The Impact Equation

Mary Long-Dhonau OBE has spent more than 25 years helping people prepare for one of the UK's fastest-growing climate risks. Known across the country as Flood Mary, she became an advocate after her own family home flooded repeatedly with contaminated sewage. Faced with little practical support and caring for a young son with severe autism, she turned that experience into a mission to help others recover more quickly and prepare more effectively. In this episode of The Impact Equation, Mary explains why flooding is no longer something that only affects communities beside rivers. As our climate changes, surface water flooding is becoming an increasing threat, and she argues that homeowners, businesses and policymakers all need to rethink what resilience looks like.

Mati Carbon, led by founder and Mulago fellow Shantanu Agarwal, made history in April 2025 by winning the $100 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal. In this episode, Shantanu shares how Mati uses enhanced rock weathering to turn pollution into soil-enriching fertilizer for smallholder farmers in the Global South. We discuss the unique model that combines rigorous climate science with a non-profit governance structure, exploring whether effective climate solutions can be both technically credible and distributively fair. Shantanu is a Mulago Fellow and this interview is the second in a series of three episodes with our friends at the Mulago Foundation https://www.mulagofoundation.org.

Today's episode we welcome Peter Briffett, CEO and co-founder of Stream. Most people are paid at the end of each month but bills and emergencies don't keep to a calendar, so the lowest-paid end up borrowing - through overdrafts and payday loans - to bridge the gap. Stream lets workers draw earnings they've already accrued, and has grown from there into savings, financial coaching and benefits, built around the employer rather than a bank. It now reaches more than three million workers across roughly a thousand employers, including the NHS, is backed by social-impact investors and recently closed a $90m Series D that took total funding past $200m.

Folake Owodunni is the co-founder and CEO of Emergency Response Africa. ERA is a healthcare technology company improving how medical emergencies are managed across Africa, starting in Nigeria. They operate the largest network of trained First Responders, ambulances, and verified emergency-ready hospitals. This network allows them to connect people experiencing medical emergencies to the help they need, anytime, day or night. Folake is a Mulago Fellow and this interview is the first in a series of three episodes with our friends at the Mulago Foundation https://www.mulagofoundation.org.

Lord Francis Maude is a senior British political figure and former minister. His career spans three Governments, four decades and multiple continents. Having had his first ministerial post under Margaret Thatcher, Francis has long experience and deep understanding of how governments work. From his early days in the HM Treasury to leading reform in the Cabinet Office, he became one of the architects of modern UK public service reform. As Minister for the Cabinet Office during the coalition years, he drove efficiency, digital transformation, and a sharper focus on execution inside government.

Adam and Rafi review the last seven episodes in our regular wash up conversation

Mark Bjornsgaard has scaled and exited seven businesses in healthcare, finance and music. As founder of Deep Green, Mark has worked out how to turn waste heat from AI data centres into heating local infrastructure and homes, with billions of investment. In this conversation, Mark talks through the long road to making that idea commercially viable, why earlier versions failed, and why the real breakthrough came from solving an economic problem rather than leading with a green one. He is refreshingly direct on what it takes to build: kill weak ideas early, stay obsessed with the customer problem, and make new systems real enough that people can trust what they are seeing.

How does a trained chemist transition into an investment banker, a senior British diplomat in Beijing, and ultimately, the CEO overseeing the world’s most critical environmental disclosure platform? In this episode Rafi sits down with Sherry Madera, CEO of CDP, to map out her curiosity-led career and explore how data has become the ultimate force for global change. From navigating the thick PM 2.5 smog of Beijing to steering massive data strategies at the London Stock Exchange Group, Sherry has spent her life translating complex risks into actionable boardroom intelligence. Rafi and Sherry dive deep into the mechanics of CDP—an independent platform capturing environmental data from over 24,000 companies representing two-thirds of the world’s market capitalization. Sherry breaks down the core business realities of sustainability, the expansion of disclosure beyond carbon, and why the ultimate test for modern corporations is moving from simple correlation to hard economic causation.