a good few years before that, but as you can imagine, the Hain and the horrors were still very real to a lot of people. And it was the first time I'd experienced a place that was so underdeveloped.

Martin:
I still remember landing in Freetown. I hadn't lived a sheltered life but I'd never been to a place where there was kind of that little, if that makes sense. Just 1 of those trips that completely changes your life.

Steve (host):
Martin, give us a glimpse into your life story so far with an emphasis on what you're doing currently.

Martin:
My background is in engineering. So I studied civil and structural engineering, which was great fun. So I'm a problem solver at heart. I love building things. I love building solutions.

Martin:
My wife would say I also like taking things apart, which is probably true. And I went into the city and became a financial engineer. So I actually spent the first 13 years of my career as an investment banker, working on the trading floors in London for JP Morgan, for UBS and for HSBC, which was great fun. Learned a huge amount about how the global financial system works and occasionally doesn't work, as we all saw, but got a real understanding of what makes business and economies tick, which I think was an incredibly important stepping stone. And then around 2008, 2009, the time of the subprime crisis, decided that I'd really had enough of the city and I wanted to use those skills to do something more worthwhile and discovered the then quite nascent social impact investment market space where London was a real leading light.

Martin:
And found my way to an organization called Social Finance that helped pioneer some of the early social impact bonds and all of that stuff. And found a wonderful place to bring that financial engineering experience and knowledge and combine it with using that for financing of social enterprises, of charities, of organizations that were trying to do some good to the world. So I had a great few years there, really enjoyed it. But then that made me realize what was wrong with the bigger system. And that if we were to really tackle the issues of climate change and social injustice and all of these types of things, actually, we really had to shift the mainstream flows of capital, we had to change the big companies, because they're the things that are really driving us off the edge of a cliff.

Martin:
And if we don't turn those around, we've got huge problems. So that was what led me to start figuring how do we show investors what the impact of any portfolio is on the planet. In every pension scheme, every institutional investor, every saving scheme has an impact on the world and on society, good or bad, and often some good and mostly bad, not deliberately, but just because of the way things work. And what I wanted to do was create a system that showed people what that actually looked like. So they could understand it, companies could start to manage and improve it, and investors could start to put their money in places where it worked better.

Martin:
And obviously there's a number of different types of initiatives out there doing similar things. I ended up co-founding this charity called Future Fit Foundation. So our vision is to create a future fit society, 1 that protects the possibility that humans and other life can live on earth forever by being environmentally restorative, socially just and economically inclusive. That's now where I spend my time. So we work with tiny companies up to enormous companies, small investors up to enormous investors, trying to change the way these companies behave, get them working within plantry and social boundaries, get capital flowing in that direction and trying to change the system as a whole as opposed to working down at the granular level.

Steve (host):
Where on earth is your place of reset or

Martin:
recharge? My place of reset and recharge is around the dining table with friends. No question Some good food good bottle of red wine And a chance to just get together and put the world to rights. I don't mind whether it's our dining table or theirs, but just that wonderful opportunity to stop and share is absolutely the place for me.

Steve (host):
What wonder of the natural world excites you the most?

Martin:
The wonder of the natural world that excites me the most are mountains. I love big big big mountains. The South Island and New Zealand is the most beautiful place on earth in my view because it's basically just 1 long line of amazing mountains going right down to these incredibly dramatic coastlines. If I could only take 1 more flight in my life and even that seems unrealistic at the moment then it would be there.

Steve (host):
Martin what is your story of hopefulness that's not your own about a person, business or non-profit who are doing amazing things for the world?

Martin:
My story of hopefulness actually comes out of the pandemic that we're in at the moment and whilst there's huge numbers of horrific stories around that, The piece that I think is amazing is to look at the vaccines and the development period, which would normally be on average 10 years. And because this pandemic was in the face of everyone, Governments and business and everybody came together, pooled their resources through everything at solving this issue as quickly as possible. And within the space of about a year, we've got vaccines that are now being rolled out around the world. And that is simply amazing. And I look at that and I think, wow, in 10 years, reduced down to 1 year, a tenfold increase.

Martin:
Now imagine that we look at all these other pandemics that we're facing of climate change, biodiversity loss, plastics, social inequality, etc. I think what if we treated those the same way? What if we took that same level of conviction to solve the problem, came together through all the resources at it, the UN have said these next 10 years of a decade of action for the SDGs, for the Sustainable Development Goals. So if we could take a tenfold increase over that decade, effectively we've got a century's worth of innovation and change that we could cram into those 10 years if we could find that same acceleration. Effectively, we'd have the same development then from the 1920s to today, over the next decade, thrown at all of these issues.

Martin:
Wow. You know, think what we could change with that. Listeners might be familiar with Project Drawdown, which is something a guy called Professor Paul Hawkin came up with, which was the 100 best solutions to climate change. So we could take a blueprint like that and put that to work and just tackle climate change. All these things coming together that we're seeing people doing this massive increase in social enterprises like B Corps, the big companies starting to announce that they're going to stop producing gas powered cars, they're going to start creating airplanes that are emission free, all of these amazing changes that are going on.

Martin:
The investment industry really beginning to try and embrace ESG and SDGs and all of that. And yes, there's lots wrong with all of that that still needs changing. But just think if we could get that same momentum, that same level of focus, and we know what the solutions to a lot of this stuff look like. We can do it. The question is, do we have the will and ability, the will and desire rather, but the fact that we can achieve something like this, that gives me hope that maybe, just maybe we can avoid these cliffs.

Steve (host):
Finally, as we prepare to re-enter, what insight, wisdom or question would you like to share with us?

Martin:
I think the insight I'd like to share is quite simply pursue your dreams. Don't sit there waiting to be asked or for permission. If you have a dream, something you want to achieve, a vision, then get out there and do it. Do what you can now and find the people who need to help you or who share that dream and vision who will journey with you on it. A little example just over 10 years or so ago, my hobby, 1 of my hobbies is sports car racing.

Martin:
I set myself the ambition of racing in the Le Mans 24-hour race. It's 1 of the biggest endurance races in the world. And I knew that nobody was going to come and ask me, nobody was going to come and invite me. I had to plot my route there. I had to find my way to go and do it as an amateur and get to that level.

Martin:
And I've been incredibly blessed and managed to do it twice in that time period. But what that's taught me is exactly that thing about pursue your dreams, drive towards, no pun intended, those goals. So hence when it came to thinking about setting up what became Future Fit Foundation, and I met my co-founder, I didn't have to think twice about it. It was like, I know this lesson, I know this story. That's the dream, that's the vision.

Martin:
I don't know whether it's going to work. I don't know if we'll get there, but there's only 1 way we're going to find out which is by trying. So to anybody who's listening, if you've got that dream, you've got that vision, just get out there and pursue it.

Steve (host):
More information about the work of Martin can be found at futurefitbusiness.org. In Martin's story of hopefulness, he talked about Paul Hawken and Project Drawdown which provides resources for climate solutions and you can find out more at drawdown.org. To join the Wonderspace community and share your own wonders and stories of hopefulness or to listen to the previous 22 interviews. The website is ourwonder.space I want to thank Martin for joining us on this Wonderspace and I hope you can join us next week for more wonders and stories of hopefulness.