Two climate risk experts show business leaders how to turn abstract climate exposure into hard financial intelligence — before it shows up as a loss.
GROWTH PILLAR: Sales & Revenue
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners / Asset managers / CFOs and C-suite leaders / Risk professionals navigating ESG and sustainability reporting
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: A clear framework for reading climate risk as a financial issue — not a reporting checkbox. Practical language for boardroom conversations about carbon exposure, stranded assets, and de-risking real estate and infrastructure portfolios.
Most balance sheets are missing something. That something is climate risk — and it's already costing businesses in real estate, transportation, and insurance more than they realize.
Ellza Malok is the Chief R&D Officer at Ampresta Inc. She brings behavioral research and data science to one core problem: turning complicated climate data into decisions leaders can actually make. Nidhi Nikum is an Advisor in Climate Risk Intelligence, with a deep background in banking, credit risk, and institutional lending. She helps financial organizations understand how climate exposure transmits directly through their balance sheets.
Ampresta closes the gap between sustainability reporting and real financial decision-making.
In this episode of Knack 4 Business, Ellza and Nidhi break down why carbon exposure is the risk most leaders never see coming — and what to do about it before it becomes a crisis.
Topics covered:
Connect with Ellza Malok on LinkedIn or at ampresta.com. Connect with Nidhi Nikum on LinkedIn. Follow Ampresta on LinkedIn or visit the Ampresta blog.
Special thanks to Suby Joseph, CFO at Ampresta, for making the introduction to the Knack 4 Business community.
This episode is brought to you by:
Canada Growth Network + GoHighLevel — Full CRM and membership community for growing businesses. $1 CAD first month. $47/month after. No contract.
Web Indexer — The smart chatbot built for the K4B site. Find episodes by topic, book meetings, and explore the archive.
Property Wizard by Gentry Learning — A real estate investing podcast built for Canadians who want to build wealth through property.
Ready to go deeper?
Visit Knack 4 Business:
Bernie (00:05)
sponsor mention. If you're thinking about building wealth through real estate and business assets, the Property Wizard podcast breaks it all down in plain language. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts,
search for the Property Wizard podcast, link in the show notes. Question of the audience. What are the biggest financial risks your business is ignoring has everything to do with your balance sheet? Most leaders know climate change is real. What they're still trying to figure out is what it costs them when they're doing nothing. Today's guests are helping organizations turn that uncertainty into a competitive edge. And they're going to show you, and us actually, exactly how.
So we have two guests here today, and Nidhi Nikum She spent her career at the crossroads of climate and finance. She's worked inside banking, energy, and infrastructure, helping organizations measure risk, find opportunities, and build a path to net zero that actually fits how they run their business. She's an advisor in climate risk intelligence, a company built to turn climate data into financial decisions.
She believes the next 70 years belong to energy. And that the companies who get ahead of that now will be the ones still standing later. When she's not reshaping how leaders think about risk, she's growing her own food on a community allotment. Like that. You can find her on LinkedIn. Her handle is NIDHINIKUM
all in one word, on LinkedIn. And our other guest is Ellza Malok She's the chief R &D officer at Ampresta Her background crosses behavioral research, marketing, and data science. Her focus is on one thing, turning complicated data into something leaders can actually use.
She studies how incentives shape decisions, especially when the stakes are high and the information is messy. She's the kind of thinker who questions the assumptions everyone else accepts. She recently reminded herself that curiosity does not kill the cat. The full saying is that satisfaction brought it back. That is how she approaches your work and you can find her at Ampresta.com and it's spelled A-M-P-R-E-S-T-A dot com.
or connect with her on LinkedIn at Ellza Malok E-L-L-Z-A-M-A-L-O-K. Ladies, welcome. It's a pleasure to have you here today. Thank you so much for being here.
Ellza, do you have a favorite quote or saying you want to share?
Ellza (02:22)
So my favorite quote is by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It's around, it goes, every individual is unique, is a unique expression of a collective conscious woven into the fabric of society. And I'm such a big believer in how we impact each other dynamically and how that informs information. And I've known this quote for over 25 years at this point and it still resonates.
before I even got into behavioral science. So it's one that kind of sits actually on my board because it resonates so well.
Bernie (02:58)
Nidhi how about yourself? you have a quote that just goes, aha, here we go.
Nidhi (03:03)
Not a quote, but yeah, I strongly believe that next 70 odd years are all dedicated to energy and energy alone. And there was once a time when information technology sucked away brains from all other sectors and brought talent under one roof. And what has that led to do is what we're seeing in AI. That was the starting point of bringing everybody into IT.
