Dr. Andrew Steer
President and CEO, Bezos Earth Fund
Economic development, economic growth, is based upon capital, and capital is not only human fabricated… It's human capital as well, which is education and health and capacity that we have. But then it's also natural capital. It's all of the wealth of a country, including its clean water, its forests that create clean air, the minerals and metals and the fish in the sea – that is part of your capital stock.
Summary
This week on Leadership Matters, Alan was joined by Dr. Andrew Steer, President and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund. Over Andrew’s long career, he has worked tirelessly to share research and support policy changes and organizations seeking to combat the growing climate threat. Prior to his time at the Bezos Earth Fund, Andrew served as President and CEO of the World Resources Institute and held numerous positions with the World Bank, including special envoy for climate change and Director and Chief Author of the 1992 World Bank Report on Development and the Environment.
Over the course of their conversation, Andrew and Alan discussed Andrew’s upbringing in the United Kingdom, his undergraduate and graduate studies which propelled him into his career fighting climate change, and his work at the World Bank, World Resources Institute and his leadership at the Bezos Earth Fund. Together, they explore the many lessons in leadership that Andrew has learned over his fascinating career.
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
Guest Bio
Dr. Andrew Steer is the President and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion fund to address the pressing issues of climate change and nature in this decisive decade.
Dr. Steer joined the Bezos Earth Fund from the World Resources Institute, where he served as President & CEO for over eight years. Prior to this, Andrew served as the World Bank’s Special Envoy for Climate Change from 2010 - 2012. From 2007 to 2010, he served as Director General at the UK Department of International Development. This followed 10 years in East Asia, where he was Head of the World Bank in Vietnam and Indonesia.
Dr. Steer is a Global Agenda Trustee for the World Economic Forum, a Board chair of the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP), a member of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED), and member of the leadership council of Concordia.
Andrew was educated at St Andrews University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cambridge University. He has a PhD in international economics and finance.
He is married to Dr. Liesbet Steer and is the father of Charlotte and Benjamin.
Transcript
Alan Fleischmann
I'm joined today by an inspiring leader who has long fought to help protect our natural world and stave off the worst effects of climate change. Andrew Steer is the President and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, which disperses grants to help address climate change and help preserve the environment. Prior to leading the Bezos Earth fund, Andrew served as President and CEO of the World Resources Institute, where he helped to scale the organization's reach further around the globe and created numerous initiatives and projects to help advance the organization's mission. He has also worked at the World Bank, where he served in leadership positions and as a Special Envoy for Climate Change, and was Director and chief author of the 1992 World Development Report on Environment and Development. Over his career, Andrew has also served as Director General of the United Kingdom's Department for International Development.
Earlier this year, Andrew was knighted in recognition of his sustained contribution as one of the world's best-known practice-based leaders in global sustainable development economics with a focus on climate change and poverty reduction. I'm excited to have Andrew on the show today to discuss his background, his incredible journey, his career, his thoughts working to fight climate change and the many lessons in leadership he has learned along the way.
Andrew, welcome to leadership matters. It is such a pleasure to have you on.
Andrew Steer
Well, thank you, Alan, it's a great honor. I've listened to many of your Leadership Matters podcasts, and it's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.
Alan Fleischmann
I know we're going to have a hard time getting all that I want to get from you and have our listeners hear in one hour, but I do want to start with your early life. Tell us a little bit about where you’re from, where you grew up, what life was like around the house, a little bit about your parents as well, any siblings – the early Steer years.
Andrew Steer
Well, I come from the United Kingdom. Scottish mother, English father. My mother came out of a more rural, left-of-center area. She became quite radical indeed. My father came from a very comfortable English background. So, I had a leftist mother, a highly conservative father. My mother was a nursing sister. She crossed the channel two days after D-Day as one of the first medical teams that then followed through all the way to Germany. My father was about a couple of weeks later. They didn't know each other then. So, over the next year they made their way, along with the allies, to Germany, and then they, during the occupation of Germany, they lived in a little town called Étalons, and they met there.
They fell in love and came back and got married, and my father, who'd been in business, in discussion with my mother decided to shift. And he actually became a pastor of a church, and really devoted the rest of his life, and she her life, to a life of service. So, I had the incredible privilege of growing up with two parents who were devoting their lives to helping others, basically. It was not an affluent background, even though my father had come from quite an affluent background. They just chose a life that, to me, was inspiring. I had two brothers, I was the middle one. And so, I don't know about you, but I look back on my childhood with great gratitude.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that, and I love the fact that, knowing you as I do and always wanted to know you even more, the idea that your parents were the role models that inspired you to service, which is what your whole life has been about. It makes such good sense. It sounds like you had good parents, not just good parents, if you know what I mean. That's wonderful. And any early things that your mom did, when she was a chance I bet she was quite active in the greater world of community stuff, and any hobbies or interests while you were a young kid or in school, that kind of informed you, and informed kind of the, looking back, I bet you didn't know it then, but looking back and you realize that it actually had a great impact on you?
