Episode 212: Emma Stewart, Netflix Sustainability Officer
Jun 6, 2022
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Emma Stewart, Netflix Sustainability Officer, discusses bringing the company's carbon footprint to net zero, prioritizing emissions sources, offsets, and carbon removal. Insights on Netflix's sustainability journey, late entry into sustainability, motivations for action, and the role of companies in environmental change.
Netflix is working to achieve net zero carbon footprint by engaging millions through film content.
Emma Stewart emphasizes the importance of aligning corporate sustainability strategies with climate goals.
Collaborating with governments and peers is vital for driving collective action towards sustainability targets.
Deep dives
MCJ Membership and Community Impact
The podcast discusses the creation of My Climate Journey (MCJ) membership option aimed at individuals looking for a community aspect while learning about climate change. The membership includes screening criteria focusing on determination, ambition, optimism, and collaboration. Over 1,300 members have joined the Slack community, leading to the formation of founding teams, nonprofits, hiring, funding, events, and open-source projects.
Netflix Sustainability Efforts
The podcast features Emma Stewart, Netflix's sustainability officer, working to bring Netflix's carbon footprint to net zero and raise climate awareness. Netflix's sustainability journey started after Emma joined, discussing challenges, surprises, emissions sources, and strategies in decarbonizing energy supply and electrifying production vehicles.
Sustainability Journey and Career Choices
Emma Stewart shares her childhood environmental passion leading to starting a club for sustainability practices. Her professional journey involves working across academia, consulting, nonprofits, and public companies. She chose the in-house role at Netflix due to its impact, speed, and potential alignment of business values with sustainability needs.
Corporate Sustainability Strategies and Influencing Policies
Emma discusses the importance of corporate sustainability strategies aligning with climate goals and influencing policy for broader impacts. Netflix collaborates with governments on policy and awareness initiatives and engages audiences through storytelling to instigate climate conversations.
Future Goals and Collaborations
The podcast delves into Netflix's roadmap for achieving sustainability targets, including decarbonizing energy supply, electrifying vehicles, and investing in clean technologies. Emma emphasizes the importance of measuring progress, leveraging technology for ongoing monitoring, and collaborating with governments and peers to drive collective action.
Individual Contributions and Advocacy
Emma encourages individuals to make their voices heard, influence decisions at different levels, and engage in sustainability discussions within their spheres of influence. She highlights the significance of individual actions and voices in driving positive change towards sustainability goals.
Today's guest is Emma Stewart, Sustainability Officer at Netflix.
Emma is working to bring the company's carbon footprint to net zero, raise awareness through their film and television content, and engage their millions of members on climate and environmental change. Emma brings a rare combination of domain expertise (environmental strategy, climate change accounting and policy, green buildings), strategy (start-up executive and corporate "intrapreneur"), and inventiveness (e.g. an architect of the original "science-based target" movement now 1000+ companies strong) to the field of corporate sustainability.
I was excited for this one because Netflix is a pillar company. They've got a big footprint and swing a big bat as it relates to their content, storytelling and audiences. We talk about Netflix's journey and how they got to be late to the game, what motivated them to get into action, what Emma's charter was coming in, where she started, and how she went about prioritizing. Some interesting tidbits come out in this discussion in terms of where the actual emissions are coming from, how they think about emissions they are directly responsible for versus the content production outside of the walls of their originals, how they think about things like offsets and carbon removal, and also Emma's general theory of change for what role companies play and what else needs to happen as it relates to policy, activism, government, and other things that are required to make this transition as quick and as efficient as possible.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on Twitter @jjacobs22 (me), @mcjpod (podcast), or @mcjcollective (company) and via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
