Eco-adventurer warns businesses are mistaking green gestures for real sustainability

Former BBC journalist Andy Pag once worked from BBC Broadcasting House in Belfast, covering stories across Northern Ireland. Now, the eco-adventurer and environment & sustainability expert is asking businesses to move beyond gestures and rethink what sustainability means in practice.

Sustainability in business has outgrown the easy gestures. For Andy Pag, the real question is whether organisations are prepared to rethink what they do, how they use their resources, and what kind of change they are willing to make.

Andy brings a reporter’s eye to that question. Before becoming known for his low-carbon travel experiments, he worked as a BBC journalist and investigative reporter, with part of his career rooted at BBC Broadcasting House in Belfast.

His work since has taken a less conventional path. Andy has spent two decades testing sustainable travel in the real world, including driving a chocolate-powered lorry to Timbuktu and circumnavigating the world in a scrapyard bus fuelled with used cooking oil.

As an environment & sustainability expert, he uses those experiences to speak candidly about sustainable business, low-carbon travel and the difficulty of creating change in systems still built around carbon and consumption.

In this exclusive interview with the Champions Speakers Agency, Andy Pag discusses what sustainability now means for businesses, why companies struggle to change, how failure shapes resilience, and why optimism still matters in climate conversations.

Question 1. What stops businesses from making meaningful sustainability changes?

Andy Pag: “The biggest challenge is attrition.

“A lot of the time, the sustainability question is wrapped up in identity politics. That makes it sound heavier than I mean it to be. But there’s a sense of, “We’re changing something about the way we do things because of sustainability.” That attrition is really difficult to overcome.

“When you think about the definition of sustainability, protecting and securing the needs of people in future generations while protecting the needs of people today, I think the “needs of people today” bit often gets overlooked. Not necessarily in the policies, but in the communication.

“When you are making changes, it’s important that you can communicate clearly, and that the policies recognise there will be losers today in order for there to be winners tomorrow. There also needs to be communication about how those losers today are actually benefiting.

“Maybe that is some kind of compensatory process that happens now, or maybe it is a long-term message of, “I know this is tough this week, but look at what’s going to happen in the future.”

“So, attrition is difficult. Secondly, I’d say clarity of direction. It’s difficult to know what change is actually going to have a positive benefit.

“Unplugging phone chargers was the thing everybody obsessed about years ago. Now we know that’s just a drop in the ocean. It has a pretty meagre effect.

“Knowing today what change will have a positive benefit is uncertain. Maybe there is uncertainty about the technology. Maybe there is uncertainty about the legislative framework you’re working in. That creates nervousness about taking the step.

“I use the example of setting off to travel around the world. I didn’t know, when I set off from Cudden to drive around the world in a van I picked out of the scrapyard and ran on used cooking oil, whether I’d find enough fuel or whether the engine would hold together.

“But I think it’s important to take that first step. When I was stuck in traffic driving down to Dover, it was the most unremarkable journey. “I’m setting off to drive around the world.” Well, I’m just stuck in traffic on the motorway here. It’s not really that amazing as an experience.

“But you’ve got to take that first step to get to the next step, to be able to solve the next problem.

“So, attrition and uncertainty are two very real challenges businesses face. They’re hard, and you’ve got to take a step and get to the next bridge.”

Question 2. How do you stay resilient when things go wrong?

Andy Pag: “I often think of myself as a demotivational speaker rather than a motivational one.

“My mother always described me as very pigheaded and stubborn. When I started working at the BBC, my appraisals often said I had very strong resilience as a character trait. It was lovely to see that criticism from my mother turned into a positive by my employer.

“I’m very wary of hero stories where, when things are tough, you dig deep and find inner strength. I don’t find those stories particularly helpful

“I’ve realised that, in times where I’ve kept going, two things have driven me on.

“The first is to find a way to make the discomfort bearable. When we sailed around the world, it was lovely on a sailing boat when the water was blue and the sun was shining. But when the toilet breaks, there’s no plumber to call.

“When you undo the hose clamp on a pressurised sewage pipe and it explodes all over you, that sort of life is not for everyone. You have to find a way of making unbearable things bearable.

“I lived on a boat for four years as we sailed from Greece to New Zealand. More than once, there were problems with the plumbing, and it wasn’t always my personal sewage I was dealing with. I don’t want to get too graphic about it.

“But I found a way. This has to be solved. I’ll fix it now, have a shower, have a cup of tea, go for a lovely swim, try to find some coral and swim with coral fish as my treat after doing this horrible thing.

“No one enjoys it, but you find a way of making it bearable.

“As a counter-example, I hate sitting in traffic. I know people who drive an hour in the morning and an hour at night, and most of that time they’re sitting in traffic. That is an unbearable thing I couldn’t find a way of making bearable.

“The second thing I’ve realised is that it helps if you paint yourself into a corner.

“When I set off to drive around the world, I got to India and was arrested for having a satellite phone. While I was in India, they brought in a new law banning satellite phones. I had no idea.

“I was arrested and they made a big fuss on television that I was a terrorist planning something. Very quickly, the police realised they’d made a terrible mistake, but by then they’d made such a big fuss about it that no one wanted to back down.

“The whole story took six months to resolve. It took an awful lot of money in lawyers’ fees. At several points, it was made clear to me that if I got on a plane and went home, this would all go away.

“But I had painted myself into a corner. I said, “I’m driving around the world.” I’d built this van, the van was in India, and I couldn’t abandon it. So really, I had no choice.

“I spent the next six months fighting a legal case and finding a way of making the unbearable bearable. I stayed with paragliding friends and went flying every day. I found solace and companionship among those friends, which really helped me, because psychologically I went through a kind of breakdown as a result of that experience. It was very, very stressful.

“In terms of resilience, those are the two recipes I recognise as part of the success when I have dug deep and found inner strength.

“But they’re not necessarily great checkboxes to put on your to-do list. “I’m going to make it, so I have no way to fail. I’m going to look like an idiot if I get this wrong.”

“That’s why I say I’m more of a demotivational speaker than a motivational one. I don’t know how much that helps people when they’re facing challenges of their own.

“There is a lot to be said for failure as well. I’ve planned a lot of expeditions that never came to anything, and you’ve never heard of them, and you never will. But they’ve been stepping stones onto the next thing.

“It’s important to think about failure as part of the process. It’s not a full stop. It’s a comma where you move on to the next thing.

“Hero stories often disguise a bunch of failures that came before. It’s okay to give up. Motivation is important, but sometimes the wise thing to do is to look at a situation, call it quits, fold your hand, and start again.”

This exclusive interview with Andy Pag was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.