Andrew Steer
Yeah, my mother was somebody who had an amazing imagination. She would read vociferously. She loved the arts. She loved poetry, and indeed, her life early on, she went, she got accepted to university, Edinburgh University, but her parents couldn't afford to pay the fees, so she became a nursing sister and chose to go and work in the poorest area in Scotland in Glasgow, it's called the Gorbals, where she saw incredible poverty. And that's where she became, you know, I'd say a real socialist. Her father, who is a very wise man, he said to her, look, you've seen just one side of the story. Why don't you go down to London and work in medicine with rich people? And so, she got a job at Harley Street. Harley Street is the medical center of London, all private, and she found herself going from the Gorbals, where she dealt with the greatest poverty in the United Kingdom, to the greatest affluence. So, she actually had an amazing ability to navigate and love all sides of the political spectrum, even though she herself would always, always fight for the underdog. My father believed passionately in free markets, would always vote for the Conservative Party. My mother would always vote for the Labor Party. But they loved each other and discussed things till late in the evening, and it seemed to enhance, rather than hurt, their relationship. And my goodness me, we could do with a little of that, Now couldn't we?
Alan Fleischmann
I mean, they were such role models. They could actually disagree and debate and do everything one would want to do, but actually still respected one another.
Andrew Steer
Yeah, novel.
Alan Fleischmann
That's amazing. I can only imagine you being a young boy listening to them. Sounds like both your parents had an extraordinary interest in people, and it sounds like your mother had an insatiable curiosity with her books. I think if you look, as I'm talking to you now, our listeners don't see it, but you're, and I've been your home, you're surrounded by beautiful books, which I love. So, the Apple did not fall far from the tree when it came to being curious. I imagine that was a big part of your youth.
Andrew Steer
Well, I've been to your house too, and I know that you have exactly the same taste. So, yes.
Alan Fleischmann
And then, did you actually get involved and interested in the environment that young? Or is it when you went to university, when you started pursuing degrees, and you started to become more interested? You went to the University of St Andrews, and then you spent time in Cambridge if I recall too.
Andrew Steer
Yes, yes, yes. I went to St Andrews for two reasons. One, my mother was very Scottish, and we'd spent a lot of my childhood in Scotland. Second, I loved golf, and I really believed that if I went to St Andrews, my golf would become better. And who knows? Well, of course, you get to St Andrews and you discover that everyone on your floor in the dorm is better at golf than you are, because it attracts people who love golf. But I certainly did play a lot of it when I was there.
So yes, I had four wonderful years of a very, very beautiful city, very old city. It’s the second oldest university in the UK, 1415 I believe it was created, and this year, just two months ago, I went back. My son graduated from St Andrews and the principal was telling me, the president of the university was telling me that actually, the graduation ceremony has not changed for the last 400 years. So, he graduated with exactly the same Latin as I graduated some decades ago. So, it was really lovely to be back up there. And in those days, I don't know about your undergraduate training, but you couldn't graduate with a master's degree from St Andrews unless you took courses in logic and metaphysics and moral philosophy, and these were taken extremely seriously, and I give thanks for that, actually.
Alan Fleischmann
Are there mentors, I should ask you about high school too, were there mentors in high school and mentors at St Andrews that you connected with, that reached out to you and got to know you and kind of helped steer you a little bit?
Andrew Steer
Yes. I mean, it is interesting, isn't it, that if you ask people who, outside of your parents, were the most influential, as often as not, they will mention teachers. And both at high school and in university, there'd be, there would be that. And one of the puzzles is that, my wife works on education, global education, and one of the striking things is, if you do surveys as they have done in any country in the world, and you say to parents, what is the most important thing in terms of the future of your family and the future of this country, they will almost always put education at the top of the list.
And yet, if you actually look at the way we finance education, the way we appoint our education ministers, if you look at, for example, foreign assistance today, the amount of money spent on education has come way down. And so, my wife and I often have friendly debates where, you know I'm talking about the need for money for climate change and technology, and she says, yes, but you don't get any of that if you don't invest in education. We need skills to the green economy. And as I look at my childhood, my character was formed primarily by my parents, but through teachers and those that I had the privilege of being in tutorials with, and then I went on to Cambridge, where I was a tutor myself. And in the Cambridge system, as I'm sure you know, you have lectures, but more important than the lectures are your tutorials, where you'd have maybe three or four students meeting every week for a couple of hours with their tutor. And it was thrilling to see, you know when it was my turn, if you like to be the teacher, to see sort of young, brilliant minds open up and learn how to write and learn how to argue in a persuasive, evidence-based way.
Alan Fleischmann
You know, the way you describe your parents and the way you're describing university life is at the very core, exactly what this world needs right now, what this country needs, but actually, it's universal. This opportunity to actually take your curiosity, imagine the unimaginable debate like you're prescribing your parents disagree, you know, have major, major discourse, but know that we're trying to find a commonality if there is one, and if there isn't, to respect the other point of view. Kind of build the empathy muscles a little bit. It sounds like you were exposed to that from day one with your parents, and then you had the great fortune of having it in university and then in Cambridge as well.
You know, we wonder sometimes whether in this technological AI-type world, we need higher education, and I bet you'd agree we probably need it more than ever, actually.
