As he watched the devastating fires in Australia destroy nearly 7,000 square miles of countryside and 3,000 homes last year, Terry Tamminen (above, right) thought of canaries that miners carried into coal mines to determine if carbon monoxide had collected in mine shafts.

“Australia was a microcosm, and these fires are a warning that we should pay attention to,” says Tamminen. “Here’s a developed nation with lots of resources, and the whole country is literally on fire. The climate science tells us that this will be our future if we don’t change quickly.”

Tamminen has spent a career making change happen quickly and for the better — whether as secretary of the California EPA under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, CEO of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, or co-founder of leading environmental NGO Seventh Generation Advisors. Here are five lessons learned from three decades of making a positive impact on the planet.

01 Learn And Adapt

Australia’s infernos give business and government leaders in other countries an opportunity to anticipate how climate change will impact their communities. “Businesses need to be thinking both about mitigation and adaptation, and policymakers need to be thinking about how to be a part of the solution of the climate emergency instead of standing in the way of progress,” he says.

02 Stay Positive

Tamminen recalled working with Leonardo DiCaprio on a formal address to the U.N. Climate Summit. They wanted to write a speech that described problems and solutions to the climate crisis, “but we kept listing the problems and looking at the science, and we found ourselves almost in tears trying to write the speech,” he says. “It’s hard to stay positive, but in the end, we wrote a persuasive speech that called for bold, unprecedented action.”

03 Share Best Practices

As head of the California EPA, Tamminen ushered in impactful policies, including the Million Solar Roofs initiative and California’s landmark Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which emphasized economic development opportunities around clean/efficient energy and waste reduction. “We proved that a strong environment and a strong economy are two sides of the same coin,” he says. 

04 Amplify Change

Through his work with global celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Jane Goodall, and Barak Obama, Tamminen has helped amplify issues and success stories to inspire change. With climate change, “We need clear voices and people we can trust, and we tend to trust celebrities,” he says. “It’s important to harness celebrity to get the message out, to normalize it, and make people realize that their actions matter and that they can be part of the solution.”

05 Think Generations Ahead

Tamminen founded 7th Generations Advisors based on the ancient First Nations philosophy that decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world for future generations. That same philosophy needs to guide actions as society confronts climate change. As individuals and as a society, “We need to be thinking generations ahead and act with urgency,” he says. 

As coronavirus reignites in states across the country, a volunteer business organization is quietly helping companies take bold action to bring the spread of coronavirus under control — marshaling private and public sector resources to solve the immediate and evolving needs of this urgent public health crisis.

Stop the Spread was started by Kenneth Chenault, the former chief executive of American Express, and Rachel Romer Carlson, the CEO of Guild Education, in early March. The organization now includes more than 1,300 volunteer CEOs and business executives in its ranks.

Through unique partnerships with member companies, Stop the Spread has facilitated the production of more than 40,000 ventilators and manufacture more than 20 million units of personal protective equipment, including N95 face masks, face shields, and more.

“Our goal is to connect businesses and organizations that are best-positioned to address critical needs during this public health crisis, often in innovative or unexpected ways,” says Christian Peele, director of Stop the Spread operations. “Some of the most creative and effective responses to COVID are coming from business leaders across the country who have ideas and assets they can deploy to the fight.”

So how does an organization leverage the collective resources of some of America’s leading companies and executives? Peele and her “amazing team” of experts, analysts, students, and volunteers say these three leadership principles have helped guide their unique and powerful response to the pandemic:

Create a Call to Action

The Stop the Spread movement began with a call for change in a New York Times op-ed, written by Chenault and Carlson. It closed with this entreaty: “Wherever we can, however we can, we must meet this unprecedented challenge… What is called for is nothing less than the full strength of our capital, our ideas, and our leadership.”

