253 | Creating Effective Government and Private Sector Partnerships with Margaret Kim
Our guest this week on the pod is Margaret Kim. Maggie is the CEO of Gold Standard, a pioneer in climate protection projects that deliver on the Global Goals. Their vision is climate security ans sustainable development for all.
Resources mentioned in this episode include:
Effective Government Public Private Partnerships: Interview with Margaret Kim
NOTE: While it’s not perfect, we offer this transcription by Otter.ai for those who are hearing impaired or who don’t find listening to a podcast enjoyable or possible.
SPEAKERS
Paul Zelizer, Margaret Kim
Paul Zelizer 00:01
Hi, this is Paul Zelizer, and welcome to another episode of the Awarepreneurs podcast. This podcast is all about the intersection of three things, conscious business, social impact, and resiliency practice. Each episode I do a deep dive interview with a thought leader in this intersection, someone who has market tested experience and is already transforming many lives. Before I introduce our guests and our topic today, I have one request. If you could go over to Apple podcasts or whatever app, you're listening to the show on, do a rating and review, hit that subscribe button, it helps tremendously. Thanks so much for considering. Today, I'm thrilled to introduce you to Maggie Kim. And our topic is Creating Effective Government and Private Sector Partnerships. Maggie is the CEO of Gold Standard, a pioneer in climate protection projects that deliver on the global goals. Their vision is climate security, and sustainable development for all. Maggie, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Paul, for having me. It's such an honor to have you here. And you're doing such fabulous work that I can't wait for our audience to hear about before we get into that Maggie pleased to share with our audience. This is not easy work, although it's really important. And we're curious about a practice that you use to help you bring a resilient self to this important work. This is probably one of the most difficult questions I need to answer in a podcast. Because I'm not very good at self care and building that resilience personally. But I have to say I do. I moved to Switzerland about three years ago joining gold standard. And what I'm starting to realize is that regular check in with nature. So I'm not a very physical sort of sporty person. But I tried to get out to the nature at least once every two weeks by the lake or in the mountains in the trail tracks, just to dress with my music and walk a little bit. And just enjoy and immerse myself into that nature that that keeps me I guess alive and motivated and sort of bring me back to square one starting work on Monday. So that's how I keep my resilience, so to speak, then there's so much research about spending time in nature and how it kind of really sets us and people who do have much more creative thinking that they bring to their work. So that's a that's a great one. Thanks for sharing that with us. So you've had a really interesting career. Maggie, before we hit record, you were saying, well grew up in New York spent a bunch of time in Korea, and now you're in Switzerland. Like if, if our audience were like, “who is this Maggie Kim person?” give us a short version of the backstory of your work.
Margaret Kim 02:59
So I'm Korean American, born and raised in the east coast of the states. And I studied public and private sector organization at Brown University, and graduated thinking I really want to learn about organizations grow, and how organizations sort of grow to be, you know, from micro small scale to medium size. And what are some of the challenges so I ended up joining small size enterprise. In South Korea, I was very fortunate to join a brilliant team that wanted to really grow and drive the business. So I ended up working there in corporate strategy, Business Development sales, really understood the value chain of a manufacturer at that scale. And some face some of the challenges is an organization. You know, going through that growth, pain, what process are need to be in place, what what's an effective strategic partnership? How do you raise funds, how do you increase revenue, so it was such a wonderful experience based in South Korea. And then using my skills built in that sector. I ended up moving to sustainability and climate change area where I work for an amazing intergovernmental organization, Global Green Growth Institute, where I got to work with developing countries all over the world, small state islands, least developed countries and their governments and thought leaders in driving resource mobilization for their climate agenda, their sustainable development agenda. So that organization was based in South Korea as well. So I spent a long time in South Korea which which gave me personally a lot of great benefit being close to my extended family. So and then that brought me to my current job in Switzerland, and it was interesting, because I really wanted to understand how the government policies and strategies and all the plans, the great work that's put in place gets translated into real impact. And that's how I ended up that gold standard, where we're looking at tangible impact, verified impact, climate and sustainable development impact. Nice. And we're gonna get into gold standard in just a second. Before we do that anything you could say, I think that pivot from the private sector, in a more traditional business while you're doing business development and sales, and then pivoting into, let's call it the impact, you know, economy, what what was that like to be in a more traditional role in business, and since