Andrew Steer
I think we do, you know, and there's a lot of talk now about the role of AI in education. And my wife has been working on this project called High Tech, High Touch, and for too long in too many schools, the teacher has been, if you like, standing there teaching things that, actually, a computer could teach you. But there is no replacement for the human touch. And you know, and they like to say, we need to go from the teacher no longer should be the Sage on the Stage, but rather the Guide By Your Side. And you know the kinds of things that AI can do, they can not only teach you to know your multiplication tables, and teach you the dates and history and so on. AI can do much more than that. It can actually trace you year by year by year so, if at the age of 14 you discover you're struggling, AI will be able to say, well, actually is because at the age of eight, it was this particular sort of insight that you failed to understand. And it will be able to really help you retrofit and come up.
But none of that is to suggest that the teacher is less important. The teacher is more important, the teacher can provide things that AI can never provide, but the AI can free up some of the time, so the teacher can do what they ought to do. And one of the privileges, and I realize it's a huge privilege, because, for example, education in places like Cambridge or St Andrews or the top universities in this country, you know, enables an incredibly personalized type of education, which is expensive, obviously, even although in my day, so few people went to university that it was all free. I mean, it did not cost me one cent to go to university through my entire to my entire career, and now, of course, it's all very, very different.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. I love this, the idea of the guide and stay in that nurturing and important steering role. I mean, it's obviously in your name, but I like the steering role that you're describing as well.
Anything you want to mention about your time in Cambridge? Did you go right to the University of Pennsylvania after that as well?
Andrew Steer
Well, actually, when I went from St Andrews to the University of Pennsylvania where I started my PhD, and then I went to Cambridge, yes.
Alan Fleischmann
Penn must have been a big decision too. I imagine that –
Andrew Steer
Well, I was very keen to go to the United States for graduate school, because in economics, that was the place where you really wanted to go. I'd started my undergraduate work, economics and geography and geology, because I really cared about the natural world. But then in graduate school, I went entirely into economics, and that's where I did my PhD. And yes, I mean, it was an incredible, you know, shock to the system to go from this, almost a village, small town on the eastern coast of Fife in Scotland, to Philadelphia and West Philadelphia. Pretty tough place in those days. It's certainly gentrified a lot since then, but it was an incredible experience, wonderful, wonderful experience to come to this country. You know, like many European men, it was, was an American girl that actually was one of the reasons I wanted to come over there. That didn't work out. But I'm still here, and next month, actually, my wife and I will become American citizens, so it's taken me a long time, and I was in Philadelphia, brand new in 1976, the bicentennial.
Alan Fleischmann
Wow.
Andrew Steer
And on the Fourth of July, went down and saw the Liberty Bell. And you can imagine, President, I guess it was President – would it be President Ford, was there. And then the next day, the Queen of England came, and it was – to see the Queen standing next to the mayor, who's a guy called Frank Rizzo in those days, who was a strange guy, but it was so nice to hear the conversations between the Queen of England and the Americans, and that was a thrilling time for me. And then, as a totally new to this country, on the sixth of July, my two brothers and I got into my old Chevy Impala, which I just bought, which was already more than 10 years old, and we drove out to California. And it was so cool. And everywhere we went, you know, we were so much in love with this country, and that's why I'm still here.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. I love that, you know, they're going to – I'm on the board of the Museum of the American Revolution, which is in Philadelphia, and the country, the United States, will be celebrating its 250th anniversary in two years, and they're already getting ready for it. This idea of, like, how do we tell the story of this country? And you will be a US citizen. So, we have to find ways to draw you in. Although you've been loving the country ever since. That's amazing.
Philadelphia had to be a big, big shift there too, and is that when you started to, like, you're pursuing economics, obviously, you got a doctorate in economics and finance, had you thought about the World Bank at that point? Was that something you were thinking or were you already, you weren't sure you would say at that point, I imagine when you first got there, but –
Andrew Steer
No, the World Bank had always been a place I wanted to work because, I mean, back to the kind of values one's parents instill, I mean, I was interested in economics because I did actually feel excited about the huge challenge of economic development. I mean, the question was, you know, there are so many theories about underdevelopment and I just found this absolutely fascinating. What would it take to accelerate the rates of economic growth in poor countries, and back then, you know, they had all kinds of theories, stages of economic growth and they even had this notion for South Asia. It was called The Hindu Rate of Growth. And they were even, even top Indian economists would talk about the Hindu Rate of Growth. Well, you know, the culture is such you can never really grow faster than 3%. Of course, it's total nonsense.
So, I just found this whole field absolutely fascinating. And so ,I was determined to learn the skills that would enable me to engage in issues of poor countries as well as rich countries. And so, my PhD was actually more in its own international economics, international trade, monetary policy and financial policy. So, my PhD had nothing to do with the environment. And it was, in fact, it was later when I joined the World Bank as a macroeconomist, and very early on, I pleaded with them I wanted to move to Indonesia, and they finally let me.
So, I was an economist out there in Jakarta with the then president of the WorlD Bank, and I was responsible for really analyzing how they were growing. And actually, Indonesia was growing very rapidly then. It was growing about seven and a half percent a year, and poverty was coming down, and President Suharto was, turned out that, you know, he had his weaknesses to say the least, but the economy was growing. And I was analyzing this, and I came to the conclusion that, actually, about half of the growth in Indonesia was simply that they were depleting their natural capital. Cutting down their forests, but actually pumping out oil and gas, which, nothing inherently wrong about that, but it's something you should be aware of.
