Sustainability Magazine October 2025 Issue 58 | Page 71

What are the key messages from your keynote / panel?

Jim Andrew: There were really three key messages and the first was the importance of system change. I think everybody who’ s here at Climate Week needs to be focused not on their individual organisation, but on how we are going to change systems.
I talked about the food system, which is very important to PepsiCo.
The second is that sustainability is a team sport. No one person or organisation can make the progress that we collectively need to if we’ re acting in isolation. So how do we, like a football team, work together, help each other to go towards a common objective, put the ball in the goal, win the game?
We need to do all these things to change systems with much greater levels of acceleration. So speed is fine, but we need to actually accelerate. What is each organisation actually trying to do and how does it support the overall objective?
And then the third was alignment. You have to work not only in your own little area, but work to support and help all the other people and organisations that are trying to do the same thing. At the end of the day in football, the goal is not to score a goal. The goal is to win the match, to win the game. And we don’ t always have everybody with the same level of acceleration and intention, working together with alignment towards the same goal.
Chris Walker: I just finished up the Route to Net Zero panel with a handful of other folks: Alice from the Mercedes-AMG Petronas team, Jess Hyman from Atlassian, as well as Maurice from Signify.
We talked from four very different industries about how we are approaching decarbonisation within our own industry and company, but also how there’ s a lot of shared models.
Some of the things that came out of that were to start thinking about it as a data problem and presenting solutions to your companies using data. But then also use the voice of the customer to really bring some of that pressure back to your company to start driving real progress.
Nicola Acutt: My keynote was a little bit provocative in that my thesis is that we as sustainability professionals are missing a key stakeholder that can help us
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