then, you've had two roles very much focused on impact. I'm a very honest person, so I'm ready. I'm gonna give you a very honest answer to that. I really enjoyed working for the company that I did. And I really worked with amazing people and amazing partners. But one day, I woke up thinking, you know, all this great work, Great thinking, you know, innovation, and, and hard work. What if it benefited broader audience, beyond just shareholders and the clients of the company, and that's how cliche, it may sound, that's how it all started. And, and I really wanted to the whole motivation was around maximizing impact. If I'm, you know, working hard and putting my sort of brain soul heart into it, I really want to do it for broader, greater impact. So that's how I ended up where I am today. And see wound up at this organization called gold standard, tell us a little bit like what is gold standard? And what was it doing, like, go back three years ago, like as you were coming on? What was there? And then we'll get into what's there today and going forward? But yeah, just kind of give our sense, give our audience a sense, what is gold standard? Gold Standard, is a global standard. We are NGO based in Switzerland. We're all about managing, measuring and maximizing impact. Because when people hear about standard and methodologies and metrics and measurement, monitoring performance, you know, these, these things don't really resonate with their everyday lives. But if you think about it, we've been hearing from media from all over the world, the risk of greenwashing. And gold standard 19 years ago, was established by WWF and like minded NGOs, to ensure there's environmental integrity and maximize sustainable development impact in the carbon markets. And and over the years, of course, we've worked with our partners and clients and and, and we've evolved to really bring best practice to articulate that impact in the carbon markets and verify it to ensure that there is no there's minimum risk of greenwashing. And now what we're evolving into based on that knowledge, and based on that best practice, how can we actually apply our principles are our ways of measuring impact to broader finance that's needed to address the global climate change crisis, as well as to support countries to develop in a sustainable way. So three years ago, when I joined, we were basically focused on developing methodologies and processes to to ensure environmental integrity and SDG sustainable development and packing carbon markets. And since joining, the team has really worked hard with its partners and different groups of stakeholders, to develop our tools and methodologies and guidances to to apply our principles and our integrity into other finance sources other than in addition to the market mechanism.
Paul Zelizer 09:30
So when I heard about you, while you were doing Maggie, I got really excited to have you on because like just to give our listeners a sense of why this is important why greenwashing is such a topic of conversation these days. If you go for instance, there's a way to search on Google certain keywords, and what's happening to those keywords over time. And one of the biggest rapidly growing keywords is something called ESG. AI or mental social governance, which is a way of talking about how can companies make decisions that have positive impact and good environmental benefits as opposed to negative ones. And that is one example of one. It's like one of the fastest growing keywords growth on the planet. And a big part of that is because the market consumers, especially those on the younger end of the spectrum, I'm going across the board, but especially anybody under 40 is saying, if a company isn't paying attention to positive impact and doing good things for our environment, we're not going to spend our money. Is that fair to say, Maggie?
Margaret Kim 10:39
Yes, there's, that's fair to say, I think there's power of Youth Power of consumers. But But I want to go back to the real basics, why we're why why we're talking about ESG. So maybe five to 10 years ago, ESG was a small division of small department of a company that sort of checks the, the minimum due diligence that then they need to do to comply with certain reporting requirements, etc. Over the course of last five years, I've seen a huge change in the corporate sector, for example, and this is not just corporate sector, we're seeing that change in financial sector. We're seeing that change in governments, we're seeing that change in investors. So how, how ESG was viewed before was sort of a compliance, like, we need to tick the boxes to get through. Whereas now, if you think about it, it's critical for the survival and success of a company, for example, we're talking about conservation, we're talking about biodiversity, we're talking about water access, for corporates who have their supply chain, that's heavily rely on water resource. And they're finding it hard to actually secure that securing water access, securing water resource and supporting local communities to have that. And that just increases the competitiveness of the company that holds that in their value chain. So the mindset has shifted, I want to say confidently that it has shifted from okay, we need to tick these boxes to report to this is about our survival. This is about our success. So it's not just looking good on paper looking good on some marketing material. But it's becoming a crucial success factor performance indicator for a lot of the companies. And that's putting pressure on investors as well. So it's amazing to see that needle change. I don't know if it's fast enough, but certainly, we're moving in that direction.