And so, there was one occasion when the president of the World Bank, who had been the CEO of Bank of America, he came out there, and I was with him. I had the privilege of going to some of the meetings with him, and we met then the Minister of Environment for Indonesia. And Indonesia was the only developing country in the world that had a Minister of Environment who was in the cabinet. And this minister, he became a good friend of mine. He's now 97, his name's Emil Salim, and he met with the president the World Bank. He said, Mr. President, he said, tomorrow you will meet the entire cabinet, and President Suharto. I would be very grateful to you, Mr. President, if you would, as the head of the World Bank, if you could say how great it is that Indonesia has a Ministry of the Environment and that the minister sits in the cabinet. Could you say that?
And the president of the World Bank in front of me said, he said, I'm afraid I couldn't do that, because we're a development institution. We are not an environmental institution. If you want someone to say that you should go and talk to the World Wildlife Fund or someone like that. And that was one of those sort of aha moments. I'm sure, Alan, you've had them in your lives, where suddenly you realize there is something seriously wrong with this picture, the fact that that he totally separated the idea of natural capital and the natural environment from anything to do with economic development and poverty reduction was ridiculous. It suddenly came to me. And so, it was at that moment I decided, I now want to sort of devote my modest intellectual contributions moving forward to the issue of integrating environment and economic development.
Alan Fleischmann
That's amazing. Because you could have had the opposite reaction, which would have been going around this, that trend of the conversation to go the opposite direction and say, you know, it's too separate, we're not going to engage in that area. But you saw it differently, which is so important, because I imagine it created – you were the first director of the environment or the environment department there at the World Bank –
Andrew Steer
No, I actually wasn't. What they did. They realized there was something called the, I guess the Brundtland report had just come out, where the whole idea of sustainable development was coined. And so, the World Bank said, we better bring environmentalists in. So, they brought this well-known environmentalist from New Zealand in, and brought in some environmentalists. And after two years, it was clear they were making no progress whatsoever because they couldn't talk the language of the World Bank, which was very much an economist’s language and an engineer's language, and these people were talking a totally foreign language. So they came to the conclusion that actually, you need to be much more sophisticated if you want to change an institution like the World Bank. And so, it was later on that I was asked whether I would lead the sort of the, if you like, the sort of intellectual process.
Every year the World Bank writes a major report called The World Development Report. And the Rio Earth Summit was coming along, and they asked me if I would build a team and write the, sort of the first ever report that the World Bank had engaged in on the links between economic development and the natural world. And so that's what I did.
Alan Fleischmann
The WDR, the World Development Report, right? That was a game-changer every year. I mean, I remember the story of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates becoming first connected. If I'm not wrong, it was, it was that Warren Buffett sent Bill Gates a copy of the World Development Report, yeah. And said, you need to read this. That was even before the foundation, The Gates Foundation which became the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I think was still called the Bill Gates Foundation at that time, but I think that's what got them talking about philanthropy in a really strong way, and what he could do with his foundation.
But I also remember the Rio Summit was huge. There's never been a summit that was more groundbreaking, I think, than that summit. Certainly, it was the first of its kind that brought people from around the world to address these issues. And your report was a big blueprint, I would argue for that summit. And I'm forgetting the name of the gentleman who was the most public person at the Rio Summit for the Bank –
Andrew Steer
Probably Maurice Strong. Maurice Strong
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, exactly
Andrew Steer
Right. The letter, yeah.
Alan Fleischmann
I remember, and he held the report in his hand. I remember there's an obituary somewhere of him holding the report in his hand. That was the first report that I had ever read for the World Bank, actually, just so you know, and they looked at it, because all these stories came from that summit.
Andrew Steer
Well, that's fair. Thank you. It was very interesting. And also, it was actually, to see the heads of state walk up and sign the Convention on Biological Diversity, and then the Convention on Climate Change. And whilst there was a lot of kind of politics involved in rich and poor and who's to blame for environmental damage kind of thing, a lot of that in terms of right and left, it was not the same political issue.
So, for example, it was actually Margaret Thatcher, the right-wing Prime Minister, who said, we, the United Kingdom, must lead on climate change. We must invest in the Rio Earth Summit. By the time it came along, she was no longer Prime Minister. I guess John Major was, but it was a conservative party that said we must invest in climate change. and there was a real sense there of sort of moral purpose, in a way that we sort of have lost, and I'm hoping we might be getting it back now, that there really was a sense that the world could be better. And of course, the report that I was responsible for was really designed to show that you didn't need to sacrifice economic development if you took the natural world seriously.