And I think now is a starting point of getting everybody in the energy sector, I would say, because the next 70 audience are dedicated to building all the fundamental new ways of not only generating energy from renewable sources, but also from low carbon energy and energy transmission distribution systems. And obviously the most important of all the battery storage solutions. And I think it's going to be a very STEM related field going forward.
So if any of your audiences are hearing this, would say build your career in energy.
Bernie (03:58)
Wow, battery storage, I think is going to be the big one. Creating it, but also keeping it too. What brought you from finance into the climate? How did that kind of those crossroads line up for you there, Nidhi?
Nidhi (04:10)
Thanks for this opportunity, Bernie. I've worked in banking in the special in the credit risk space, special in institutional lending. And that sort of teaches you a few things, you You learn a lot of horizon scanning for risk and emerging threats and opportunities. And I ended up also working in digital transformation within the financial services sector, which brought me very close to the data pipeline and how the data tells you the performance of a company.
And looking at data, it almost makes you a good soothsayer. And for banks, climate risk is not a separate category. It sort of manifests through what we hold on our balance sheet. So if you look at physical risk, which is damage from extreme weather events and transitioning risk, disruption from moving from the current set up to a low carbon economy, all these risks will transmit through
a bank's balance sheet, for example, through a credit market liquidity and operational aspect. And I am very close to it because I not only sat in the risk rules, but I also sat in the frontline rules within institutional lending. And traditionally within the financial system, risk is a very back office activity, whereas climate risk is not. It's a very frontline mandate because it all centers around making better decisions so that you don't build more risk on your balance sheet.
Especially that risk has got huge externalities because all of this you cannot control by sitting in one office in a location. So I see that same sort of vibes in the infrastructure sector as well. So any high frequency intense weather events like floods and wildfires, they cause immediate damage to the collateral that you're building in the infrastructure sector. It impacts your corporate supply chain.
climate risk is such a horizontal sector agnostic risk that it impacts you in a way that its impact should be read directly into the finances of any corporations. And that sort of felt like a very organic gold story for me personally, you know, that because I understood risk and I understood capital markets, it was very original for me to then start working in climate risk space so that
I can potentially change the climate change story. It does not feel like a good PR or a CSR exercise, but it really feels like addressing the biggest challenge that we face today.
Bernie (06:35)
Wow. I can totally appreciate it because, what is it? Some people have doubts about climate change still. And at the end of the day, if the light switch is not on in the room and it's dark outside, it's still dark, right? So it's the hard realities. Ellza, now you're at the other end of a spectrum where the finance is almost like the science,
Not that behavioral research isn't science, but usually, know, when you're dealing with people, there's kind of fuzzy logic almost embedded into that space. What brought you into this space and into the climate sphere at the same time? And I'm suspecting I kind of know, but you know what? Go ahead.
Ellza (07:17)
Yeah, it's always interesting because one would think that behavioral research has very little to do with climate risk. But behavioral research is how we all make decisions. It's the science behind how we choose whether or not to go into a decarbonization initiative or not. And I think from the collective group here at IMPRESTA,
We all have this mission of we need to move this because it's not only going to cost us a lot of money, but it's going to hurt our planet and hurt many, many people if we don't change. The issue is that the behavioral incentives aren't there. And that's really where my research plays and my background plays into it. It's blending. How do we get the information that from someone like Needy and then turn it into a behavioral incentive model for
businesses and those that are working in businesses to make those decisions every single day and translate that into something actionable that drives the behavior change that we really need.
Bernie (08:17)
Again, that's kind of figured that's where that was going. And it makes a lot of sense. So when I hear other people talk about sales, right, it says they ultimately comes down to an emotive decision at some point in time, even if you have hard facts, much like if you have a teenage male and you go, do you want the red sports car and you're 16? answer is, uh-huh, yes, I do. Right. So how do you...
How do you get that dopamine hit, but at the same time and convincing somebody that might not be, you know, their alignment's not in that space, their headspace, not that they're against protecting the environment against climate change, but their headspace isn't in there. How do you get them there? I mean, you can go hi your insurance rates are going up.
And, know, how do you do the reward mechanism? And it might, be oversimplifying that, but how do get them to kind of get into headspace?
Ellza (09:09)
So there's kind of an arc of patterns that most people go through. And it's different for the individual versus the collective. our model is definitely to get a collective to move. But you've got to move a handful of individuals. So you're going to get the early adopters, the ones that already buy into this to move forward. And once they start getting a competitive advantage in the market because they've de-risked, then you're like, well, what are they doing?
