Once a somewhat niche industry, critical minerals are now dominating headlines, influencing geopolitical trends and driving international trade.

These materials are core components of technologies crucial to the energy transition and defence systems, and heightened interest in these areas is fuelling demand. For example, lithium demand jumped by 30% in 2024, while nickel, cobalt, graphite and rare earths all increased by 6-8% – and it is expected to keep climbing.

With the International Energy Agency forecasting demand for these minerals to triple or even quadruple by 2040, the rush for critical minerals will continue shaping international relations, highlighting the need to address major environmental and social implications.

In this week's episode, Giulia interviews Olimpia Pilch, critical minerals consultant at Minefield Consulting, on the complex world of critical minerals, their importance in energy transition and defence, and the geopolitical and environmental challenges involved.

Their wide-ranging conversation covers:

• The definition of critical minerals
• Supply chain vulnerabilities and geopolitical risks
• China's role in critical mineral processing and supply
• What are the potential and limitations of critical mineral recycling
• The environmental and social implications of mineral extraction

While the Global North has outsourced polluting industries, including mining, for decades, it’s crucial to understand that clean technologies need these primary sources. Amid geopolitical tensions straining supply chains, achieving the energy transition may require a new world order.

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With Season 6 we're doing something different.

The world feels unpredictable right now, but it's not random. Climate shocks, geopolitical tension, technological disruption, rising costs, shifting power - these aren't separate crises, they're all pressures building across the same system.

Over the past five seasons of Shaken Not Burned, we’ve explored climate, finance, technology, sustainability, inequality and more - often as separate topics. But the world doesn’t experience them separately. So what’s actually going on?

In this opening episode, Felicia Jackson and Giulia Bottaro unpack why the world feels increasingly unpredictable - and more importantly, how do you navigate it?

This season, we’re rethinking how we understanding what's happening around us and how we decide what to do next.

Each episode will take you inside a specific industry or system - from finance to AI to supply chains - to understand how these pressures are playing out in practice. Not as abstract trends, but as real decisions, trade-offs and consequences.

Because this isn’t abstract. It shapes what things cost, how businesses operate, where risks sit - and what choices are available to all of us.

And once you can see that, the world stops looking like a series of random crises and starts looking like something you can navigate.

It’s what allows you to see what matters, where change is possible, and how to act when the future isn’t clear.

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Two years on, we have reached season 6!

We have explored a wide range of topics, from the just transition to the planetary boundaries, through the circular economy and climate risk. Now, it's time to delve even deeper into our quest to help you build sustainability literacy.

The current multicrisis is affecting industries in different ways: companies are facing challenges that are unique to the context in which they operate.

That’s why, in this season, we’re tackling one sector at a time, exploring the risks and trade-offs behind business as usual. Each arc will comprise four episodes to drill down into fundamental shifts, innovation, and regulation: expect in-depth analysis on mining, fashion, AI, and many more.

We are living in turbulent times - what happens next depends on how well we understand the world around us. At Shaken Not Burned, we believe that sustainability literacy is a key tool in identifying where risks and opportunities lie. Join us for season 6 as we decode how the decisions driving our economies, industries and institutions are unfolding in practice.

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The food system underpins our entire society. Its stability is crucial: when it starts to wobble, prices rise, availability becomes uncertain, and stress travels quickly from farms to household.

Yet, much of modern agriculture still operates under deep uncertainty. Farmers spend tens of billions of dollars every year on crop protection chemicals, largely without being able to see how much of what they actually apply reaches the plant.

When you don't have that visibility, the rational response for many is to manage risk with excess. However, overuse of pesticides has far-reaching impacts not only on ecosystems, but also human health.

In this week’s episode, Felicia speaks to Vishnu Jayaprakash, founder and CEO of Agzen, an MIT spinout that has developed an AI-based system that measures and controls the amount of chemicals being sprayed on crops. Its technology helps farmers cut chemical use by 30-50 % without sacrificing yields.

The conversation explores the intersection of climate risk, food systems, and the role of technology in making agriculture more efficient and sustainable. Vishnu shares his personal journey into agriculture and what led him to develop Agzen.

Sometimes, the fastest, deepest changes will not come from tearing systems down, but from seeing them more clearly and addressing them differently. Whether making industrial agriculture more precise is a bridge to something better, or a way of prolonging a model that ultimately needs bigger change, is an open question. What is clear is that visibility, accountability, and better information shape what's possible.

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Buildings shape much of our daily lives, but their environmental impact often goes unnoticed. Yet the built environment accounts for nearly 40% of global energy-related carbon emissions, from the energy used to heat and power buildings to the materials used to construct them.

In this episode of Shaken Not Burned, Felicia talks to Drew Shula, founder and CEO of Verdical Group, about the role the construction sector plays in climate action. The conversation explores how decisions made during design and construction can influence emissions, costs and resilience for decades, and why much of the real progress in reducing building emissions is happening at the local level.