On the contrary, economic development, economic growth, is based upon capital. And capital is not only human-fabricated capital in the form of roads and factories and bridges and airports. It's human capital as well, which is education and health and capacity that we have. But then it's also natural capital. It's all of the wealth of a country, including its clean water, its forests that create clean air, the minerals and metals and the fish in the sea – that is part of your capital stock. And so, in a way, with a colleague, I wrote a short book entitled Four Types of Capital, where there's sort of human-made capital, which is what everyone thinks about, human capital, which is education and health, natural capital, and then social capital. Because part of the department I ran was not only environment. We then added social capital, because, turns out that the work of people like Robert Putnam at Harvard and many others have shown that, actually, the way you and I relate to each other, Alan, the way you and your amazing organization works, that is social capital that actually makes the economy more efficient than it would otherwise be. So it's important if you care about economic development, if you care about poverty reduction, you've got to care about all four kinds of capital. And of course, economists have traditionally focused just on the first which is, how many factories, how much infrastructure sort of thing?
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, I love that. Goes back to that Robert Kennedy quote about everything that matters is not in the GDP, or that at the time the GNP, you know, with all the things we care about and never counted. I mean, I love that, if I mean, if I want to read your book now, I could read your book now. It’s probably evergreen.
Andrew Steer
I hope so.
Alan Fleischmann
What year did you write it?
Andrew Steer
That would have been about 1996 probably, something like that.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, because when you think about it, when we're talking now about, how do we fix capitalism, and if you look at it through the four lenses that you just did and we actually had to deploy capital, and look at it as all the four capitals, if you will. And then how do we also deploy? Then you get into how we attract talent, how you mentor talent, how you deploy capital, maybe through technology even, it's very important today in a way that can improve our natural resources and improve our communities, rather than deploy capital that depletes us or does nothing for the greater welfare of our community. The four capitals probably, you should do, I would argue, should do an op-ed that brings it back to life. Now, because I think we have an urgency in our country, and globally, to really have people understand that capitalism can work if you look at it like you just did.
Andrew Steer
Well, yes indeed.
Alan Fleischmann
The WDR, though, was a huge thing, and what you did in Rio, you and colleagues in Rio, it was the first time you really saw people from public life, from public sector, from private sector, and from civil society coming together around a topic. From what I can imagine, obviously, there was always Davos, but that's different. This was really about a mission, a principled mission, that we had a responsibility and even an urgency to deal with the environment and development together and bring leaders together in an uncommon way. And I think, and I think that that strikes me as being a first, or certainly a first of its kind at the scale in which it was and all it can, so kudos.
So you were already committed by that, I guess at that point you were all in.
Andrew Steer
All in, yeah.
Alan Fleischmann
And today, people still refer to that, don't they, with all the summits that have come in, the COPs and everything else that has followed, people still talk about Rio.
Andrew Steer
Oh, they do. And interestingly, you know, subjects go up and down. in the five years after Rio, the issue of biodiversity was more important than climate, and huge efforts to protect. We then lost our way a bit on biodiversity, and now it's quite encouraging. We're seeing a lot more attention now to nature, which is good. And of course, there's a real link between nature and climate change. So, protecting the forests is essential to protect life on Earth, but it's also essential to address climate change as well. I mean, we need to sequester carbon in the trees and the soils and the bushes and the crops.
Alan Fleischmann
And you left the World Bank to go to the UK, and then took on the UK Department of International Development, then went back to the World Bank, right?
Andrew Steer
Well, first I left the Environment Department to move out to Asia. So, I ran the World Bank programs in Vietnam and then in Indonesia. So, I spent 10 years out there. And I was very keen to sort of try and put into practice some of these ideas, and were thrilling times. It was at a time of the East Asian economic crisis, so a country like Vietnam, which was somewhat insulated from that, was going through sort of huge changes that were that were very exciting.
When I got there the economy was totally statist. They didn't really understand the value of procurement, competitive procurement. So, we worked with them on that. They didn't have a law for the private sector, so we worked with them on that. They didn't have a trade deal with the United States, so we worked with them on that. And it's wonderful to see, for example, when I got there, the total number of rural people that had electricity was like 28%. it's now 99% I mean, no country in history has managed to electrify or reduce poverty at the pace they have and the reason is, you know, common sense, good economics and following market-based.
But obviously for me, given my interests, what was also encouraging is sort of a recognition that the beauty of nature, you know, meant a lot. You might assume in a socialist country they would be less interested, but actually they weren't. So, we were able to do some wonderful things there.
Then went on to Indonesia, which had just gone through a revolution. Just after being in power for 30-odd years, President Suharto was summarily kicked out of office, and so there was this wonderful spirit of starting afresh, with a huge emphasis on sort of governance reform, anti-corruption. A difficult period, but very, very exciting. So East Asia is a region that I care a lot about, and I will be going out again next month to Indonesia.
Alan Fleischmann
And how many ministers of environment are there in the world?
Andrew Steer
Well, I suppose now every country has a ministry of environment, although they're not all in the cabinet. But back then, Indonesia was the only one of the developing nations.
Alan Fleischmann
So when you left, what was your position? Were you running East Asia when you went back to the UK for a period, and then went back?
Andrew Steer
Yeah, then the British government sort of asked whether I would go and serve my own country for a while. And so it was really a privilege, because the British Development Ministry, then it was called DFID, the Department for International Development, you know, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had come into office and they basically said, look, but they were one of the very few that had a really standalone cabinet level Minister of Development, and very generous. And while I was there, they made the 0.7% of GDP allocated to ODA, Official Development Assistance, in law. So, yeah, it was, it was a very, was a very exciting time to be there, the British government in those days, under Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown, every year, the 24 different ministries were ranked, and they had this incredibly detailed process over six months of assessing which ministry was the most effective in delivering what they're supposed to deliver. And for five years in a row, it was the Department for International Development, and so we were able to attract the best young people. And so it was a very exciting time.
