In conversation with Hannah Jones

Summary

In this interview, Hannah Jones is interviewed by young Fellow Amy Meek. Their conversation focuses on Jones’ experiences as chief sustainability officer at Nike and her work with the Earthshot Prize. She discusses the challenges of driving sustainability in the corporate world and the need for systemic change in business models. Jones promotes a mindset shift towards innovation and ‘urgent optimism’, encouraging young people to engage in sustainable practices and autonomous decision-making for a better future.

Reading time

10 minutes

Sustainability trailblazer and Earthshot Prize CEO Hannah Jones talks with environmental campaigner Amy Meek FRSA about the urgent need for a global innovation movement and an optimistic attitude.

Amy Meek: Hannah, I’m so excited to have this conversation with you and find out more about The Earthshot Prize and your views on the intersection between environmental action and business. I’d like to start with your time working in the business sector. What were your greatest successes and frustrations from your time as Chief Sustainability Officer at Nike?

Hannah Jones: I joined Nike in 1998, when there was almost no talk of sustainability. It was a very difficult time for the company, which was facing significant accusations of labour rights issues in its supply chain.

I came in very clear that I wanted to be a part of change and to solve the issue of labour rights. For the next six years, I found myself literally crawling through factories, talking to workers and management, and beginning to see that, beneath this globalised supply chain, we had fundamentally externalised social and environmental impacts from business. It was all about the bottom line and nobody was talking about the environment or people.

Fast-forward to 2005. There were droughts in Bangladesh and India which meant that rice supplies were fundamentally diminished. Very quickly, India and Bangladesh began to put in tariffs and quotas. The price of rice went up, and the women workers in our supply chain couldn’t afford rice, which was their staple food. That was the wake-up call to realise labour rights are incredibly important, climate change will define all our futures, and the most vulnerable people will be the ones impacted first.

We realised that we needed to look at our footprint environmentally and to try to get out of being an emitter of carbon, having waste through our supply chain, thinking about chemistry and clean water. We had to build a new set of capabilities. And when I became Chief Sustainability Officer — I think we made the title up, there was no job description — it was the most incredible experience. It’s shaped how I think about the world today. 

Meek: Looking back on your time at Nike and at where business is today, do you think the corporate sector is where it needs to be in terms of its sustainability transition?

Jones: If you look back to when I began, we’re way ahead. That’s the good news. The bad news is we’re not nearly where we need to be. Despite significant leadership and courage among some corporations, not all are thinking about how to become net zero in the right timeline.

Fundamentally, what’s not serving corporations is the business model and the financial incentives. As long as financial systems incentivise the short term and profit over everything and unlimited growth - there’s a fallacy of unlimited growth - it makes it very hard for corporations to go beyond making today a little bit less bad instead of actually building businesses that are all good.

We see purpose-driven companies that are thoughtful about what they’re doing, and yet they all face those financial incentives that make it incredibly hard to do the right thing. I see so many people so passionate about this and so knowledgeable about sustainability. I see boards waking up. I see regulators starting to regulate.

Meek: Sometimes when we talk about climate change it can feel a bit doom and gloom and like we’re so far away from being where we need to be. But the innovation side of it is the really exciting bit. How do you think we can support agency and create spaces within society and in business to encourage people to be innovators?

Jones: I live in a place of urgent optimism, and I have done for a long time. At Nike, for the first 10 years or so, we looked at the world through the lens of risk. When we flipped and said, ‘let’s think about this as an innovation opportunity’, that reframe opened up a new mindset and suddenly it became exciting, and designers, creators and innovators began to compete and share with each other.

The spark of changing people’s mindsets to view this as an opportunity is the unlock that we all need. This is the future because, right now, we collectively hold the pen of history. We are writing history. Maybe it’s the first draft, but ultimately we’re making history happen. If you go back in time to these huge waves of transformation, it is the people that dare to think differently that became the leaders of that future movement.

My challenge is do you want to have FOMO and have missed the boat because you weren’t busy trying to think about how to be entrepreneurial and creative about fixing the planet and aligning your sense of purpose to something that you could do with your life? Or do you want to be a part of the greatest transformative movement in the world that’s going to be all about that sort of creativity, unleashed?

Meek: How do we demonstrate to young people that business could be a way for them to actually pursue something that’s innovative and change-making when even these most forward-thinking businesses still have their own problems to contend with?

Jones: I’m interested in how you give young people a sense of agency. I am so tired of the narrative that your generation is doomed. I have a deep anger with older people for daring to put out a narrative that basically drives youth anxiety, youth anger and youth apathy. Because it’s not true.

Every generation has to rebel and to challenge the generation before. And we need this young generation to do that on steroids and to be completely irreverent about what has come before. This generation, and every generation, has choices and agency.

Meek: As someone who works with young people and a young person myself who’s only just been able to vote for the first time, it’s encouraging to hear that perspective. Many young people feel unable to influence politics or business. If there were one thing that you’d recommend to a young person who wanted to shape the future of business, for example, to be more sustainable and to be more ethical, what would that be?