Paul Zelizer 13:00
Beautiful, thanks for that great explanation. So in short, both customers, and investors and other market forces are saying, we want to do business, we want to invest in companies that are paying good attention to these ESG issues. And so there's a great deal at stake, let's just say that for a company as well being and profitability, and maybe even survival going into the future to be perceived as doing well on these measures. And some companies decided, well, let's figure out how to do well on these measures, then other companies seemed a little more invested in well, let's do what we need to to perceive to be perceived as a company doing well, but you know, may not be particularly very deep. And that has something to do with why Gold Standard says we're going to help the market sort of vet, is this a company? Is this an organization that's truly moving the needle towards sustainability and positive impact in the world? Or is this one of those companies that's wants to be perceived that way? Because there's a lot of money at stake? Is that kind of fair to say, Maggie?
Margaret Kim 14:14
Very high level, of course, as a standard, we don't assess companies or because because a company's operations is divided into so many different elements and and where we currently focus, for example, hundreds and 1000s of companies have signed up for science based targets initiative, which is a global sort of network that's created by a number of respected think tanks and NGOs and uns to to help companies to set credible Net Zero target. And a lot of companies have had signed up for that in the last two to three years. But how do we know if companies are getting the They're in a credible way. And how do you measure that So, and what we support, of course, along with our partners is to advocate for companies to first disclose where they are in terms of carbon footprint to get there, and then try to reduce within their company boundaries within their boundary value chain boundaries to to reduce as much as they can, and then finance beyond their own boundaries, to contribute towards sustainable development impact. And then, of course, their policies or decision making their advocacy, their marketing communication should align with that. So so what we're trying to support is to find ways to advocate for that model, as well as to help companies to use market mechanisms. Or, or if they use market mechanisms, or non market financial mechanisms to invest in in creating that impact. Our role, gold standards role is to verify that impact and and basically put a stamp to that claim.
Paul Zelizer 16:12
Beautiful, and you keep using the word partners. Now, again, our episode title is about partnerships between government and private sector. And that was something I was really impressed with. So you have these standards, these gold standards that really are about helping to point in the direction or verify use the words companies that are actually having positive impact. But one of the ways you're amplifying or making the work that gold standard, more effective is by forming these private sector government partnerships. Talk to us a little bit about that.
Margaret Kim 16:54
So we work with four major stakeholder groups. So one are the corporates, especially the corporates, companies that have complicated value chain supply chain. Another group is governments, national governments, subnational governments. And third group is impact investors. And final group is project developers who are creating carbon credits. So for governments, it's interesting because we started with, we started by working with a number of national governments in in supporting them with Article Six of the Paris agreement. And for those of you who are not familiar with Article Six of the Paris Agreement is, is a cooperation mechanism. It's it's a market based mechanism that government to government can bilaterally agree and trade the mitigation outcomes. So in very simple terms, basically, government to government, they're they're trading carbon credits or or carbon outcomes. And we started working with governments in in designing their additionality framework and how to prioritize select projects that that qualify under this mechanism. And that led us to really understand the need for private and public partnerships. And the reason why this is important is because governments can't do it on their own. We know that, that we need trillions of dollars from private sector to be invested in order for us to achieve our global goals. And government on its own cannot achieve it and private sector on its own cannot achieve it. So these two entities, these two groups need to speak to each other and find the system systemic way of driving that impact driving that benefit for their own people. And, and for me, that was a starting point for us to think about, then then what's our role as a standard to to engage and to support that ambition is is around MRV, which is monitoring, reporting and verification. And and it's around trying to foster a blended finance model between public money and private money and to ensure that that money dries maximized impact. So we work with a number of private equity funds. We work with a number of impact funds that are trying to blend and create a blended finance mechanism for for public money, whether it's through an international financial institution or what Whether it's through a government development agency, to really to blend the finance, where the public money can direct the capital by taking the first loss, and to help channel private sector finance towards positive impact, where it's much needed. And that's the the model we have, we're working with a number of partners to drive that model. It's not easy, I have to say. And there's so many sort of buzzwords around blended finance model blended finance facilities, but how many of them are truly working, where we're facing those challenges, but it's really exciting because we have committed partners who really want to make it work.
