04 June 2025 – How did you get involved with The Club of Rome?
When I joined in 2012, The Club of Rome was a pretty homogenous group. The co-presidents asked me to join to disrupt the comfortable nature of this. I’m good at that, so I joined. I was then asked to join the executive committee. We set about bringing in more people, and especially women from the Most of the World. The result now is that we have a lot of healthy debates and discourse in the community, a product of the amazing diversity of opinions. We’re now a growing and dynamic force that is being recognised, particularly in Europe, and more so now in Asia. The Earth4All work is showing that the organisation is considerably more relevant than it has ever been.
Where do you think The Club of Rome’s biggest impact and potential for change lies?
The world changes not so much because of facts and figures and data, but because of stories. This comes hard to someone who writes, who puts forth facts and figures and argues on the basis of evidence. But the world changes because of stories. Of all the achievements of The Club of Rome, the thing that it has done best, of late, is to bring on its communication team to find different ways of putting forth the facts and figures, in ways that reach most of the people in the world, those who live on story. Humans have always learned from story. From the earliest days when we would sit around a fire and tell stories to each other, this is hardwired into our brain.
Now we need to tell the story of the consequences humanity will face from ignoring urgent information about our planet. We need to say it in ways that people can hear. We can say it all day long, but if the people out there don’t hear it, we won’t have done any good at all.
What are you most keen on driving through your role on the Executive Committee of The Club of Rome?
Being re-elected to the executive committee at the last annual general meeting was a great honour and there are several agendas on which I’m focused.
One is to ensure that the organisation is financially sound – through fundraising and creating fundable projects. For example, Michael Pirson and I are working on a project to transform business education. Business degrees are some of the most sought after in the whole world. The people who get these degrees go on to run many of the big companies that are largely the reason the world is in such trouble. When they enter a business school, many want to make a positive difference in the world, and we want to find ways to communicate to them about the business case for building sustainability into their plans. Very few graduates of business programmes know about the financial value of being more sustainable.
The Club of Rome can bring its unique skills to this, and companies, foundations and individuals ought to be interested in funding this. The more we bring this kind of transformative funding in, the stronger the organisation becomes and the more successful our message becomes.
My second priority is ensuring that the staff is taken care of. We have an amazing team in the secretariat. We would be wise to ask their opinions more. They are the ones who are doing the work every day, and we ought to be in a regular conversation, including about the support they need.
Third, I think we need to bring more young people in as full members. It is incumbent upon us to bring in the best of the new talent. I’ve been trying to do that, recruiting people from Most of the World who are also young and accomplished and fully deserve to be a member of The Club of Rome. We need to be searching our networks for who’s out there doing really exciting work. Most of these people are a heck of a lot younger than most of us.
What has been the greatest learning from your experiences around the world?
For my sins, I travel the world a lot. Sometimes, I’m travelling for months on end. My greatest learning is that everywhere there are great people transforming the world.
At COP 16 on Combatting Desertification, I met Natalie Topa, the spark plug behind the World Food Programme’s half-moons farming project across the Sahel region of Africa. She works primarily with women. The men have largely left the villages to go to the cities to get work because their land has desertified. Natalie helps the women learn to hand dig half-moon basins that sequester carbon, collect the little rain that falls, and now provide green cover and food for their families. The region is being transformed where Natalie is working. I had heard about the programme but never before met her. At the Conference of Parties in Riyadh we met and are now finding ways to work together.
Even when Conferences of Parties ends in failure, I meet the people working on non-negotiated solutions, such as Natalie, or Helmy Abouleish from Egypt, who is supporting farmers through carbon markets. Companies can offset their impact in ways that lift poor farmers out of poverty. Or Vijay Kumar from India who empowers farming families through Community Managed Natural Farming. They’re all working on regenerative agriculture and are wildly successful. The group I am a managing partner at, Now Partners, is helping Helmy monetise the carbon he is sequestering through carbon markets. We are helping Vijay Kumar to share his work with other countries. The techniques each of them has developed has the potential to transform agriculture around the world. To work with these change-makers and bring them together to collaborate is why I travel.
What do you tell business leaders to encourage them to focus on sustainability?
Current and future business leaders need to understand that you can’t do business on a dead planet. At NOW Partners, we help leaders understand what we call regenerative value creation: ways to build value for individuals, shareholders, companies, but also for all the stakeholders, in a business operation. Doing this helps a company better serve its customers, the communities in which they operate and all life on the planet. This approach may sound like ideology, but regenerative value creation is a better way of doing business.
Companies that implement it will, in the end, make more money. They will also be part of solving the problems facing us. For example, companies that behave responsibly are the most attractive places to work, so the best talent wants to go there. When you have this workforce of great talent, if you allow them to help the company become more sustainable as part of their day job, they become more engaged. Gallup has shown that an engaged workforce is 24% more productive, 21% more profitable. If you implement renewable energy and use energy efficiently, you cut your costs. You’re not having to buy fossil energy and pay for it to burn it, creating more greenhouse gas emissions. If you aren’t using toxic materials in your processes, you are more insurable. You lower your risks and healthcare costs. These are material numbers. This approach that we call the Integrated Bottom Line delivers superior profits – no polar bears required – but it does it in a way that solves many of the existential challenges facing humanity now.
It is important to save nature for nature’s own sake, but it is also important to recognise that solving the climate crisis, protecting workers and preserving biodiversity all have a very real business case behind it.
What does a sustainable society and industry look like to you?
That’s been the question, going back well beyond The Limits to Growth, what is sustainability? We don’t really know. Karl-Henrik Robèrt, the great Swedish physician, set out to define sustainability and came up with four system conditions. In the long run, he’s probably right.
If you were to define a system that is truly sustainable, it would have to be that:
– substances taken from the Earth’s crust cannot systematically increase in nature,
– substances created by humans cannot systematically increase in nature,
– the biological integrity of the system cannot be undermined and
– it has to be fair and just.
But I was sitting at Davos with the head of a major mining company who said, “I don’t like sustainability.” When I asked him why, he said it would put him out of business. The Natural Step approach to defining sustainability is a nonstarter: we are not going to get businesspeople to sit down and engage with us if it puts them out of business. So, I don’t talk about what is a sustainable world, I talk about measures that move us in the direction of greater sustainability. I prefer the term regenerative. John Fullerton has laid out eight principles of what it means to be regenerative. In the now 50-odd years of doing this work, his is the best way I have found to set forth operating principles drawn from nature, from the way the universe operates. A pretty good definition of what’s sustainable is to have a system that is continually repairing itself, is self-healing and able to endure over time.
Meantime, if we are ever to reach a sustainable world, we must solve the existential crises facing us. The real focus of my work now is with a team of people from around the world building COPx, empowering people to solve the climate crisis from the bottom up in communities everywhere to implement the known solutions to the climate crisis in their own way. Since we launched in early February, COPx tripled its list of COPx Organisers. Join us at www.copx.global.
Juan Echanove
