The Future Is Green: Hari Balasubramanian Of EcoAdvisors & EcoInvestors Capital On Their Top Strategies for a Cleaner Planet
An Interview With Wanda Malhotra
Measure, monitor, and transparently report your progress.
As we face an unprecedented environmental crisis, the need for sustainable solutions has never been more urgent. This series seeks to spotlight the innovative minds and passionate advocates who are leading the charge in environmental conservation and sustainable practices. We aim to explore the most effective strategies, breakthrough technologies, and transformative policies that are shaping a more sustainable future for our planet. As a part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Hari Balasubramanian.
Recognized as Canada’s top Consultant/Enabler by Clean Leaders in 2021, Hari Balasubramanian is a proven sustainability expert who is driven by the belief that all types of capital can be deployed to achieve impact. He has worked alongside over 300 projects in 5 languages and 60+ countries and influenced over U$5B in sustainability-oriented financing — helping protect threatened species, forests, oceans, and the people who depend upon them. Hari is the founder of EcoAdvisors, a Certified B Corp and Top Impact Company recognized by Real Leaders, and EcoInvestors Capital, which advise and invest for sustainability at scale.
Thank you so much for joining us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’?
Growing up as a first-generation kid in Atlantic Canada, it was basically preordained that I would become a doctor or engineer. My most salient memory of grade 12 biology class was during the Ecology module when I thought, “what is the point of learning about coral reefs and rainforests? They’re just a fad”. The summer after high school, I volunteered at a rural hospital in South India and fell in love with the idea of helping people, working in challenging environments, learning language and culture, and feeling like I was making a positive difference. At University, however, I became disillusioned with the path required to become a doctor and, as graduation approached, jumped at the chance to assist a PhD candidate — not because the research interested me at the time, but rather to suppress my intense fear of leaving school and entering the ‘real world’.
I spent that summer in southern Portugal, living in a Tide Mill that offered the unique perk of jumping into the ocean right out my bedroom window. I spent 8–10 hours a day underwater with seahorses. Before that moment, I may as well have thought that seahorses occupied the same mythical realm as unicorns or chupacabras. While seahorses are indeed magical, they are also real… and they are spectacular. They are monogamous, have elaborate courtship rituals, and are part of the only Family of Animals where the male gets pregnant and gives ‘birth’ to tiny baby seahorses. My relationship with nature had changed. When not underwater, I was with a community that has relied on this coast for generations. Every day, I saw people fishing and asked them about what they caught, and they always said that it was less than they remembered from years ago. They told me about dreams for their children, about food, health, education, and a better future for their families.
That summer, I dove into sustainability both literally and figuratively. I dove in with all of my being. While seahorses are magical and captivated my imagination, the real learning was about how communities rely on nature. Conservation offered an avenue to connect my newfound appreciation of nature, with my intention to help people. Importantly, it was a way to help all of humanity not just individual humans. It turns out that coral reefs and rainforests weren’t just a fad after all and have been a focus of my work ever since!
Can you share with us the most interesting story from your career? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?
From Portugal, I had the great fortune to work on coastal and marine projects in Barbados, Malaysia, the Maldives, and Cuba. I came out of the water and got a role leading the monitoring and evaluation function at one of the largest environmental NGOs, where I oversaw (and got to see) over 150 sustainability projects in 45 countries around the world.
Many philanthropists are happy and feel fulfilled once they contribute, but that often isn’t good enough if climate change is getting worse, and biodiversity loss is accelerating. Having a results-focus allowed us to evaluate our impact and manage for success. It also turned out to be compelling for the corporate sector, which hadn’t previously engaged with conservation at scale. We could finally show an ROI for corporate dollars from a social and environmental perspective. With this great potential opportunity, came a considerable amount of trepidation — not only from myself, but also from across the institution.
I remember my first meeting with the CEO of a large diversified resources company. Having been in conservation for years now, I had a certain mental picture of a mining executive, and was prepared for a cartoonish Dr Evil character sitting in a wing-backed chair contemplating how to cause as much destruction as possible. Turns out, the CEO was a person. A father. Who had their own concerns about equity, safety, and climate change — and who really wanted to be part of the solution.