Paul Zelizer 20:46
It's just genius. What y'all are doing Aggie and you referenced Article Six of the Paris Agreement listeners, I'll put a link to the shownotes. So if you want to read more about that, and we're gonna get more into in the second part of the show what those partnerships actually look like my Maggie and also how this actually works for gold standard as an enterprise. But if our listeners are listening, and they're like, Well, that sounds great, but gold standard has been going for, I don't know, your 1820 years now. 15 years, like for a while, right? You didn't just wake up yesterday and say, Hey, let's do this multi collaborative stakeholder partnership, public private thing, right? That's been going on for a while, if this is kind of sparking a light bulb and a listener saying, Wow, I never really thought of engaging with municipalities and governments before as a stakeholder in positive impact. But this is making a lot of sense. What would you suggest to one of our listeners who would like to have more collaboration and develop governments as a partner to get started any any like, here's the first three things you want to think about, if you're somebody who'd like to see more of this in your impact area.
Margaret Kim 22:06
I've, in my previous role, I've worked with many governments and in my current role, where we're working with a number of governments, and I think that the most important element before you start thinking about an engagement is to understand their priorities. And, and I know there are a lot of doubters when it comes to government work and policy work, but but based on my experience, people care. And and there are so many hours and an effort put in put into these policies and policies to support their own people. So for me, the first place to start is to really understand what that government's priority is. What's from from where I'm working in, in terms of climate targets, and sustainable development goals, like look through their high level policies, what are their important sustainable development areas? Is it is it about biodiversity loss to prevent biodiversity loss? Is it about energy access, in which sectors, what kind of programs are already in place? What kind of resource mobilization they're looking at, I think that's where everything starts to really understand what the government is prioritizing. And second, is to actually talk to them a lot of people based on our experience and my previous experience, you end up thinking we have a brilliant project idea of this must help the government of Uganda, for example. So you go pitch thinking this is a brilliant project. So take it and you'll be really surprised how many brilliant people in the government of Uganda already thought through prioritizing project pipeline, you know, aligning their results, matrix metrics to their overall government goal, their global commitments. So a lot of these things have a place and have governance have decision making process and consultation processes. So So I think the second part is to understand the process who makes which decision and who you need to talk to, to consult them. And third, is to actually understand the on the ground needs. So if you have a brilliant project, if you are thinking about a project site, go there, visit them, talk to the communities, talk to the local NGOs, there's a brilliant sort of NGO network and and think tanks and local groups, advocacy groups that are there to really provide you with all the scientific data evidence to go talk to them and under Then the real issues the gaps on the ground that you can add value, you can help them to maximize impact on the ground. So if you can connect, connect those three dots, I think you will have a brilliant project impact project or impact intervention in a country in partnership with government or municipality or sub national entities.
Paul Zelizer 25:24
Great suggestions, Maggie. Thanks so much. So in a moment, I want to hear a little bit about what gold standard looks like now and a little more in detail like your revenue streams and your programs and who your clients are. Before we do that, just want to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. I'm excited to announce that we have a new sponsor for the pot, Saybrook University. Saybrook University prepares students to challenge conventional thinking in business, social structures, mental and physical health and more. They have innovative online and hybrid programs to help students become part of a global community. They offer certificate, Master and doctoral programs, and they're guided by renowned faculty with years of experience in their respective fields. Saybrook is committed to helping students achieve their full potential, and their sacred community is deeply rooted in this humanistic tradition. Sacred graduates are transforming healthcare providing organizational leadership, developing sustainable practices, and caring for populations in the open to business and non business majors alike. Say bricks. 100% online Master of Business Administration Program is designed for students who are passionate about conducting business operations guided by the principles of sustainable social impact. Their hybrid online Doctor of Business Administration Program is designed for experienced professionals who are interested in exploring and applying the most recent research and theories regarding organizational and social systems change. You can learn more@saybrook.edu There's a link in the show notes. And thank you to Saybrook University for sponsoring this pot. So Maggie, in the second part of the show, we'd like to joke about putting on our entrepreneur glasses. So if you were to put on your entrepreneur glasses, you've been with gold standard. Now for three years, the organization's been going on for quite a number of years, if you just looked at like, what are your programs and revenue streams? And who do your clients tend to be right now.
Margaret Kim 27:33
So if we look at our revenue stream, it's I would say most of a large chunk of our revenue comes from carbon issuance. So carbon credit issuance, or whether that's through a voluntary carbon market or compliance market or government led market mechanism. And, and our second largest revenue comes from grants from governments or foundations. And third, we also have donations from like minded or principle light individuals or small enterprises who want to donate for for driving our mission. So that would be sort of the mix of revenue stream today.
