CEO Jennifer Jordan-Saifi believes she is well-placed to try. Jordan-Saifi spent the first decade of her career providing humanitarian aid in conflict zones in the Middle East, and the decade after that negotiating the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on behalf of the Canadian government. Diplomacy comes second nature to her. These days, she uses it to convince private sector CEOs to act on climate reform.
Her main priority is to bridge the gap between under-resourced governments with fast-approaching climate targets and private-sector leaders with money to spend. “To achieve the SDGs and the Paris Climate Agreement by 2030, we need to move from billions of dollars in investment to trillions,” she explains. “Most governments don’t have the resources to do this, which is why we’re falling short of those goals. We need the private sector to come on board.”
The SMI’s founding mission was to form a de facto “United Nations for the private sector” that would identify scalable climate solutions, convince private sector leaders of their value and viability, and help those leaders to overcome barriers together, says Jordan-Saifi, who has been part of the organisation since its foundation in 2020, in her previous capacity as private secretary to the then-Prince of Wales. When His Majesty ascended to the throne in 2022, Jordan-Saifi took on the mantle of CEO, and he graduated to “the wise man on the mountain”, she says — still supportive of the SMI, but “at arm’s length”, in deference to his new constitutional responsibilities.
Sustainable Markets Initiative CEO Jennifer Jordan-Saifi with King Charles III.Photo: Jeff Spicer from PA Media
Her mandate to 2030 was clearly laid out in the organisation’s 2021 Terra Carta manifesto. Inspired by the Magna Carta, the Terra Carta is “a private sector roadmap that puts nature, people, and planet at the heart of global value creation”. Its 10 principles include: accelerate and align industry roadmaps, adopt common metrics and standards, sustainable investing at scale, and create market incentives. The SMI also has a secondary manifesto, the Astra Carta, which was published in 2023, to “protect our origins on Earth” as the space race heats up. If the SMI is the private sector’s answer to the UN, these are its resolutions, she says: “It’s really about transforming business models and economic models to be default sustainable.”
The move towards cross-industry pathfinders is “a maturity thing”, says Jordan-Saifi. “When we started, we grouped companies by industry because many of them hadn’t thought about sustainability before. We needed to get everyone moving in the same direction of travel, even if they were moving at different paces. Now, to deliver on that, we need a more horizontal approach. We have always acknowledged that change won’t come from one company alone; now we’re saying it won’t come from one industry alone.”
Educate and elevate
The SMI’s main goal is to “bring leaders in and make them feel safe to learn”, says Jordan-Saifi. It’s a process of “continuous improvement”, while acknowledging that “nobody is going to be perfect overnight”. In service of this, the organization stages a lot of “seeing is believing” interventions, highlighting the power of field trips to see case studies in action and catalyze mindset shifts.