What I learned from that experience was most individuals share core common values — about family, community, stability, and the environment. So, if we could provide a rationale for why and how to engage, understand, and align incentives, then they could get on board. I also learned that people are human. And very rarely do humans actively want to contribute to the destruction of humanity.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Three character traits that come to mind are empathy, optimism, and systems-thinking.
- Empathy — After my brief stint trying to walk the path of a doctor, a happy accident led me to tropical marine conservation, then to a global conservation organization, and then building two sustainability-focused businesses. At each of these stops, I gained more exposure and insight into the deep connection between people and the environment. Whether in the fanciest boardrooms or trekking through mud in the depths of tropical forests, I have always been drawn to people, their stories, their struggles, and their values, where I find far more commonality than difference. Empathy is the first step to understanding, alignment, collaboration, and progress.
- Optimism — In the sustainability space despair seems to come easily. The people I have met, the stories they have shared, and the hope they express have sparked an unyielding optimism in the power of community and the human spirit.
- Systems-thinking — Our ‘solutions first’ approach is built on optimism and is grounded in contextual experience and global networks developed over the last 20 years. We believe that more sustainable is always possible. Making connections between capital and on-the-ground community impact requires being audacious enough to appreciate the appropriate scale while pragmatic enough to operationalize it. Once the goal is understood, thinking through positive and negative dependencies helps us figure out the best pathways to get there.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that might help people?
We are always working on exciting large-scale projects. What excites us at EcoAdvisors today is an approach to break down siloed approaches and address systems challenges with systems solutions. We articulate this through an enterprise-wide offering. This is an integrated systems-approach across entities, sectors and the capital stack (e.g., philanthropy, operating business, and investment) that matches values/impact with risk/return. This approach resonates across our corporate, government, and individual clients.
The enterprise-wide approach works for any client with multiple entities. For instance, a Family may want to enter the sustainability space and they need help to understand their priorities, synthesize, and draft a sustainability strategy for their Foundation, which grows to their private business holdings and Family Office and could include grantmaking, operational sustainability, and sourcing and due diligence for investment opportunities. Another example is an asset management firm that is considering entering the sustainability space. An initial approach may be to create a sustainability vertical, within an asset class. However, rather than create a dedicated (and isolated) sustainability vertical bound by asset class, we envision creating a sustainability horizontal that capitalizes on existing strengths and leverages opportunities that not only leads to greater impact but also greater risk-adjusted return.
Ok, thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of our interview. What pivotal moment led you to dedicate your career to sustainability, and how has that shaped your approach to environmental challenges?
I already shared my first “Aha!” moment that summer in Portugal in 2001. The second came a decade later, when I was sitting at the Hague and listened to a presentation stating that some ~US$45 trillion a year was being spent actively destroying our planet. Since I worked with most of the major funders at the time, I thought, ‘well, how much are we spending actively protecting it?’ Taking NGOs, Foundations, governments, World Bank, and Development Finance Institutions (DFIs), came up with a number between $45–50 billion (or ~US$0.045 trillion) a year spent protecting it. That has now increased, primarily with increased climate mitigation finance, but is still woefully inadequate and roughly 1000x less than the amount we spend destroying.
It was clear that philanthropy alone would not achieve the necessary scale to tackle the global challenges at hand, and corporate commitments were often too far removed from on-the-ground sustainability results. Real dollars needed to flow.
In September 2012, I founded EcoAdvisors with a simple thesis — help redirect some of the ~US$45 trillion and grow the $45–50 billion for environmental impact. Our goal is equally simple: to help create a healthy planet where all people thrive.
Could you describe a groundbreaking project or initiative you’ve been involved in that significantly contributed to sustainability?