The response from business leaders was immediate and galvanizing: Within days more than 400 executives and leaders — from Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry to CEOs of Zoom and PagerDuty — had signed on, with a thousand more joining the movement within weeks. “It was so inspiring to see these leaders step up in this moment and have the courage to think creatively about the problem and solutions,” said Peele. As the country experiences the summer spike in COVID cases, “the current moment requires that same kind of bold
imagination.”

Build Partnerships

Stop the Spread’s core work brings companies together to address critical resource needs. Early on, Stop the Spread linked ventilator maker Ventec Life Systems with General Motors — a partnership that produced 10,000 units a month when ventilators were in critical demand. Today, the organization is collaborating with firms and research institutions to scale production of coronavirus testing, treatment and tracing efforts. And Stop the Spread is pivoting to focus on racial and economic disparities exacerbated by the pandemic, through areas such as food security and the equitable distribution of testing and Personal Protective Equipment.

One of Stop the Spread’s latest partnerships occurred in June when it joined forces with ImpactAssets to find, foster and fund the most innovative and impactful ideas that were surfacing in response to the pandemic. ImpactAssets investors have already put more than $170 million into COVID-related investments. Now a rich pipeline of 400 Stop the Spread investment opportunities holds promise not only as impact investments but also as funding for supporting and championing critical response efforts around the U.S.

Never Underestimate Your Resources

From the beginning, Stop the Spread has embraced a principle that says, “we have more available to us than we think and if we just take a second and survey what we have we can change the world with it.” Peele says, “Our combined capital, our combined network, our combined brainpower, it is enough to do this work.”

That ethos has been expressed countless times by Stop the Spread’s volunteer executives. One example: Rick Schostek, Executive Vice President at Honda North America, Inc., surveyed the idle resources his firm had due to the pandemic and forged a partnership with Dynaflo, Reading, Pa. to manufacture at scale a sophisticated compressor that is an essential component in critical care medical ventilators. That partnership ensured that ventilators got off the assembly line and into hospitals on time. Said Schostek: “I’m humbled to be part of a manufacturing enterprise that is working to find ways to join this fight, with each of our business lines —automobiles, power equipment, power sports and aircraft — offering unique solutions and support.”

As the pandemic evolves, Stop the Spread and ImpactAssets will leverage these principles to address significant gaps in the COVID response — with a focus on communities of color that have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. Says Peele: “We are committed to helping catalyze private sector response and building innovative solutions that go beyond the immediate crisis to address issues of social equity and support the communities and individuals hit hardest by the crisis at hand.”

Please join Stop the Spread. This fight is far from over, and private sector leadership is essential to solving this crisis. Please ask leaders in your organization to complete this form to let us know how you’ll support this urgent and unprecedented moment in American history.

Eat more fish for a healthy diet, but what about raising more fish for a healthy portfolio and planet?

That’s the idea behind Aqua-Spark, an investment fund with a focus on sustainable aquaculture businesses around the world.

The small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) in which it invests “are working across the value-chain toward the production of healthy, sustainable and, accessible aquatic life, such as fish, shellfish and plants,” according to the company.

It aims to create triple impact—specifically, “each investment is chosen for its potential to generate significant financial returns while also activating positive environmental and social outcomes.”

Amy Novogratz (above left), the firm’s co-founder and managing partner, explains what aquaculture is, what it entails and the lasting investing and environmental returns it can generate.

What was the ‘spark’ that started Aqua Spark?

My partner and I met through an ocean conservation event that I produced with TED and deep ocean explorer Sylvia Earle. After a week spent immersed in ocean-related challenges, on a boat in the Galapagos with a hundred committed individuals, we left wanting to do something together to preserve ocean health.

We came across aquaculture and were stunned by the size of the industry and how quickly it’s growing. Aquaculture will play a big role in the future of our ocean and food security, and though it has the potential to be the most resource efficient food system, current practices are far from efficient. It’s a highly fragmented industry with no real dedicated financing streams, and we see a big opportunity to influence how the industry grows.

How did you personally become involved in the work?