So it becomes less of conversation and this happens often that we see in sustainability. It's this corner, nice to have department that when push comes to shove gets defunded because maybe the numbers don't look right this year, et cetera. When you put in a balance sheet, it becomes a fiduciary responsibility to the leaders in an organization. It changes the way that the lens that you're reviewing it from to say, it's not if I wanna keep this plant running, it's.
is this plant at risk for the next earthquake that may hit and thus ruin it because we're seeing more natural disasters every day than we have in past years. So it flips the script on how you view it. So rather than making it a sustainability conversation, it becomes a financial duty to de-risk your organization.
Bernie (10:24)
One of the other things I find sometimes if you don't know, you don't know. so I think from your end of the spectrum, it's the, listen, you're basically, or better yet, your insurance company going, yeah, no, no, or you're paying a lot more, almost the value of replacing everything now. how does a person find out? Mother of goodness, I am, I'm putting myself at risk. you know, is there, is there yeah.
AI monster sitting in the background, you're to type in this stuff here, your coordinates on the planet earth. And, uh, this is what I'm doing for a living and outcomes. A your risk factor is whatever it is. Right. And you know, what starts the conversation going on now? How do I, how do I kind of, uh, rectify this?
Ellza (11:10)
On the individual level, there.
Bernie (11:13)
Well, yeah.
But if you're the CEO, for example, right. You're sitting in the boardroom or if there's a strategist working with your CEO, because that's not their gift. Right. And someone sits there and they function as the Oracle. Where are we going next? Right. How? You know, but they might not know a bit of information. They know there's something there's a gap. How do they fill that gap? Is it there is it a platform where they kind of plug a number in and plug in some background information?
Or is that where Ampresa comes into play?
Nidhi (11:43)
think there are significant gaps in the market, but before I talk about the gap, I think it's because a lot of people know the gap exists, but not all of us can solve for it. So it's important to mention that when you meet like-minded people and you form a tribe, you are at a better success rate of solving for a gap. That's you see the group here. Who are obsessed with?
Solving for the gap, it's very important. So before we go outside the world in this preacher mode, we have to be within our tribe, be sure of the key things that A, we are not romanticizing the problem itself. B, this is not a hypothetical problem. And neither it is an intellectual high for us. It's a very real and a very material problem. And we would like to make this climate risk
less abstract so that the business decision makers can consume it and make better decisions. And those decisions will reflect directly onto their balance sheet. So we endeavor to bring things together, which will start showing the impact that climate risk is creating on your balance sheet profit and loss and cash flow statements. We get very financially clear.
What we will do through this is we like to make the ground for tie for other sorts of mitigation efforts to land for the businesses. The businesses want to do the right things, but they're running in six months to one year financial engine, know, final returns, return on interest, return on investments. So we need to convert the information in that format that they can consume to let's, what I said, make the risk on their business
appear less abstract and more like a target number that they can do something with. So we are going to be the enablers to make that happen and not do what others are doing, which is creating more reporting burden, I would say. Right, Anzal?
Ellza (13:52)
Yeah, absolutely. think part of it is, I'll use a really good example of how our carbon performance scorecard operates in the real estate space. There's a lot of unknowns, even though the real estate space actually has a good chunk of data. It has financial data, it has insurance risk data because they calculate a lot of that, but it's all reporting. Nothing is put together in a financial model that an asset manager can be like,
These are the buildings I need to go work on because they pose the highest risks for deterioration in a particular area, et cetera. And then for us to give you a monetary number of some of those potential samings across insurance, across retrofitting, and just across de-risking that asset from getting undervalued.
That is where Nidhi's talking about it becoming tangible. So now you have the information in the language that you speak as an asset manager or a chief investment officer to say, okay, these are the priority buildings that perhaps generate me the most amount of revenue, but are eating up my profits because of X, Y, and Z. And I can capture some of that profit by doing these investments. And as Nidhi said, most of these organizations run in shorter periods.
So for us to give you short-term goals, mid-term goals, and long-term goals and prioritize those, that's really what our initial product, the Carbon Performance Scorecard does. It gives it to you to say, this is the language that you speak. We've just translated it for you.
Bernie (15:24)
having been involved in a corporate space and the annual budget and going through, so Nidhi, I totally understand what you're saying. What are we doing this year and what's the capital expense and operating expense and I'm not an accountant, but I learned pretty quick what works well.
Nidhi (15:41)
Yeah, those are the terms that's what we're talking about. And thank you.
Bernie (15:46)
You know, we did an ROI for a project to put solar panels on a roof of a building. And the CFO at the time, says, what's the ROI? What's the return on investment? Is it three years? It's 12. He went for it. We went forward with the project, right? It's interesting. At previous conversation, same building, someone suggested from a government agency, we should put a grass roof on top. And the VP at the time goes, yeah, no.