Jones: It’s all about your consumer choices because those are the choices you take on a daily basis without thinking. When you walk into a coffee shop, are you choosing plant-based milk or are you choosing dairy? It’s as micro a decision as that.

What we know is that if the world moved to more plant-based food and less meat and dairy, the impact on carbon is huge, which means the impact also on biodiversity is huge. If you say I’m going to go to a second-hand store instead of a new store, you’re making a choice. So, how you live your life every day adds up.

Meek: What drew you away from working within business with Nike towards The Earthshot Prize?

Jones: I’d really fallen in love with innovation. Through the course of my journey with Nike I began to see that saving the planet is an innovation challenge. We need more bright, young creators who are focused on fixing the climate, one scalable solution at a time.

Then Covid hit. It made me realise that climate change would make Covid look like a walk in the park, and that now was the time to look for a role where I could be helping turbocharge the innovation ecosystem around sustainability.

I saw this job advert in The Economist, and it said, ‘CEO of The Earthshot Prize’ and I thought, huh, that’s interesting, I’ve never heard of that. And then I read a bit more and found out that it was a new idea. In all the conversations, what became clear was the ambition for The Earthshot Prize was huge, starting with our founder, the Prince of Wales, and so I signed up.

Meek: Something I find amazing about The Earthshot Prize is how diverse it is in terms of the people who win the awards. It looks at sustainability as something that intersects with workers’ rights, inclusion, building ethical businesses — and that’s so encouraging to see in an age where we still sometimes get stuck in viewing sustainability as its own problem. How can we translate that from The Earthshot Prize to more widely in society?

Jones: It’s a good observation and we very much have designed The Earthshot Prize to be something that will spark the world’s imagination, wherever you are and whatever seat you sit in. Diversity and representation are absolutely critical to how we search, how we select and how we celebrate.

In terms of our selection process, we have official nominators around the world who are tasked with going out and finding diverse solutions. We make sure to not give the impression that sustainability is something that only these experts over here can do, but that it will come from everywhere and every kind of person, and that goes all the way through the selection process to that final cohort of 15 finalists and ultimately the five winners.

We wrap a lot of storytelling around it deliberately, because we think that people in the mainstream narrative about the environment are being overwhelmed with stories of doom and gloom and despair and defeat and denial, whereas we see thousands of stories of possibility and opportunity and hope and optimism and determination and grit and human ingenuity at its best.

Meek: It must be so hard to decide between all the amazing things that people are doing. What would you say it is that makes a winner of The Earthshot Prize really a winner?

Jones: First, the solution that they’ve built needs to be proven. We need clear evidence that it works. We do a lot of due diligence on that. We need to make sure that they’re legal, that they’ve got the IP, all those boring things that are really important. So, does the solution work, is it proven, is it out and about, and is it showing traction?

Second, if this solution were scaled or replicated, would it be transformative? If it passes those two hurdles, then we start to get really interested and then we narrow it down. We have interviews, we have experts, we’re comparing them to a portfolio of similar projects.

Then you start to look at the team. If a team is going to come on and be a finalist, they need to be ready to be on the global platform talking to potential investors and funders and scaling their work. It is a leadership challenge. It is a communications opportunity. We have to have an indication that the team is solid, that the leadership is ready for this journey.

And then the final magic twist is we absolutely look at diversity and representation. We make sure that our cohorts are representative. We look specifically for female-led solutions. We look for Indigenous-led solutions and we look for Global South-led solutions.

Meek: As everyday people in somewhere like the UK, where we feel a predominantly small consequence of climate change compared with the impact we have, how can we engage with the ethos of The Earthshot Prize and help to drive that innovation in everyday life?

Jones: Number one is vote. Number two is to make every action you take a decision you’ve made about the environment. Number three is to decide how to spend your working life and what you’re going to focus on. Number four is to be a part of using market forces to pull excitement and energy and capital towards the innovations that you see coming out of The Earthshot Prize.

Optimism is a duty. Adopt a mindset of optimism and urgency and a ‘can do’ attitude. Don’t let the denialism and the defeatism seep in and turn into anxiety or apathy or anger. Anger sometimes can be healthy, but apathy and anxiety are not healthy. That narrative of denialism and defeatism is deliberately orchestrated to push you towards apathy. Do not let that force win.

Put yourself on the side of urgent optimism. Take action. Know that you have agency. Champion Earthshot finalists and dream of becoming, not an astronaut, but an Earthshot winner.

Hannah Jones was appointed CEO of The Earthshot Prize in May 2021, following a 22-year stint at Nike, where she served as Chief Sustainability Officer, Senior Director of Corporate Social Responsibility EMEA and, ultimately, President of Nike Innovation Labs.

Amy Meek is a young Fellow who started youth-led charity Kids Against Plastic at age 12 along with her sister Ella Meek.

Images by Urszula Soltys, a Polish-born, London-based portrait photographer.

This article first appeared in RSA Journal Issue 3 2024.