It's Climate Action Week Sydney 🌏

Hey guys, I’m Simon Crerar, founder of Impact&ble 👋

Today’s email began at 33,000ft feet over the Bass Strait on Sunday, and finished during the iX Summit in Sydney Town Hall this morning. I’m on Gadigal for Climate Action Week: the sessions I’ve attended so far have been inspiring and uplifting. 

Thanks for subscribing to issue #1. After 25 years working for global media brands like The Times, Guardian, and BuzzFeed, today I'm launching something new, a weekly newsletter dedicated to helping founders shape their stories of change.

Every week, this newsletter will delivers insights you won't find anywhere else through intimate conversations with Australia's most innovative impact-focused founders.

This month we're diving deep into the people and innovations reshaping our future:

→ Today: my neighbour in the Huon Valley, Grant Gilmour from Beanstalk AG. 

→ Sunday: Greenhouse’s Charlotte Connell unpacks Climate Action Week Sydney.

→ March 23: The Australian Seaweed Institute’s Jo Kelly discusses Seagriculture.

→ March 30: Geoneon’s Roxane Bandini-Maeder unpacks climate risk mapping.

If you're building, investing in, or supporting ventures with positive planetary impact, my ambition is to make impactable.news your essential weekly digest. Thank you for joining me as I aim to build – and serve – a community dedicated to accelerating positive impact through the power of story: let's shape the future, together!

Today’s newsletter is 1,040 words, and should take you five minutes to read.

One Big Thing 1️⃣ 

This week I’m starting very close to home, in the heavenly Huon Valley, Tasmania, where my family and I moved from Woolloomooloo in Sydney in January 2023.  

I recently spent five days dog-sitting at my mate’s house. Grant Gilmour is a director and co-founder of Beanstalk AG, a leading food and agriculture innovation powerhouse, working to unleash ag’s potential to be a force for good.

From launching the world’s first Drought Venture Studio, to providing transformational support to almost 50 innovators, Beanstalk is growing fast: read more here.

3 Key Takeaways from our chat 🔑

→ Why Grant ditched management consulting:  “I have a background in law and finance, but at some stage I really wanted to stop making PowerPoint slides and do something meaningful.”

→ How Beanstalk Ag’s founders explained the business to their grandmothers? We said: “we help tech companies and food producers/processors be friends.” 

→ And how they’re building a team of rockstars: “One of the prerequisites for the best people in their field is ‘I want to work from where I want to live’. And so being able to enable that is critical for us for attracting and maintaining the best talent in the industry.”

Click here to read more about Beanstalk’s plans for 2025 and beyond.

Hyperlocal focus: warming seas = aquaculture ecocide 🚨

Grant and I live in the Huon Valley – Australia’s southernmost LGA, 45 minutes south of Hobart. It’s a glorious part of the world – historically the centre of Tassie’s apple industry – today home to a bunch of interesting people doing awesome things. 

Our neighbours include Fat Pig Farm’s gourmet farmer Matthew Evans, Milkwood’s permaculture educator Kirsten Bradley, and Guardian Australia cartoonist and rabble rouser First Dog on the Moon.

This week the impacts of climate change have quite literally washed up on our shores. 

An ‘unprecedented’ but sadly long-predicted mass mortality event at industrial fish farms just offshore – caused by a bacterial outbreak sparked by spiking ocean temperatures – has seen more than a million salmon dumped, and chunks of salmon flesh washing up on our local beaches. Truly grim.

Over the weekend the RSPCA removed its approved certification from Huon, the fish farmer now owned by scandal-prone Brazilian parent company JBS Meats.

I’m on the committee of local environmental group Neighbours of Fish Farming (NoFF), and the case against the multinational owned fish farms has never been clearer.

Elsewhere in Australia 🌀

The most southerly cyclone in 50 years crossed the Queensland coast at Beachmere.

My wife has family in Ballina so like millions of Australians we had a nervous weekend waiting for news. Was Cyclone Alfred’s southern track caused by climate change? 

Probably not, Cyclone Zoe crossed the coast at Coolangatta 1974.

But meteorologists – and experts like Climate Salad’s Mick Liubinskas – say that our warming planet means we will see more frequent, more intensive cyclones (and fires, floods and storms) and associated natural disasters in the years to come.

Quick Links 🔗 

→ A Mining Billionaire’s Case for Ditching Fossil Fuels (spoiler, it’s Fortescue’s Andrew Forrest) on the cover of this week’s Time magazine, where the iron-ore tycoon spruiks green hydrogen.

→ Michael Bloomberg steps in to help fund UN climate body after Trump withdrawal. Former presidential candidate steps in to cover USA’s financial obligations to the UN climate body.

→ Cold Wind Of Reality Hits Postponed Election. Tony Abbott comms chief turned Sky TV presenter Peta Credlin freaks out about the possibility of “a faster move to net zero” and a “total phase-out of coal mining and gas extraction” in a hypothetical Greens/Teal coalition with Labor post-delayed election (in the discarded Sunday Telegraph I picked-up at Sydney Airport).

And Finally… 🎬

Last week I also chatted to Roxane Bandini-Maeder, CEO and co-founder of Geoneon for a forthcoming issue of impactable.news.

Roxi – as she has been dubbed by our fellow Tasmanians – is a Swiss citizen drawn, like me to Tassie for its cooler air and mountain views. I learned a lot about Geoneon’s climate risk mapping tech, but on a hectic week of big storms and mass mortalities, it was her perspective on resilience that has stuck in my head: “I'm a big believer in resilience” said Roxanne. “And I think as an entrepreneur, we all have to be resilient. But also now with climate change, we won't avoid it. So we have to become very resilient.”

Sending you strength this week. And thanks for reading! If you have any feedback: good or bad, or suggestions for founders I should cover, email [email protected].