We are often told that we stand on the shoulders of giants, and I have no hesitation in acknowledging the inspirational leaders I have been lucky enough to have learned from. They are too numerous to count, but one stands out for this question. My first ‘real boss’ was Jennifer Morris, who spearheaded Verde Ventures, a debt-finance vehicle that provided capital to conservation-aligned small and medium-sized enterprises in critical biodiversity areas in the tropics. The most missing of the missing middle. The notion of revolving or financial returning capital used for environmental benefit was completely foreign to me at the time, but uncovered the potential for so much more than just philanthropy and public funding to address the biggest challenges of our time. Do good and do well — who would have thought? In order to address the massive funding disparity and capitalize on the opportunities that the sustainability transition presents, we need much more of this. A seemingly minor mindset shift will undoubtedly be the difference between our functional extinction or a thriving future for humanity.
How do you navigate the balance between economic growth and environmental preservation in your sustainability strategies?
Our economy has been built without acknowledging or accounting for what underpins value creation. By treating nature, climate, and the environment as externalities and not including them in fiduciary decision-making, investors are not getting a full picture of true risks and opportunities.
Nature has value. In fact, in 2020, the world learned that over half of global GDP is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services. The food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe. The sooner we recognize Nature as a real asset, the sooner we change our relationship with, and propensity to destroy the very underpinning of our existence. The Global Biodiversity Framework was recently adopted, and implementation pathways are there. We often think of nature as complex, but in reality the solution is simple: protect (30% of critical intact nature); restore (critical ecosystems we have lost); and sustainably manage the rest. It just so happens that many of the pathways for this simple set of solutions already exist and can support economic growth. Now, we are not so naive to believe there are no trade-offs between economic growth and environmental impact. What we do offer is this: there are far fewer trade-offs than the existing economy currently understands. Our work is to uncover those opportunities with mutual benefit while clearly identifying and highlighting pathways that require non-financial return-bearing capital. We believe and build our businesses around the notion that if we can be more thoughtful about the sources, uses, and conditions of capital suited for specific portions of the sustainability transition, we can accelerate positive change while growing the economy.
What emerging technologies or innovations do you believe hold the most promise for advancing sustainability and why?
First off, we are very aware of the gap needed to address sustainability solutions and that this gap is both financial and technological. However, we believe that the technology gap is less than generally thought. There are plenty of existing pathways for the transition that exist and are sub-scale today. Therefore, we start with the big picture — the largest and most material sectors for the sustainability transition, and the best existing technologies within those sectors to make material progress. This gives us broad categories such as energy, buildings, industrials, mobility, land-use (agriculture, timber, etc.), and intact nature. Each of these have incredible existing technologies that are sub-scale today that simply need pathways and incentives to allow for greater market penetration. Our approach is to then look at where early-stage technology development makes the most sense within individual sectors. In energy, challenges still exist around storage and distribution. For buildings, there are clear pathways for operating efficiency but less on the materials side. Industrial applications need a suite of input and energy innovations. Land-use suffers from an intensity and input challenge. Across the board, we believe in the role of technology for field and desk-based data acquisition, large data predictive models, software solutions for aggregation, synthesis and analysis, reducing friction in value chains, decoding provenance, and chain of custody to name a few. Bottom line is that there is a combination of sector specific and enterprise-wide technologies that will help position sustainability with the pace and scale required to meet the challenge.
Based on your research or experience, can you please share your “5 Top Strategies for a Cleaner Planet”?
Before diving into strategy, it’s important to get aligned and understand what is material. What sustainability impacts and dependencies are the most relevant to you? And, which will have the most substantive effect in the world? Aligning on a vision of the world you want to contribute to and understanding materiality will help you prioritize your actions and see which strategic pathways will build value for you and for the planet.
- Reduce your emissions as much as possible.
Climate Net-Zero Pathways can mean shifting to renewable energy and moving from linear processes to circular models to reduce waste. Project Drawdown offers a climate solutions library for more ideas in helping you reduce Scope 1 and 2 emissions.
2. Reduce your negative nature impacts as much as possible.
For some ideas, Business for Nature offers a series of Nature actions across 12 sectors.
3. Widen the tent and look at your value chain. Successful organizations that take a holistic approach and think across their value chain can better address systemic issues and drive collective action.