Alan Fleischmann
How long did you serve as the Director General?
Andrew Steer
Oh, it was just three years. And then I got a call from the then president of the World Bank, Bob Zoellick, who has become a good friend, who was a great guy. He asked me whether I would be willing to serve as a Special Envoy for Climate Change at the World Bank. And I felt this was an opportunity that could make a big difference. So I, also by that stage, my wife, who's Belgian, had never lived in the United States, albeit she'd been a student for a while at Georgetown University. My kids had never lived there, even though they were born here in America. So, I thought this is probably the best opportunity I've got to take the family over and Americanize them, and there we are. We're still here.
Alan Fleischmann
And you went, you worked with Bob Zoellick, and you were the first Special Envoy for Climate Change. I think at the Bank, yes?
Andrew Steer
Yes. I don't think the World Bank had ever had a special envoy for anything before, but it was a great job. And because it was just after the failure of the big climate meeting in Copenhagen, if you remember, where they thought they'd get a deal, the whole thing fell apart. So then working first with the Mexican President, Felipe Calderón, working with him, he was hosting the next meeting. Then the South Africans took over and working with all these guys, and then working to sort of build a coalition of commitment, was very exciting, yes.
Alan Fleischmann
And then what made you decide to go to the World Resources Institute, which is, I think a lot of people I know you for so many different things, you know, I remember different stages of your career at the World Bank, because your roles were always so external facing. But, you obviously spent a lot of WRI, and that's where a lot of people, I think, knew you for a long time, because you, I would say, you kind of reinvented it. It already had an amazing purpose. It always had a great mission, but you kind of reintroduced it in a way.
Andrew Steer
Yeah, the World Resources Institute was an institution that I knew and loved. I'd seen it over the years. It was created at the end of the Carter administration when the Reagan administration came in and Gus Speth, who'd been, I guess, head of the Council of Environmental Quality, realized there was no sort of Think Tank, Do tank that focused on international environment and its link with sort of development. And so, when they asked me to become the president there, it just seemed like a very good opportunity to work on the same subjects, but from a different angle. I was intrigued at that stage in how governments, I worked a lot, obviously, with governments, they are absolutely essential. I worked a lot with the private sector, but civil society and its role play an increasingly important part of the jigsaw puzzle that is required to make success. I was really interested to see how we could grow and increase the influence of WRI. And so it was really – I had nine years there, and really, really loved it, and we grew a lot. And it was, again, I mean, I've been blessed to work in interesting times.
Alan Fleischmann
More challenging times each year.
Andrew Steer
If you're in this line of business, you sort of live in constant sort of cognitive dissonance, because, on the one hand, we're all like lemmings heading over a cliff. You know, if you, if you look at the data on climate change, if you look at the data, the rate at which we're losing nature, we're losing species 1,000 times greater than the natural rate. We're losing species more rapidly than we are identifying species, and so too on climate, you know, we still are not where we need to be. So on the one hand, you live in this sort of feeling of, you know, incipient despair. On the other hand, it's unbelievable what's going on in terms of good things.
I mean, when Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House, they were very expensive. Those same solar panels today will cost 99.6% less than they did then. We've seen this massive cost parity where green energy is now, on 80% of the world's surface, is cheaper than fossil-based energy. And so to battery storage, incredible technology. There are also ideas coming along that are new and different and so, on the one hand, we live in this state of incipient despair. On the other hand, this sort of thrilling exponential positive progress.
And so, in a way, it's a kind of, we do a lot of work now in the Bezos Earth Fund on what we call tipping points. And there are, there are two kinds of tipping points. There are really bad tipping points. And in climate change, we're reaching the stage where, if temperatures rise any further, you're going to find and we lose more forests, you're going to find an exponential downward path. You're going to release trillions of tons of methane as permafrost melts. You're going to change the entire climate of Latin America if you cut down more of the Amazon. Those are. Negative tipping points. Those have been studied quite a lot. But more exciting are positive tipping points, which is when you get that kind of aha moment, when suddenly, you know, smartphones in Africa totally bypass traditional phone systems. That's a that's a kind of a positive tipping point. We're seeing that in electric vehicles. We're seeing it in battery storage. We're seeing even in new food systems, for example. And so, in a way, it's sort of a battle of positive versus negative tipping points. So it's practically exciting, but it's also intellectually, very exciting.
Alan Fleischmann
Also, if you believe that humans who make problems happen can also solve problems, yes, great. Combination of folks coming together and great ingenuity coming from all that, it does give you some optimism.
You're listening to leadership matters on SiriusXM and leadershipmattershow.com. I'm your host, Alan Fleischmann. I'm here with Andrew Steer, the President and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, and we're discussing his extraordinary career and some of its insights along the way, which have been pretty amazing and fascinating.
Let's talk about the Bezos Earth fund. You went over as the president and CEO, you went over as the inaugural president and CEO. What made you do that? Obviously, I can imagine creating something at the scale in which you're doing, it must have been so attractive, like you've been now there, I guess three years there, is that right?