From energy modelling and building standards to the challenge of scaling sustainable construction practices, this episode looks at how the built environment is becoming both one of the biggest climate challenges – and one of the most practical places to make progress.

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There are talks of endless economic crises, yet the rich are getting richer. Even though many countries promise a welfare system, healthy job markets, and in general decent quality of life for the masses, the numbers suggest that inequality is only getting worse.

According to Oxfam, in 2025 billionaire wealth jumped by over 16% to $18.3 trillion compared to 2024 levels. This massive amount of money is spread among only 3,000 people, who are worth an average of $6.1 billion each. Perhaps more shockingly, billionaire wealth has gone up by 81% in just five years. Is there even a country or industry where average wages have grown at the same rate since 2020?

Meanwhile, 25% of the global population can’t afford regular meals, and nearly half are living in poverty. But why are we talking about this in a sustainability podcast? One of the central tenets of Shaken Not Burned is pursuing a just transition: if the world's richest 1% own around 45% of the global wealth, we can’t expect this money to be invested in a way that will benefit all people in an equitable manner.

In this week’s episode, Giulia interviews Julia Davies, impact investor at We Have The Power and a member of Patriotic Millionaires UK, on what we can do to recalibrate the world's wealth system.

For Julia and her fellow Patriotic Millionaires UK members, the answer is simple: increase taxes on wealth, not on work. The organisation proposes a tax of 2% on wealth above £10 million – however, the UK government doesn’t seem to be listening.

The conversation explores the implications of wealth extremism, emphasising the importance of community solutions and systemic change to address these pressing issues, advocating for a more equitable distribution of wealth and resources.

Crucially, all of us can do something about this, as individuals or business owners: support the campaign and “vote with our wallets”: that is, buy from ethical companies and small- and medium-sized businesses, rather than massive corporations.

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Climate action is facing political backlash, from watered-down EU regulation to the overturning of the EPA’s endangerment finding in the United States. Yet beneath the headlines, systemic climate risk is becoming harder for central banks, insurers and investors to ignore.

In this episode of Shaken Not Burned, Felicia speaks with Rachel Delacour, co-founder and CEO of Sweep, about the Climate Contribution Framework, developed with Mirova, ICARE and Winrock International. The framework builds on existing emissions standards but moves beyond footprint alone, assessing how companies reduce emissions, scale low-carbon solutions and finance climate innovation.

As investors search for credible signals of long-term resilience, this conversation explores whether we’ve been measuring the wrong thing — and what it would mean to evaluate companies by their full contribution to net zero rather than by emissions alone.

Sweep and Mirova Research Center launched the Climate Contribution Framework (CCF): A New Standard for Corporate Climate Action. This pioneering methodology developed by I Care by BearingPoint, and Winrock International offers an unprecedented unified, science-based benchmark to fairly measure and value the full spectrum of corporate contributions to global net zero.

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In this episode of Shaken Not Burned, Felicia Jackson speaks with Rob Cobbold, founder of Native Squared, about what credible nature finance looks like when you start from land, communities, and long-term stewardship — rather than carbon metrics and abstract credits.

They unpack why many current funding models for nature protection struggle to deliver durable outcomes, how carbon-first and uplift-based approaches can exclude the ecosystems most worth protecting, and why intact nature often fails to qualify for finance at all.

Trust — between funders, communities, companies, and ecosystems — is the missing infrastructure in nature finance: benefit-sharing, governance, and time horizons matter more than ever. Importantly, Indigenous and local communities are among the most effective stewards of ecosystems.

The conversation reaches a surreal but revealing point when Rob explains that, in some cases, the most legally robust way to protect a forest may be to buy the logging rights – and then not log it. It seems that it’s easier to use the same legal tools designed for extraction for protection, compared to the systems supposedly built for conservation. It’s hard to think of a clearer illustration of how upside-down current models have become.

Rather than offering a new “solution,” this episode focuses on judgment: how different models define value, who benefits, where responsibility sits, and how to distinguish genuine stewardship from compensation dressed up as impact.

Nature is foundational to climate, economies and human wellbeing, not an optional add-on: biodiversity loss and climate change are deeply interconnected and mutually reinforcing.

Unfortunately, carbon-centric funding models can undermine nature protection rather than support it. Damaging behaviour can be perversely rewarded because it shows that action is needed: if a forest is being logged, the current system can ensure that funds are directed to that area to avoid logging. At the same time, pristine forests are not legally entitled to funding because it is assumed they don't need protection. Intact rainforests, coral reefs, mangroves – essentially, those ecosystems doing well – often can’t access finance because they aren’t “additional” enough.

Outcomes matter more than processes, even when certainty is impossible.

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