View your supply chain with a climate and nature lens. Consider seeking pre-screened values-aligned partners via certification networks relevant to your business/sector. Maybe there are B Corporations, 1% for the Planet members or other certification standards your partners align with. Chances are they will have sustainability measures already in place for their own reporting. This will, in turn, make it easier for you. From a business perspective, if and when you are asked to disclose either Scope 3 emissions and nature impacts and dependencies, you will be that much more prepared.
4. Look for positive dependencies where you can create value while enhancing climate and/or nature-related objectives.
Example: rooftop solar is both cheaper and cleaner than fossil fuel in many jurisdictions.
5. Measure, monitor, and transparently report your progress.
Example: Collect data, assess, benchmark, improve, measure progress and adapt
In your view, what are the key steps individuals, communities, and governments need to take to achieve a more sustainable future?
We think about our advisory work falling in the following categories. Not steps per se, but thematic areas that can help any individual or institution participate in the sustainability transition.
- Education — about the fundamentals of the value of nature, the basics of climate change mitigation and adaptation, and how sustainability thinking underpins global societal value.
Bottom line: 100% of human existence relies on nature. If we erode this fundamental asset base through short-term decision-making, we’ll have nothing left. - Translation — across sectors, industries, organizations, geographies, public policy, and the capital stack to align incentives and common purpose. Knowing about the value of sustainability is a first step, communicating in a way that matters to your stakeholders drives change. Framing in terms of value creation and risk management can bring non-traditional allies to the movement. Examples for this translation? The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) (tying climate and nature-related issues to financial materiality).
- Integration — of climate and nature into all roles, functions, and decision-making.
Integrating climate and nature into decision-making is not about moral obligation, it is about underlying value. Establishing a clear theory of change that recognizes and manages both sustainability-linked risk and opportunity can serve as the foundation of any strategy that will help organizations align activities and investments and progress towards a vision of the future they want to contribute to. Sustainability isn’t a department, a marketing tool, or a reporting requirement — it is the underpinning of any successful entity. As such, it needs to be part of everything, everywhere, all at once. - Allocation — of resources to sustainable solutions, projects, and activities that align with your integrated vision. Our biggest challenge today isn’t the science, the technology, the solutions, or the stated commitments… it is inertia. Go. Do. Something.
- Communication — once you have made material progress, communicate your story, programs, allocations, and reports and inspire others to act and do the same! It is hard being first, and you are not. The more of us that start moving and telling others, the more others will move as well. Remember, the biggest challenge today is inertia. With more communication around how a robust sustainability strategy can be built and work, the more uptake there will be.
With this framing, individuals, communities, and governments can contribute to the growth of a sustainable future — with more comprehensive information, better risk management, and improved decision-making processes aligned with environmental and social goals. This will help manage against substantial risks, create resilience, and uncover new opportunities — meaning better business, better investments, better performance, and a better planet for better human existence.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
‘SustainAbility’ — where people have the ability to integrate sustainability into every decision they make. This movement would empower people to shift from short-term needs and outcomes to the long-term. Integrating ‘SustainAbility’ helps us account for the longevity of our actions and makes us reflect on the kind of world we wish to live in (now) as well as leave for our children, grandchildren, and future generations.
This isn’t about the planet. Ultimately, the planet will be just fine with or without us. SustainAbility is truly about the future of humankind.
What is the best way for our readers to continue to follow your work online?
You can follow EcoAdvisors on LinkedIn, Twitter and visit www.ecoadvisors.org
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent on this. We wish you only continued success.
About the Interviewer: Wanda Malhotra is a wellness entrepreneur, lifestyle journalist, and the CEO of Crunchy Mama Box, a mission-driven platform promoting conscious living. CMB empowers individuals with educational resources and vetted products to help them make informed choices. Passionate about social causes like environmental preservation and animal welfare, Wanda writes about clean beauty, wellness, nutrition, social impact and sustainability, simplifying wellness with curated resources. Join Wanda and the Crunchy Mama Box community in embracing a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle at CrunchyMamaBox.com.
The Future Is Green: Hari Balasubramanian Of EcoAdvisors & EcoInvestors Capital On Their Top… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.