Paul Zelizer 28:33
And in terms of like the team at gold standard, like how many people are working for the organization, how many people or I guess some of it, you might be a little bit more of a b2c model, you're working with a lot of companies and governments alike, but just how many organizations or individuals does gold standard tend to serve in a year these days?
Margaret Kim 28:57
So we are quite small, but but definitely growing quite rapidly as as the market signals. We're currently 28 people and this year alone, we're, we're looking to bring on board another eight like minded brilliant people to the team. We deal with, as I said earlier, we deal with four different stakeholder groups that have very different interest or an approach. So it's been quite challenging. We work with more than 80 countries in terms of our project developers distribution, geographically, we work with at least 10 governments today bilaterally in providing support to their work. We work with 3040 corporates through a platform I'm to support their their value chain challenges, and we work with individuals and also small enterprises who reach out to us to, to, for example, understand how to form a good cement zero strategy and how market mechanism mechanism can be used how to understand the beyond value chain financing or investment model how to understand blended finance models I investors so, so yeah, I haven't really counted the number of stakeholders, but definitely we're far stretched down in dealing with a very wide scope of stakeholders geographically, as well as industry wise.
Paul Zelizer 30:52
Yeah. But anything you could say, because what gold standard is doing, you have a wider range of stakeholders, then I could think back I have 100 episodes. I, I love our guests, and I form like a bond is like, Oh, I love this one. And I love this lot. It's like every parent's not supposed to Love A Child more, you know, they're all different, right? I love our guests. And they stay with me, and I'm thinking back, I can't remember a guest doing incredible work with his deeper variety. You know, just just a wide scope of different stakeholders of what you're doing with gold standard. And that's fascinating to me. I wonder if you have any, what have you learned about working with such a wide scope of stakeholders, private sector, you know, CEO and the head of state of a government in a country that, you know, is LDC at least developed country that's really trying to bring an economy both to get it to grow it. So there's more economic resources, but also struggling with some of the impacts of climate change, as we know, LDCs are more likely to be on the front lines of some of the changes we're seeing in terms of climate like, anything you could say about what you've learned, working with such a wide variety of stakeholders.
Margaret Kim 32:19
Cool. I'm still learning. I think it's gonna be a huge learning journey for all of us that gold standard, but but first thing is, I think the interest. And I'm, I'm saying it in a very high level, broad level, but I think the interest, I've seen the interest being aligned, more and more in the recent years, and I'm not I can't generalize the entire corporate industry, I can generalize all governments. But at the end of the day, companies, governments, investors, we're all human beings. And I think there's finally a consensus that we can run the earth that we live in, in the same way we did for the last, I don't know how many years and, and in order for us to really pass on the nature, the natural resources and the abundance that this generation had the luxury to enjoy. And I'm only talking about global North right now. Because the lot of the developing countries are actually at the front line of climate change, detrimental impacts of climate change. So if we really are serious about passing on the, to the future generation or the next generation, even the the abundance we have on Earth, is really to make sure we address climate change, and we work towards a sustainable development pathway. And I think that really, really high level which could be, which could sound cliche, I am seeing that, that interest being more and more aligned between the different stakeholders between the governments and corporates. So it's no longer you know, corporates are sort of saying, We want profit driven, we want to just profit and report back to our shareholders government saying no, no, no, I think the private sector needs to do more and more and more, we're not going to incentivize, I think they're, the dialogue is really opening up because we have a common interest. But of course, we all speak different languages there. So what I'm learning by being in a consortium that has a brilliant US based private equity, brilliant Conservation International Organization, brilliant project development agency, as are NGOs sub national level, a brilliant funder that's focused on climate ambition. They're all speaking different language. So so my key lesson learned from this is first to understand that different language and try to come up with a key messaging that works for all of us. And that's been a struggle. And it's not easy, because what private equity needs to drive is very different from what an international organization with a conservation or nature based objective need to achieve. So how do we sort of work together to understand that I think that's, that's very simple sounding task, but it's really, really hard to address. So so that's one of the key lessons. And second is, is really to communicate. I think people assume things because you're so used to working in one sort of industry or sector or, or group of people. So you realize this is the only way to go. But there are different innovations that can come through through these partnerships. And we're witnessing it and we're experiencing it every day, although it's challenging. So I think that that really open mind that communication and trying to learn from each other to drive that innovation is key to success when it comes to this, this sort of private and public partnership in a broader sense.
