The Tamesis
Chief executive Jennifer Jordan-Saifi believes she is well qualified to try. Jordan-Saifi spent the first ten years of his career delivering humanitarian aid in conflict zones in the Middle East and spent the next ten years negotiating the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on behalf of the Canadian government. Diplomacy is second nature to her. Today, she uses it to convince private sector CEOs to take action on climate change.
Her top priority is bridging the gap between under-resourced governments with rapidly approaching climate targets and private-sector leaders with money to spend. “To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement by 2030, we need to shift investment from billions to trillions of dollars,” she explains. “Most governments don’t have the resources to do this, which is why we’re failing to achieve these goals. We need private sector involvement.”
Jordan-Saifi, who has been a member of SMI since its inception in 2020, said SMI’s founding mission was to create a de facto “United Nations of the private sector” that would identify scalable climate solutions, convince private sector leaders of their value and feasibility, and help these leaders work together to overcome obstacles. She served as private secretary to the then Prince of Wales and has been a member of the organization since its inception in 2020. She said that when His Majesty the King ascends the throne in 2022, Jordan-Saifi takes over as CEO and he emerges as the “wise man on the hill” – still supporting SMI but “at arm’s length” to respect his new constitutional responsibilities.
Sustainable Markets Initiative CEO Jennifer Jordan-Saifee with King Charles III.Photo: Jeff Spicer via PA Media
The organization’s Terra Carta 2021 manifesto clearly sets out her mission through 2030. Inspired by the Magna Carta, the Terra Charter is “a private sector roadmap that puts nature, people and planet at the heart of global value creation.” Its ten principles include: accelerating and aligning industry roadmaps, adopting common metrics and standards, investing sustainably at scale, and creating market incentives. SMI also has a second manifesto, the Astra Charter, to be published in 2023 and aimed at “protecting our origins on Earth” as the space race heats up. If SMI is the private sector’s answer to the United Nations, these are its resolutions, she said: “It’s really about changing business models and economic models to make them sustainable by default.”
Jordan-Saife said the move toward cross-industry pathfinder is “a mature thing.” “In the beginning, we grouped companies by industry because many companies had not thought about sustainability before. We needed to get everyone moving in the same direction, even if they were at different paces. Now, to achieve this, we need a more horizontal approach. We have always acknowledged that change will not come from just one company; now we say change will not come from just one industry.”
education and promotion
Jordan-Saifi said the main goal of SMI is to “bring in leaders and make them feel safe to learn”. It’s a process of “continuous improvement” while acknowledging that “no one becomes perfect overnight.” To this end, the organization develops a number of “seeing is believing” interventions, emphasizing the power of fieldwork in practical case studies and promoting mindset change.