Andrew Steer
Yes, yes.
Alan Fleischmann
You know, tell us a little bit about it. What drew you over and, you know, a little bit kind of what you just described, you know, the challenge is urgent. I imagine all that you just described, not just for Latin America but for the world, will be upon us. And then already is. And then, I guess, a sense of optimism. I imagine that there's something we can still do.
Andrew Steer
Yes, well, look, I mean, Jeff Bezos made this extraordinarily generous commitment, ten billion to be given away as grants for nature and climate this decade. You know, not setting up a foundation that will last 100 years, but let's get on with it, this decisive decade. And I think a lot of us, when he made that announcement, were inspired about just how powerful that could be. We will need trillions of dollars to solve the problems, but overwhelmingly, that will need to come from the private sector. But actually, there needs to be some derisking, there needs to be some grant finance that can create the environment in which much bigger sums of money, and ten billion dollars was certainly by far the biggest commitment that had ever been made for climate and nature up to that time.
And so Jeff and his now fiancé, Lauren, asked to talk to me and maybe six or seven other CEOs in order to get ideas of what he might spend the money on. And I was so intrigued talking to them. I mean, such a sense of inquiry and interest and potential for what we might do. And so that first conversation was nothing to do with who would be the president of the fund. It was to do with, do you have any good ideas? And it's thrilling to meet leaders like that, who are genuinely interested in drilling deeply on tough issues. And so then, you know, maybe a couple of months later, I got a call to ask whether I'd be interested in this position. And so that's how I'm here now. And yeah it's been three years, and so we're having a good time giving money away. Sounds like it's very easy. It's easy to do badly, it's difficult to do well. And I hope we're doing it well, I believe we are.
We're doing some pretty interesting things, and we have to ask ourselves, because we are larger than others, are there particular things we could do that others can't? And one of the things that we do that would be hard for smaller charities to do is we aim at really difficult problems, and then we build teams, and we work as a team together. So, for example, I just came back two days ago from a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa and Mozambique. And in Congo, we have decided to make protection of the Congo Basin Forest, which is the most threatened and most valuable forest in the world right now, we've decided to make that a big focus for us, and so we got 10 of the best institutions on Earth and we said, look, we will finance each of you, and you have to do what you're really good at, and we'll agree with what you do.
But, in addition to doing your own work there, the 10 of us work as a team, and if we work together, we'll be able to engage at the head-of-state level, we’ll be able to engage at the global level, we'll be able to share information, we'll be able to egg each other on. And so, we just met with those partners that we have in Kinshasa. And it's thrilling, actually, what you can do if you try and do things in a different way, if you try and really wrestle with issues so that you make the whole of the effort more than the sum of the parts, and that's what we try to do.
And we do the same in various other places. So, for example, we're very active in tropical Andes and in the Amazon basin. We're very active in oceans in the Pacific. And then we do a lot of work on energy and various other things as well. And in each case, we try and make every dollar that we give away as a grant, we try to make it do two things. The first thing, it has to do what it says on the tin as we’d say, and in other words, if you say you're going to do X, you do X. But then, in addition to that, you've got to be part of creating a movement, because having pilot successes is nice to do, but that won't move the needle the way we need it. So, everything we do needs to create a flywheel and then build momentum so that after a while, change becomes irresistible and unstoppable. And that's what we're aiming for in everything we do.
Alan Fleischmann
That's amazing. Actually, I love that. You know, you do the thing you promise, and then the ideas go well beyond it.
Andrew Steer
Yes, yes, yeah. That's very well said, yeah. Do what you say you're going to do, then we'll talk. Then we really accelerate. Yeah, that's exactly right, yeah, well said.
Alan Fleischmann
What I love also is that you've served in and continue to serve, in other capacities, on other boards, or you've this linkage between understanding the importance of private industry, private sector, public sector and civil society working together. You live that. I mean, you've been very much engaged on boards. I know you were on the IKEA board I recall, and advisory board. Tell me a little bit about that. Obviously, its deliberate in your journey, and it's important to the basis fund of the work you're doing, I imagine that you have linkages, you obviously have them with the World Bank and you maintain them. You have them with international organizations, you maintain those. But you're also working with governments, and you're working with business and you're working with civil society.
Andrew Steer
Yeah, it's extremely important, as you know, obviously, Alan, you've written a book on the subject, that we understand private investment, because, at the end of the day, governments set rules, the private sector will be the implementer of so much. And so for me, serving on the advisory board for IKEA, say, also on the advisory board of Bank of America, I co-chaired the climate board for HSBC, and seeing these, these corporations really, really dig deep on very difficult issues, and it's not easy.
So, for example, if you are, well, IKEA has the advantage that it doesn't have quarterly reporting, doesn't have shareholders. It's privately held, and a lot of profits go into the IKEA Foundation – it's a really wonderful organization, so it can make long-term decisions. But it is remarkable what a company like that is doing.
