If you can cast your mind back beyond Partygate and all the dodgy deals over PPE, there was one remarkable story about Covid-19 which wasn’t covered much in the press. The Chinese made public the genetic makeup of Covid remarkably quickly after the disease surfaced, and over the following weekend (yes weekend) Sarah Gilbert and Katherine Green had worked out the formula for the vaccine which became known as AstraZeneca. 

One weekend.

How on earth did they manage that? Well for years scientists had been warning of the next Pandemic. Companies were even set up to provide Pandemic Insurance -though the take-up was pretty small. Gilbert and Green knew where the virus was going to originate, and they had been working away diligently behind under-funded closed doors mapping our its likely make-up. So when the formula arrived from China, they had to tweak things a bit, and they had the answer.

They happily shared all their knowledge with people who might previously been seen as competitors, and rather than crow when one vaccine proved less effective than another, they immediately offered their labs to help with fixing it. All rather un-capitalist behaviour.

Of course it then took months to get approval, and it wasn’t helped by the mob of conspiracy theorists arriving in force. If you want the whole story, Gilbert and Green’s book Vaxxers takes some beating.

The formula for FOOTPRINT+ was modelled about the time that Covid was starting to appear over the horizon. The scientists knew the pandemic was coming, but the politicians sat on their hands. We took a look at this and thought there’s a much bigger cloud behind this one and it's called Climate, and when the Covid one passes, that one’s going to be the next big C. So while Covid was taking its course, we carried on putting together our own formula, and we launched it last year.

Of course we aren’t the clever people in this story; we most certainly don’t consider ourselves to be visionaries or even particularly smart. But what we decided to do was provide a forum where the people who are clever and visionary can come together for 3 days to sit with each other to share their knowledge and experience. A little like the people who did the right thing on Covid, they are happy to share expertise because they feel they are all working towards trying to fix something bigger than any of their shareholders' demands. Competitors talk to competitors, people share stories about success and failure. The atmosphere in the room last year was described as electric.

There are the equivalent of Anti-Vaxxers in this story. This year’s COP will be set in Dubai, and no doubt it will be swarming with Big Oil lobbyists. But the next big C won’t go away, and behind the scenes, clever people are now working hard to develop their climate strategies.

The greatest movement is from the companies who cater for the next generation. Just as McDonalds have (remarkably) come up with McPlants, student accommodation suppliers are seriously wary of building in concrete now. It’s not an absolute yet, but behind closed boardroom doors, the conversations are very much moving towards alternative methods of construction.

The people who are driving the property market now are coming over the horizon, and they are sharing anxiety all over social media about the planet and what they think needs to be done to try to correct it. Companies which ignore this won’t be trading for very much longer.

The more enlightened funders know that the next generation is starting to avoid buildings they don’t like the look or sound of, whether they’re considering purchase or are part of the burgeoning marketplace of renters. The developers of the new timber office building just finished in Hoxton are very well aware of this. Having taken the jump of faith into Net Zero, they looked very happy and relaxed at their opening; a lot more so than some of the other developers we talk to.

There are companies who haven’t seen the light yet; but they are starting to become less in number. We are running an Insta page where we ask the younger members of staff on our database why they went into a company which works in the environmental field, be they engineers, architects, insurance or funders. The replies all very similar.