We're not doing that. Subsequently, I had a chat with somebody who does design, and she says, you know what? You never want to put grass on the roof if it has other implications on carbon, right, for the carbon offsets. So when you're doing a brown build or refit versus a new build, is there kind of an aggregator going,
I have these really great ideas. It could be the grass on the roof. And it might make sense under certain circumstances. And this was a 15-story structure, so it's way up there. People were joking with me going, yeah, you're going to have goats on the roof or what? The mow the lawn. Well, then we'd sell goat milk, right? Listen, I have all these great ideas. I want to do this project.
And I'm about to do either a launch of a new product or a launch of a new building, a new structure, a new series of structures, or even, even a supply chain. Is there something that can aggregate going, okay, that looks really good, but it's not going to help you at the end of the day. It's going to cost more to and cost more, not just money, but also an impact. Is there something that kind of, kind of a sorting hat that makes going, okay, these things come together well, like you don't make oysters and peanut butter happen typically.
when you're making a sandwich, right? Is there a kind of a perfect mix that blends things? I'll open to either of you.
Nidhi (17:30)
Yeah, no, that's a great question actually, Bernie. And this is what real asset managers deal with. What they currently have versus what they wouldn't build. Here's an interesting fact that by 2050, where all the built up world should have been decarbonized by, most of the buildings are already built. So they need to decarbonize process now in order to go to net zero by 2050. What does that mean? It means that you have annually
that much money to spend. So you need to prioritize which building retrofitting do you need to do first. But in order to open the pulse strings and start spending money, you need to have a baseline of how much does it take to decarbonize a certain building, which means do you even know how much is the current embodied and operational carbon impact or footprint of a certain building? When was the last time you did anything to upgrade any of the infrastructure which led to energy consumption?
and escape of emissions from the building. How is the water management and the waste management which contributes to a lot of these greenhouse gases. So those then become strong data points and our model will tell you which is the asset that you need to focus on when. So it sort of takes away that decision making around, I've got all these 120 buildings in my portfolio, where do I start?
Well, we'll tell you in the next three years, focus on these and the year after focus on those and all the immediate ones probably they're going to be stranded as six. hence try to think of getting rid of them in due course in time because one of the things that is parallely happen and as I know is great deal about this is the carbon risk on taxes increasing day by day.
how much a building produces from in terms of its emissions on embodied carbon and operational carbon has a direct impact on how much taxes you'll pay for keeping that asset in your portfolio. And that's strong reality. you obviously know that you have got only limited amount of funds to spend on retrofitting something. You need to plan it accordingly. And the platform allows planning capability.
Ellza (19:40)
Yeah. And as far as like specific tactics, you know, are there standard ones kind of like, I'm assuming you're kind of getting to that, like lead or any of these other standard practices. It really depends on the region, the type of building, the type of asset, et cetera. The beauty about the model is that you can kind of enter that information in and then you can say, this is what gives me the maximum impact in the period of time, as opposed to.
investing in it and then hoping for the best. You can kind of pre-plan as Nidhi's talking about and say, this is what I'm expecting and work with your chief sustainability officer or your sustainability team and say, we wanna, these are the things that we wanna prioritize. Let's find the best partners and providers for these services. And they may have new technologies that the system can then kind of say, well, the average is X, but this provider does better than X.
Now your numbers are better. it gives the people who are making these decisions the control and the ability to say, yes, these are the assets I'm working on. And then this is the blend of decarbonization solutions I'm going to put into it. And one building may look completely different from another, just depending on what type of solution is being embedded into it.
Bernie (20:55)
He said something interesting at chief sustainability officer.
So is that what you folks do? Then you become the fractional option of that? is that something that's prevalent? Do you see that happening a lot? Do you see only large corporations, but it's kind of like to other people, it's a gap that they don't know they have?
Nidhi (21:14)
No, that's generally a hat, sorry. That's generally a hat that someone wears in a corporate setup. If you start breaking it down to smaller setups, you won't even have a CSO, know, a Chief Sustainability Officer. You generally have a handful of people who are in the C-suite. we don't exclusively talk to CSOs, our product will platform it on. It will talk to the C-suite, more decisions makers like the CEO and the CFO.
Ideally, yes, the CFO should be looking into the outcomes of the platform. Chief sustainability officers have bigger sustainability mandate, but they may not always have the purse to spend the money. And our platform goes knocking on the door of people who are the money decision makers.