I mean, I always remember at the end of every advisory group meeting, we would go once a year to their headquarters and spend a day or a day and a half together, and the CEO would end each meeting by saying, are you sure, and there were five of us on the advisory board, are you sure that there's nothing else you really want us to do? You sure, any big idea you've got? Which is an incredible thing to ask an advisory board, because obviously this was not just environment, it was social issues as well, human rights issues, a whole bunch of issues. And I remember one time I said, well, look, you're doing much, much better. I mean, you're one of the best-performing companies in the world in sustainability. But let me ask you this – you're doing better, but do you know whether you're doing enough? And that led to, and, you know, they could have said, well, I mean, what are you talking about? What is enough? And I said, well, wouldn’t it be fun to think through what “enough” means? And they said, we’ll think about it.
That then led to them taking the lead on creating something called science based targets, which is, these are companies that say, I don't only want to do better. Because up to that stage, every company was saying, oh, we're doing so much better, our energy efficiency is up, we are polluting less, we're doing better. Well yeah, but are you doing enough? And science based targets were set up to do that and for companies that are really willing to struggle with science and say, yeah, we're doing enough, and we're going to be transparent in monitoring it. So yeah, but it's difficult. I mean, at the moment, it's sort of, sometimes you even listen to the Secretary General of the United Nations sort of trashing the private sector, the corporate sector. He says they're greenwashing. Well, some of them are, yes, but actually some of them are not, and many of them are not. This is hard stuff.
So for example, take a bank like HSBC, which really, really was trying to figure out, you know, I don't want to get too technical, but if you really want to do climate change seriously, you don't only worry about greenhouse gasses within your own office buildings and you know what electricity you use, you worry about your entire supply chain. And for a bank, that means they need to know when they lend money that that money is not going to lead to more greenhouse gasses. This is extremely difficult stuff. If you've got 20,000 Asian clients borrowing money from you, most of whom are not measuring their own greenhouse gasses, how do you how do you even go about that? But they were not going to give up. They really wanted to go deep, But it's hard, and there will be many slips along the way. and we should expect there to be, you know, three steps forward, one step backward, and we're seeing that at the moment.
And about three years ago, there was this massive kind of enthusiasm for declaring we're committed to net zero, and many companies didn't know how they were going to do it. And that's fine. I mean, John F Kennedy didn't know how he was going to get to the moon, but he did, and so it's now like, Monday morning or Tuesday morning, when actually we're discovering this is hard, and this is where real leadership is required, because not all of your staff will want to go forward. Not all of your shareholders will want you to be green, and so these are challenging but exciting times,
Alan Fleischmann
The last two minutes of the show, which I knew we're going to need another one with you, Andrew, I go from being scared to extremely worried about not enough people feeling urgent, seeing in all these elections around the world, these elections come up, certainly in this country, in the United States, it's coming up. You've got all these naysayers about climate change still. I mean, it shocks me, but then I talk to you, and I feel the same urgency and the worry, but I feel this pragmatic optimism, and it leaves me with great hope. And we have wonderful people in common that we love. Jane Goodall, she's been on the show twice I think, and others that we know and admire who do leave us with hope as a verb, meaning that it has to come with action. You're one of them. Leave us with a sense of where you think we are, not forgetting that we have to underscore the urgency and the fact that we're running out of time, but there is still hope.
Andrew Steer
Yeah, well, there definitely is. There definitely is. And it will come when we invest heavily in working together with the right kind of teams. We live in a world in which no individual actor will solve the big problems. It requires different types of organizations. There are no silver bullets in my line of business or yours, Alan, and it's a jigsaw puzzle. And change will come when we take down our own flags, when we, with great energy, great professionalism, but humble spirits, work together. And we're seeing that.
I mean, I was just in Mozambique three days ago, in the most wonderful national park in the world. It's called Gorongosa. I see how the specialists there are working with the Mozambican government, which has many, many problems. They're investing across the piece, not only to protect animals but to invest massively in education and health and other things. And you see these incredible, bright fires of hope. And the trick for us and the trick for leadership, is taking those and fanning those fires so that they become irresistible and unstoppable.
And it is happening, but nowhere near fast enough. And so, as we think about who are we going to vote for in an election, as we think about how we're going to allocate our own time, our own personal giving, how we're going to educate our children, what careers we go into, what we stand for, we should have our eye on the real prize, I think. There's a lot to be discouraged about, but there's also a huge amount to be excited about,
Alan Fleischmann
Because there's no question, if you're spending the summers that we're spending, you know climate change is well on its way. We feel it. Life is different. We see the storms of life. We see everything and it’s not going to get better unless we put to work some of the things that you're doing and help you rethink capitalism, deploy it differently, as you have been during your career doing, which has been amazing.
I knew we needed more time. We're gonna have you back on but you've been listening to Leadership Matters. I'm your host, Alan Fleischmann, we just spent the last hour with Andrew Steer, a good friend, an important leader, an inspiring leader, the President and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, founded by Jeff Bezos, envisioned and being realized by Andrew and an extraordinary team. Andrew, you have been so important to this cause of climate change and bringing together people. It is such an honor that you have been on the show. I’d love to have you back. You’ve had an amazing career. You've influenced so much, and we need you in the arena probably more than ever. So ,thank you.
Andrew Steer
Thank you. Alan. A real pleasure.
Alan Fleischmann
I look forward to seeing you soon, thank you.