Paul Zelizer 36:36
Thanks for sharing that, Maggie. So two of the programs that really stood out as I was learning about gold standard, and getting ready for this, one of them is the actual work you're doing with corporates. So can you tell our listeners a little bit about how do you specifically work with corporates raise their hand and say this sounds interesting, we want in come work with us? What does that look like?
Margaret Kim 37:04
So we're currently working with mostly those corporate to have complex value chain supply chain. Because it's, I'm not saying it's simple, but at least the scope one and two, your direct emissions in your value chain are are easier to control or calculate or monitor. Whereas scope three, which becomes the supply chain, it's a complex world. And if you can't transform that sort of pathway towards net zero, then then you're set up for failure. So a lot of companies are trying to work on how to solve those challenges. So for example, if your, your, your supply chain has has a number of farms that are growing cows and creating milk for milk supply, and what if you're sharing that sourcing area with another company? How do you determine calculate your emission and pack your emission factor in that area? So it gets very technical, but but bear with me, and, and that, that's where companies are struggling, because for some companies, more than 80 90% of their carbon footprint comes from that scope, three supply chain admissions. So I think their gold standard can't provide all answers. But we're part of a group of partners and a platform called value change initiative, where we're trying to identify those areas of challenges, and try to come up with guidances that makes sense to corporates and work with corporates to sort of help them calculate that and connect that back to their reporting requirements. So that's one way of working with corporates. And more and more corporates are actually interested in, how can we invest in our own value chain, and claim the credit for their impact. So investment versus the resulting impact? So we're working with a number of corporates to to understand how they can set up a fund for example, that they can invest in and as a return, they they get the impact claim. That's, that's dedicated to them. And our role as a standard is to help them set up that MRV, the monitoring, verification and reporting system of the fund and make sure that we can certify the fund and certify the impact that's created by the Funds investment. So those are the two main areas that we're focusing on with the corporates and of course, there's a tremendous job done by our technical team on thought leadership and and advocacy as well. So right now, corporates are struggling because there are all these reporting requirements. And they're all these targets to achieve. But what can they claim? And what can they not? What can they offset? And what can they not offset so, so there's clarity, there's a global effort amongst a lot of the think tanks and global NGOs, to bring that clarity to play so that corporates don't have to struggle through that. And also to not fall into the cracks of greenwashing or impact washing. So that's another area in terms of policy, that we're trying to work with NGOs work with corporate partners to drive that clarity arm around corporate claims on impact.
Paul Zelizer 40:45
Beautiful, and we'll put a link in the show notes for companies that want to get more information about the work that gold standard is doing with companies. Another area that you're really well known for, is called fund certification. And it's more focused on investors rather than corporates talk to us a little bit. How does that work?
Margaret Kim 41:07
So it's the line The line between investor versus corporates are getting blurry, because of the discussion we just had. Because corporates are increasingly wanting to invest in their own value chain, their own supply chain, and claim credit for the impact that their investment has, has created. And investors and also they're more and more conscious about, you know, is my money going into maximizing sustainable development impact? And and how can we be reassured that impact is real? Because we briefly talked about greenwashing. Now, it seems like everybody's talking about impact washing, because it's such an easy word to just put in your, you know, cover page of the investment report cover page of your annual report. But it's how do you actually get there? So so the reason why we launched on the funds certification process is, initially when we were just focusing on carbon credits or carbon projects, we were looking at intervention level or project level impact. But now we're looking at aggregate of projects or programs. And can we certify the fund to make sure not only it's the driving real impact as a project, but also has the gold standard principles baked into integrated into the entire investment cycle, because a lot of times when we talk about verification or certification, whether that's a carbon credit, or, or or fund, it has to be integrated from very beginning, from the preliminary design stage, all the way on to performance monitoring, and the resulting of the impact claim or the carbon credit. So the funds certification is really to drive that practice the best governance best decision making. And also to to make sure that the key principles of gold standard are integrated into that funds, management, as well as the prioritization selection of projects, and driving that impact monitoring performance and driving that impact. So that gold standard can say, this fun meets our certification requirements. And therefore, these projects impact are certified by gold standard.