Ellza (22:01)
Yeah, it definitely enables the CFO to make the decision. And the chief sustainability officer is more around the how. So once you get to how are we gonna, we've decided to decarbonize this particular asset or our company as a whole, the chief sustainability officer has this wealth of knowledge on how to make that happen. But you've got to make the C-suite specifically, the CEO and CFO have to commit to it mentally first.
before you get into the how.
Bernie (22:30)
Okay, Ellza, how do you look at him go look longly and deeply into my eyes and follow my trance? How do you bring them there? I know you don't do that, it's because it's all you know, it's, it's the behavior, but how do you bring them into that into that light?
Ellza (22:48)
Well, I mean, one of the easiest ones is you make it part of their responsibilities. And if it's already an existing responsibility, like chief financial officers almost always have the de-risk responsibility, the risk mitigation responsibility. If this now says, I have a blind risk that I wasn't aware of before, because I thought it was just a reporting mandate to the government where I had to fill this out and that would, I, I,
That's a responsibility of the chief sustainability officer. But now I realize my influence impacts that. And I could save X amount of dollars or I could de-risk my organization that potentially saves me on insurance, helps me save some or recoup some of that profit. Now I have control over it because it's my fiduciary responsibility to make this organization as profitable as possible.
Or if I'm the CEO in that suite and I'm saying, well, we didn't invest in X, and Z, and now we're potentially missing a market.
that my competitors are already tapping into, now it becomes my responsibility. So that's really the heart of IMPRESTA is that it monetizes, it reframes how climate risk is viewed as not this, climate risk and decarbonization are always gonna be do good initiatives. There's just also a profitable initiative. And there's that blind gap that a balance sheet doesn't show.
Bernie (24:04)
As you're mentioning this and you're going, are doing a good thing or it's a profit in the balance sheet? Is there a ripple effect of other outcomes that are, you know, that may not be able, won't translate well? It'd be like when you're meeting somebody for the first time and you know, you can stand up and can stare at two faces and they'll go, hi, my name is, right. But if you smile, right, it helps, right? You know, there's a ripple effect that happens from the communication.
Do you find that there's a ripple effect when a company has done and going, hey, we can do this. It's going to help us with our finances and we're not maybe prevent the, you know, do the butterfly effect. We're not going to have a typhoon or a hurricane roll through here, but are there other more, you know, impacts that are, that surround the whole, the whole space of that business?
that aren't measureable.
Nidhi (25:02)
Yeah, I would like to definitely answer this one because, like I said, we need to make these abstract nature of this risk to something like a whole font of things, right? if I take an example of how does it start from place of the relationship between the GDP versus the greenhouse gas emissions and how does that impact that to a company, how it performs?
structural economic shift of reduction to greenhouse gas emissions can happen because emissions intensive industry needs to decide on two things. One is reduce the energy intensity and lower the carbon intensity. What does that mean in layman's language? You need less energy per unit of GDP. That's energy intensity reduction. And lowering carbon intensity is you use less
of the current fossil fuel based energy, which means you use better and cleaner energy sources. Why? Because the carbon pricing or carbon taxes, the strong levers that the countries are using to decouple the GDP with GHG emissions. And why do I talk about this? Because I take one of the examples from global north, which is Sweden. Sweden is using very ambitious policy around carbon taxes to support this decoupling effect.
So the countries are already demonstrating feasibility and increasing prevalence of this transition to the cleaner modes of economic activity. The companies cannot be left behind, right? So why do I say that? Companies operate in these countries, right? So how do they become more sustainable and get to their profitable goals? So in that context, now if we talk about energy, energy actually has moved from facilities management to the boardroom because it
directly impacts the financial performance of the company, the operational continuity of the company and the corporate reputation. If there's a certain price spike or there's a supply interruption, that can erode your margins overnight. And increasingly, both your customers and investors expect credible decarbonization strategies. So energy is no more cost project and things related
through any retrofitment that we're talking about in a asset is no more a cost project. It's a value driver. So what do the companies need to do? Companies in order to see the ripple effect of making these good changes, they need to build strong data visibility and have digital optimization of how much do they consume, when do they consume, and from what sources of, for example, energy do they consume. They need to build tangible
response mechanism to reduce the exposure to peak performance of pricing of around energy supply. Especially the energy intensive sectors, they have the leverage to build on-site energy production and battery storage. There's another interesting thing around just on the energy side of things that the gas prices are high and the gas turbine is under supply. So if you look at the horizontal scanning of this in fact,
change is coming. So organizations have to increasingly invest in some sort of digital optimization platforms and the ability to connect all the data points and generate solutions for them to maintain their operational independence and also meet at the same time, this tightening things around sustainability and carbon reporting requirements. And yes, I mean, people may say, know, it's not our core business, but I'll say businesses are doing it.
and they need to be shifting from this passive consumption to the active energy trading sort of mindset, treating electricity flexibility as part of a strategic asset rather than fixed cost. And when you start looking at, what is my strategic asset versus what is my fixed cost? I think a perspective on solving more of the things changes, and you get onto this bandwagon of decarbonizing if it helps.