After running the TED Prize for almost a decade, I became adept at cultivating large scale global collaborations that brought different types of thinking together to form solutions. With a challenge as big as transforming the global aquaculture industry, we knew we needed to work with many partners and create synergies across the value chain and geographies. I wear many hats as a Managing Partner, but spend a lot of time developing and nurturing a global aquaculture ecosystems, aligning visions and fostering collaboration. I am very excited that we live in a time where we can take so many perspectives into account, and work towards redesigning an aquaculture system that works for us all.

You mention real power comes from collaboration and partnership. How? 

The scale of this challenge is too big for any one company or group to do it alone. Globally, we are farming almost 700 species in diverse environments ad economies, using different operating systems. But there has been a lot of knowledge gained in recent decades. New solutions have been developed and many stakeholders have entered the space with the vision of a more sustainable industry.

We need to triple aquaculture production globally by 2050. And as a relatively undeveloped industry, with few regulations, little technology, minimal data usage, there is a huge opportunity to take a far reaching, multisector, multilevel approach in order to transform practices and lift aquaculture to its potential. Sustainable aquaculture will be a core part of our future food system, and we need to keep the big picture in mind.

As part of your approach and philosophy, you note that entrepreneurs and investors have the power to change the world. How do you tap that creative energy to achieve your mission?

 Aquaculture is a good example of an industry where doing things sustainably is better business in the long run. We need the right solutions to scale in order to get the industry to the point where sustainability is accessible and cost effective. This is going to be driven by innovative, committed entrepreneurs and investors who are going to back them. In less than five years, with our portfolio leaders, we’ve seen that we can redirect the aquaculture industry to be cleaner, more efficient and far more sustainable, and many large investors and industry strategics are taking notice and getting on board.

What kind of evaluation/selection process do you engage in?

Our investment team does thorough due diligence. First, we look at what the company is solving in the aquaculture industry, how they are different and how they help us reach our impact goals. We look at the strength of the team and how they fit into our portfolio. We have a synergistic portfolio, where our companies work together and benefit from each other. We make sure they are going to add value to the other companies and get value in return.  

We involve our network of experts and partners in the different stages of due diligence, in assessing the product, the market, the partners, the industry fit, etc. One of our industry experts always joins us on our site visits and produces a separate report alongside our team’s report.

Is there an anecdote about one or two that you could elaborate on now in terms of impact?

A simple example of how new technologies can play a clear role in cleaning up the industry is eFishery, an aquaculture tech company based in Bandung, Indonesia. They use sensors to gauge water movement, which then codes how much a fish is moving, and then has an algorithm that determines the appetite of the fish to feed them automatically.

It’s truly revolutionary, but also really affordable. It saves farmers up to 24 percent each cycle of feed. Feed can be up to 80 percent of the cost of operating a farm. So, it’s huge economically. But also, feed is one of the big pollutants and also plays a big role in fish health. When you’re talking about aquaculture, getting feed right is one of the big challenges/opportunities.

How can innovative philanthropic capital play a bigger role in something like sustainable aquaculture?

When you look at the blended needs of different capital in aquaculture and the different partners working in aquaculture, there’s an immense amount of opportunity. We have a private equity offering, for example, as an investment option in ImpactAssets’ donor advised fund. We are also planning to launch a subset of our fund that’s focused solely on sub-Saharan Africa. We’re talking to a number of different foundations that would potentially have an interest in economic development and food security in Africa, so there’s a great opportunity here. Philanthropic capital can be “patient capital.” It will help us start to create a financing model to develop the industry, de-risk aquaculture investments and build a track record in aquaculture in Africa – and in aquaculture generally.

What’s the outlook for aquaculture growth?

We hit a point a couple of years ago where we’re actually producing more fish via aquaculture globally for human consumption than we’re catching in the wild. Aquaculture is also bigger than beef. Tripling the industry means we need to produce an additional 140 million metric tons of fish in the next thirty years. Taking into account how much of that will be fed species, it means we will need 8 times the amount of feed, just for aquaculture.