Paul Zelizer 43:43
So again, we'll put a link to the work you're doing to help investors make sense of this complicated terrain in the show notes. So maybe you've been there now for three years. And you know, I can imagine there's a lot to learn. But, you know, I would getting a sense of you. My sense is, you're somebody who's interested in being proactive instead of reactive. So like three years in, you got to have some sense of what gold standards about now and how things work. Like, what are you thinking about going forward? Where do you see the space of multi stakeholder partnerships, and really having deep impact and helping people kind of understand the difference between deep positive impact deep sustainability as opposed to impact washing and sustainability, Washington greenwashing. Where do you think this field is going and specifically, in your role as leader for gold standard? What's on your radar going forward?
Margaret Kim 44:46
Going forward, I think there's mountains of work to be done. And not just by gold standard, but but alongside with our committed partners. There's a lot to be done. I want to be optimistic that the needle is finally moving. And yes, it's went from millions to billions investment into climate change and, and sustainable development future. But that that needs to now go from billions to trillions. And while we go from billions to trillions, and as we scale investment, I want to my ambition is basically that all investment going into whichever way follows the the key principles of gold standard follows the best practices of gold standard doesn't necessarily need to be stamped by gold standard. But it will be great if, if this becomes best practice common practice amongst governments, amongst project developers, amongst investors amongst corporates. So, huge ambitions still a long way to go. But my ambition is the reputation we've earned in the carbon markets to be the best standard, the most rigorous, high integrity standard. I hope that that legacy lives throughout the investor groups throughout the government community, throughout the project developers and throughout corporate. So that would be my outlook for the future.
Paul Zelizer 46:27
I think y'all are doing fabulous work and listeners, please, if you feel comfortable, I'd love for you to share the story of what Maggie and her team at Gold Standard are doing far and wide, there'll be a link in the show notes to the gold standard website. Maggie, I can hang out with you all day, you're a super busy human. And our listeners are super busy humans too. If there was something as we're winding down that you were hoping we were going to get to that we haven't yet touched on. Or there's something you want to leave our listeners with. As we start to wind down, what would that be?
Margaret Kim 47:04
I think we're faced with probably the most unprecedented challenge as human beings, this, this climate, this, this challenge of climate change is real. And if we don't collectively work towards addressing it. Basically, it's unfair, it's probably going to leave our future generation, not much to deal with. So to me, it's there, there different interest groups, there are different agendas, there are different objectives. But at the end of the day, this is not something one group can solve. This is not something governments can solve. This is not something just corporates can solve. It has to be a collective effort, including, you know, Paul, you and me as individuals. So how do we reduce our footprint within our own control our own boundaries, our own national borders? And how do we finance beyond our own boundaries? And how do we communicate that? How do we? How do we discuss that and help each other understand the severity of the issue, and share best practices and successes and in the small wins, those will accumulate to be a big win. And I think it's really important to understand that, that if we don't do it in a collective and systemic, systemic way, we're not going to succeed. So I really hope that all of us think about our own role, not in just not just in our sort of organization wise, but also individually, what we need to do to contribute towards that, that global agenda and global goal.
Paul Zelizer 49:01
I agree, Maggie got a lot of work ahead of us. And I'm super grateful to folks like yourself, who are doing just such helping us discern, you're doing such incredible work in a space where people, like you said, are using big words and big language and we need those frames, but you're helping us discern, is this for real? Or is this somebody who's wanting to take advantage of some of the or be seen as making a change when they're maybe not doing as much positive things for the planet as we would hope I thank you for getting in there rolling up your sleeves and helping us discern the difference there. And it's been fabulous to have this dialogue with you.
Margaret Kim 49:45
Thank you, Paul.
Paul Zelizer 49:47
So this year, that's about all the time we have for today. Again, all the resources we talked about, check the show notes and please go tell your friends and colleagues about the incredible work that gold standard is doing. Before we go, just a quick reminder, we love listener suggested topics and guests. If you have an idea for the show, you can go over to the wire printers website, go to our contact page, we try to be really transparent. We have three simple guidelines are right there on the page. If you're like Check, check, check, check, check, check. Yes, this makes sense. Please submit it. We'd love to hear your ideas. So for now, I just want to say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care in these intense times. And thank you for all the positive impact that you're working for in our world.