Bernie (29:06)
Ellza I get the financial picture. I get the impact point. is it, is it the decision that people are making from a business perspective? it fear-based or is it a feel good basis? Which is, which is stronger, you know, at the end of the day, you know, what makes the bell ring the loudest? And you go, I see the light. Let's go this way. You know, or whatever it is, or the fresh wind.
Ellza (29:32)
Behaviorally, in businesses, fear-based or risk-based decisions are the ones that are made first and always kind of the knee-jerk reaction. It's one of the reasons why anytime, and you see this in B2B all the time, if you lead from an opportunity mindset, you're only gonna get those that have an opportunity mindset strategy.
But most businesses, especially if a CFO is signing off on something, they lead from a de-risk model because their shareholders require them to think that way. They are the last stop when it comes to financial failure of an organization. So that's always a component of it. It's the reason why we're starting with risk first and not opportunity. But most organizations today,
operate from a risk mindset as opposed to an opportunity mindset, especially the bigger ones where they've gotten big enough that failing is not really an option. We see that with spirit as they were too big to fail, then the problem just became too big for them to even handle. So those are some of the things that we bake into our behavioral incentives when we say this is the
This is the current performance core card. In the future, as our organization grows and our product line grows, we will work on like, here's some low hanging fruit of opportunity capture or value creation if you're in the private equity space. But we always are gonna start with risk because people make decisions on or have a reactive emotion to de-risking something, not losing something as opposed to gaining something new.
Bernie (31:05)
Polycrisis mode. Needy. Are we in a polycrisis mode globally? And what is a polycrisis?
Nidhi (31:13)
Bernie polycrisis means when things getting together and spoiling the party actually. there's obviously carbon emissions as a giant big problem. Then there's depletion of natural resources and nature as such. And then there is the third part of it, which is it's called cryo-polycrisis. The third one is the huge amount of pollution that we're dealing with.
You know how we talk about microplastics that it's everywhere. It's in the placenta now. So it's too intrusive and too abrasive. But this is also a very numerical thing to measure actually. what does that mean? Polyglycine means that there's a constantly so much entropy in the system because the system is failing and the resistance to maintain the status quo is so high, it creates more entropy. So we are in the center.
feeding loop, know, instead of not able to break out of it. And if you pick up on the uncertainty index currently, and there's an index which is monitoring the world, it's through the roof. It's through the roof last year, it's through the roof this year. So what does that mean? In such a world which is very hard to predict, and the externalities are too wide, I would again draw down to the same conversation around, when so many things are going wrong.
You have come back to the basics. Decouple. Decouple your biggest source of crisis, which is emissions, from the very economic activity that we do. Because we are a very energy hungry planet. What would never change is our desire to use more and more energy. But how we use that energy, from where does that energy come, has to change. And that can only happen if we use the levers of reduce energy intensity, reduce the carbon intensity.
so that the business operations can be free from this pressure. If you sort of lift the hood in a business situation, you can understand what underpins these operations to make them profitable. And that's the thing which we try to solve for. As I said before, to make the risk mostly, which is a bit of an abstract thing, we want business to address that which is not so abstract.
So we convert that risk into a favorable cousin, is less abstract, which is like, like Ellza spoke earlier, if I tell the business that the income is disappearing, we'll get the required attention, right? Because now there's a number, there's a source for it, and there's a target position to go to. Climate risk actually gives you a lot of levers around cost efficiency and avoidance of problems so that you can get out of this polycrisis mode.
You cannot continue to function as a business how you did for so many years and time is against us in this. But unfortunately the world has started solving for this problem from a reporting perspective. Now tell me one thing, if you're driving a car and this problem is in the engine and equate that to the core of the business, you would want to open the engine itself, but not look at the tailpipe, right?
