Breaking the Sustainability Silo – EcoTech Insights

Hi everyone. I am pleased today to be joined by Elaia Reddy, the VP of Product at Aptera. Elaia.

It's great to have you on. Thanks, Bonnie. It's such a pleasure to be here.

I'd love to hear more about your background and the work that you're doing in aptera. Yeah, Certainly. So as the VP of product at aptera, I lead the development of our carbon accounting platform.

Um, our mission is to help businesses track, measure and reduce their carbon emissions, um, writing them with the insights they need to make data-driven decisions. I think what excites me most about my role in Aptera is the work that we do with companies across industries and maturity levels. It's really help them achieve their goals through our platform and services.

I wanna start with talking about sustainability silos. That's something I've noticed with my research where sustainability departments are often not as well known within an organization. They seem to stay in a silo even though their work is so important and really can reach out to all the business units.

Do you find that as well? Yeah, unfortunately, this is a challenge that we quite often see. The sustainability is sometimes viewed as a separate business initiative, often handled by a dedicated team or department, um, sometimes just kind of put in the corner.

Uh, and even across companies, sustainability can sit within very different business functions from finance to operations to people. So there's little similarity and standardization across the board, which oftentimes leaves these teams feeling, uh, left in the dark. Yeah, that is true.

I mean, how do you think this lack of notoriety and collaboration can detrimentally impact an organization? Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, sustainability teams are impactful when they're able to connect with the rest of the business and influence business behaviors that alleviate the known risks of climate change. Um, without those critical collaboration, sustainability teams really lose their ability to drive meaningful change.

And at the end of the day, an opportunity for innovation is lost. Solving climate risk business problems requires a myriad of different perspectives, and collaboration is really at the heart of that. Well, how do You recommend Chief Sustainability officers change that?

How can they, um, get more their messaging out to the different business units and really convey to leadership and the entire company that what they do is important? Yeah, so Marsh of the spirit of collaboration really starts at the highest levels of leadership at a company. Um, an important part of the CSO role is to create a vision for sustainability that's not just, uh, corporate responsibility, but a central business priority, and then get the buy-in and support of other business stakeholders through constant education and touch points.

Um, on the more tactical side, we've seen clients with successful climate programs integrate sustainability metrics into the overall business strategy and performance reviews of peers, um, not just the CSR report and sustainability report. So ultimately sharing the accountability of sustainability helps drive these results. That's A good point.

And I'm sure, uh, more of that will be coming into play. Even the term chief Sustainability Officer, it's not totally new, but some people may not be aware as a title that exists, even though all major corporations now seem to have it. How have you found that role evolved?

I think to your point, Bonnie, this, this role has really evolved from a nice to have to a strategic board level function for mature companies. And today's CSOs need to not only be sustainability experts, but also business leaders who can tie sustainability to the company's financial success, brand reputation, and regulatory compliance. Um, and so much of this depends on data-driven decision making and transparency.

Um, CSOs are increasingly relying on technology to measure and communicate progress on emissions reductions, other sustainability initiatives across the company. Yeah, that is true. And this is 2025.

It, it's early still in the year, but it's a big year because we have these regulations coming down from Europe. And I'm sure you're on very up to date on these regulations, but I'm wondering how that impacts your job because now we've been talking about it for years now. The year is here.

Absolutely. The, the regulatory landscape of here and in Europe, uh, is evolving rapidly, and we're already seeing the impacts of upcoming regulations on the demand for climate reporting. Um, while there still may be some remaining uncertainty around the details and finality of specific legis legislation, our clients know that these mandates they're coming down the road and the sooner that they can prepare, the better equipped they'll be to handle a, a world, um, in which these regulations are really at the forefront of people's minds.

I think we're also seeing a greater focus on supply chain emissions, both in practice and in regulation. I've spoken with your CEO in the past, so I, I know the basics of the platform, but our audience may not. So I love to hear about the technology behind how it works and what you do.

Yeah, certainly. So, um, I think the main heart of our operation is to make sense of the energy and emissions data that we bring in from our clients and to really help them evolve their climate strategy around not only current data, but where we see the predictions and the future of their emissions are going. I don't think I can emphasize enough how important and critical IT solutions will be to decarbonization efforts over the next decade.