The Fire & The Flood: Managing the threats of a global pandemic and changing climate

Navigating Our World

Our house sits next to a river. We see the water slowly rising year after year and threatening to flood the foundation. Then, a house fire erupts. What do we do? If we don’t act against both the fire and flood, our house will be gone.

Doug Baker, Chairman and CEO of Ecolab, believes climate change is a serious business risk that must be addressed even amidst a burning pandemic, as he describes in his house-on-a-river parable. In conversation with Brown Advisory’s Karina Funk, Baker discusses climate risk and lessons of the pandemic from his vantage point at the helm of Ecolab, which provides technology for clean water, safe food and hygienic environments to three million businesses around the world.

Guest:
Doug Baker
Chairman and CEO, Ecolab

Host:
Karina Funk, CFA
Portfolio Manager; Chair of Sustainable Investing, Brown Advisory

Background Reading:

• The Unlikely Environmentalists: How the Private Sector Can Combat Climate Change, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2020
• Leading a New Era of Climate Action, Harvard Business Review, January 31, 2020
• Larry Fink's Annual Letter to CEOs, BlackRock, January 14, 2020
• Let’s Make Water Chapter One of the Climate Story, LinkedIn, September 25, 2019

Please visit the Navigating Our World website to listen to our first episode: We've Been Here Before (and Made It Through): A Conversation with Jon Meacham, historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

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