And the tailpipe is a euphemism I'm using for reporting realm. We're telling the entire business world to start reporting. Yeah, that's great. You need to report, but before reporting, just want to do a tick box exercise. Go and measure the things which this, there are two things in materiality. One is what you as a business do create an impact on the world versus what the climate change is doing an impact on you as a business. That's the core essence of trying to understand.
what you should spend your energy doing. Especially in this conversation when you talk about in press time, we're not in the business of this archaeological fact-finding mission that we tell you what all is wrong in your balance sheet when you're already buried. We intend to give you calculated profits and losses based upon what we measure for you so that everything is very tangible. Otherwise, it's very difficult to get out of the polycrisis mode.
you will continue to feed the same systematic things which are systematically wrong, the foreseeable future. But you know what, Bernie, we all need to not just solve for big profound problems because it looks like a big challenge, but also because we need to become good grandparents. We need to live enough on the table for the future generations to have an affordable life on this planet.
and not just consume everything in one go the way we are running. And all of this lies back into how the business is running this world. We create so much of economic productive outcome and we are brilliant at doing that. And we can actually do it in a more profitable way, choosing the sustainable way. And to do that, we bring in the climate risk intelligence into your decision-making skills. Because once you see that target number, you cannot just close your eyes and say,
I'm against this, this is an ideological difference. It's not. That's a number on a sheet. You cannot not make anything about it.
Bernie (36:18)
Ellza, one of the things I'm understanding from Nidhi's comment, it's a legacy, right? So, you know, if I plant grass seed, you know, in spring, I'm bound to see it. And I have to cut it by, you know, mid-May, mid-June here in Canada. But if I plant an oak seed, right, the tree, it'll be long term and coming. And, you know, 80 years down the road,
it'll be there, it'll be, you know, assuming there's rain, there's, you know, sustenance and so forth. How do you get people to change that mindset? It can be the CEO, could be the CFO, it could be the C-suite, or it can be, hi, I'm a solopreneur, I'm starting. what do you suggest for them to get their mindset wrapped around that construct, that going, yes, I have an immediate goal.
And the ripple effect is, 20 years, 30 years down the road, I'm not leaving a stain. I'm leaving something that's growing.
Ellza (37:17)
Yeah, I think it's because our financial metrics are run on such a short term model. As Nidhi said, if you can bring that polycrisis analysis paralysis mindset down, and now you have a sense of control, the idea of looking for legacy becomes much easier because you're not tackling problem after another. If you are a business that has maybe multiple plants and
One got hit by a tornado like we know has been happening a lot here and I'm in Chicago. So the Midwest is riddled with them. Another one has been flooded because of a hurricane, et cetera. You're just dealing with crisis after crisis and you're constantly in that high cortisol level. Even as a person, you're just like, another thing. But if you have control over that, like we are going to do X, Y, and Z, these very tangible things, you actually now have the opportunity to think about legacy.
as opposed to right now where many of them are just in such a crisis mode that they can't think about legacy. It doesn't give you the option. It's the equivalent of a person being homeless and then they're gonna be like, what am I gonna do for my grandchildren? I'm just trying to think for today and how to get to a shelter. That's the level that we're trying to kind of work through. And we wanna create space for that legacy thinking as opposed to just having this
And a lot of sustainability initiatives do that. They have this wonderful, amazing idea of where the future could be, but it's very romanticized. And for us to get to tangible, we have to kind of crawl before we can walk, before we can run. And that's how our model is built is like, this is what you get today. And then in the future, you can think a little bit more midterm. And then after that, you can think super long-term. can think about,
where to plant the oak trees, but you got to the grass first. We've got to have some fertile area for you to think about as opposed to, know, fire after fire, especially if you are in that C-suite where we live in a very uncertain area, very uncertain times where you're constantly planning how to mitigate that. If you have one more lens to look at, like, okay, I'm going to mitigate these three pieces of risk.
through these solutions because I have a clearer understanding of how my balance sheet works with climate intelligence that gives you the space to think about it.
Bernie (39:39)
So a question to the both of you then.
Ellza (39:37)
So,
Bernie (39:41)
New technology, new ways of making things better. usually, depending where you're in the spectrum, if you're 15 years old and you grow up with a product as it evolves, you know the ins and outs of it. But if you've never grown up with it, or it has its own implications, whether you're talking about batteries, for example, Car batteries that are,
an EV vehicle, if it catches fire, that's so good, right? How do you get the people, whether it's the CEO or the solopreneur, okay, here's a new option, might be a good thing, but how do I know it's a good thing? And what do I look for for risk? Because it's maybe something I've never managed before. It's like if you want a gas furnace and you want a fireplace,
They both generate heat. They have risks attached to them, but they also have things you have to be mindful of. How do you bring that awareness into the choices?
Nidhi (40:35)
I think that's a brilliant question, Bernie. And I want to sort of step back and say, this is already happening. So just said, think bring the awareness to the folks to what actually the market is already doing. And I'll tell you, no grand nuggets around it. We need a lot of energy on this planet, right? And we need to go from 53 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions to net zero. Okay, that's the equation we are trying to solve globally.
Energy sector is the biggest emitter of that, more than 73%. And we use energy for five to six key areas, which is energy production itself. Making things, we use an electrical making, most of the things like cement, aluminum, plastic, and everything. Growing things like plants, industrial level animal keeping for meat production. Going around the place, which is transport. Keeping the ambience warm, cool, freezing, so HVAC and homes in industry.
We definitely need different kinds of sources, ways of production of electricity. And that's what we're going to do in the next 70 years, implementing them to solve the current crisis. But is it all doom and gloom? No. And why people are not aware about it is a very crucial thing. I do not know how to solve for this, but I can tell you that clean energy market is a now growth story. And I'll tell you quick numbers around
the patents being filed because I think all C-suits understand the number of patents being filed, right? And China is a leader here. Notably three things, State Grid Corporation of China is the leading filer in ESG and renewable energy patents and document. German company Siemens AG, which was the most renewable energy patents in the global power and utility sector.
And then there's a battery component, which is around a company called Contemporary and Bricks Technology, which has got filed more than 2,200 of the patents in rise of the battery technology. Then there's solar dominance. 62 % of the patents filed are in solar technology space. So that's like booming massively. And then comes wind energy, both onshore and offshore. Did you know that, and again, Diana holds close to more than 900
1000 worth of patents are being filed or being commissioned for a solution. And then there is Huawei and Seattle again filing lots of patents in the batteries and LED storage. So this engine is already churning so much outcome that it's ready, market ready for consumption. It's just a matter of time where this becomes a front page news. So I think the question we are asking here is why is this not a front page news? That is beyond my...
thinking here why it's not a brand for you, but that is a good news in all the things that is about doom and gloom. We are a very intelligent species on this planet and we are doing a lot of it. We protect and safeguard our future. How that comes out to the rest of the world is the thing that I deeply interested in. And hence building something that sort of puts all of that information, the heart of why you should solve for this is the game changer and some
one of the things that we intend to do through this platform.
Ellza (43:50)
And I think part of the process is as these technologies come to play, understanding the risk between having a solar panel that you have to maintain and your existing energy output or whatever mix of sustainable energy that you're producing is part of our benchmarking process. So in my role as the R &D, having a consortium of solutions where we can benchmark in their success rate.
is part of the process. So to say, you're one of X organizations that are already using this technology, because there are other areas in the globe, like China, that are far more advanced than us in many ways in terms of energy output, that we can use that information to say, here's where your benchmark would fall if you were to choose X technology versus another.
And having that mix, as I mentioned, everybody's going to have a slightly different mix because of their needs, their budget, the timeline they're expecting it to occur in. So it's going to be in the model, which is the more advanced solution that we're working on building. But that's the whole point is if you can compare, it's kind of like a credit rating. If you can compare where you fall in terms of everybody else, and then you know your three or four levers to improve
your credit. That's kind of how our model is going to work to say, all right, well, these solutions will increase by X, but they come with other risk, right? So you're never going to be risk zero because it's just impossible. But we will be able to provide you at least some information around perhaps this tool doesn't work in California because of X, Y, and Z, or it's fading out because of the mercury output or the cobalt leakage that may occur.
Just like every other innovation since the industrial kickoff, we're gonna have our learnings. The point is though, we are moving at a more accelerated rate that the learnings are gonna come a lot faster than they were 100 years ago when information was sent through Telegram.
Bernie (45:55)
or a carrier pigeon. Ladies, I want to say thank you so much to our listeners. Connect with Nidhi and Ellza at Ampresta.com. That's spelled A-M-P-R-E-S-T-A dot com. And if this conversation has tweaked your interest in how you can improve your business and how the overall operation can be improved. whether it's coming up from a
Ellza (45:58)
Yes.
Bernie (46:20)
opportunity mindset or a oh my gosh, oh my gosh, I got to cut corners in efficiencies and risk aversion, reach out to them. They can meet your needs in this particular space. I want to say a big thank you to Suby Joseph, who is the CFO and also involved with Ampresta and making the introduction between Nidhi and Ellza to the Knack 4 Business community.
So again, just to remind you, if you're looking for having success to something that's coming to you, whether you want it or not, you want to stay competitive, you want to stay active, reach out to these folks. ladies, thank you so much for being here. To reach us, we're at knackforbusiness.com. That's K-N-A-C-K, the number four, business.com. And use our chat bot to find out about more episodes. Just look for the question mark and just type in your questions or even book a call.