A conversation between UrbanEmerge and Net Positive Labs
UrbanEmerge is an inclusive and sustainable development consultancy working across low, middle, and high-income countries. Their work spans circular transition strategies, sustainable and inclusive urban infrastructure planning, climate finance, private sector sustainability consulting, and digital innovation. From supporting transit-oriented development in Vietnam to circular economy pilots in the UK’s high streets, UrbanEmerge operates at every scale where policy, place, and private sector intersect. This conversation is a collaborative exchange between Dr Naji Makarem and Andreas Beavor, co-founders and managing partners of UrbanEmerge, and Frank Van Beuzekom, COO & co-founder of Net Positive Labs.
It can feel like sustainability keeps cycling between hype and backlash. The question is not whether it works, but why it feels like it keeps stalling. ESG frameworks that felt permanent get quietly shelved. Companies that were racing toward net zero slow down. Net Positive Labs co-founder Frank Van Beuzekom admits he may be frustrated at times just how cyclical this can be. Yet, how cyclical this process is, is also natural as public and private sector entities test what works and what is durable. That said, it remains a bit of a disappointment, because the case for sustainability, in a broad sense, is so clear.
Naji and Andreas of UrbanEmerge also see the cycles. The question for them is not whether momentum comes and goes, but what form it takes when it returns. Each cycle creates pressure to refine what sustainability actually means and what it requires in practice. The current contraction, in that reading, is less a reversal and more a recalibration and broadening of perspectives from a narrow focus on carbon emissions to a broader and more inspiring circular economy perspective.
Both organisations are clear on one thing: the underlying case has not weakened. Waste and pollution in cities is measurable and harmful. Biodiversity loss is accelerating. The gap between awareness and broad action in business and governance can still be too wide.
One of the more important arguments in the conversation is that the dominant framing of sustainability as an energy and carbon problem has, over time, narrowed the scope of action in ways that can even be argued to be counterproductive.
The path of reduction, as Naji Makarem of UrbanEmerge describes it, went something like this: global environmental challenges were compressed into the climate problem, and the climate problem was then compressed into a carbon emissions problem. Each step made the task feel more manageable, but it also subtracted a great deal that matters. Biodiversity loss, soil degradation, water cycles, and land use have largely fallen outside the mainstream sustainability conversation despite being deeply connected to carbon absorption and long-term ecological function.
"The UK is one of the most environmentally degraded countries in the world when it comes to biodiversity," Naji notes, citing consecutive State of Nature reports. That is not a fact that appears in most corporate sustainability reports. It also points to something important: a company can achieve net zero in its energy use and still contribute to an ecosystem that is losing its capacity to function.
The alternative framing Naji proposes is a circular transition, built around three distinct principles. The first is to regenerate nature, which means sourcing from regenerative agriculture, well managed forestry, and responsible mining rather than supply chains that deplete soil health or contribute to deforestation. The second is to keep products in circulation, which opens up new business models around repair, reuse, and product stewardship. The third is to reduce waste and pollution, which is where carbon reduction fits in, not as the whole story, but as one component within a broader system.
This reframing matters because it changes what organisations are asked to do, and it changes what they can point to when they do it. Reducing emissions is often invisible to customers. Addressing climate and environment challenges in other ways, such as sourcing from regenerative suppliers, eliminating packaging waste, or rebuilding relationships with local producers is visible and tangible to people who are not sustainability specialists.
One of the most consistent barriers to sustainability adoption in the private sector is not a disagreement with the goals; rather,it is the assumption that meaningful progress requires unaffordable cost increases. Both teams have encountered this in practice, and both have found it to be more manageable than it appears.
Naji describes a calculation worked through with food service businesses in their Circular Kitchens initiative. Switching from conventional to organic milk might involve an input cost increase of 50 to 100 percent on that line item. On the surface, that sounds prohibitive. But when you model the actual price increase required to absorb that cost at the point of sale, the result is around 2 percent of the retail price. In concrete terms, a coffee that costs 3.50 would cost 3.55.
What makes that figure significant is not just that it is manageable in isolation. It is that it sits inside a period where consumers have absorbed 30 to 50 percent general inflation with no associated environmental or social benefit. A 2 percent premium on something that is demonstrably better, and that can be communicated clearly, is a very different ask of customers.
The implication is not that all sustainability transitions are cheap. Some genuinely involve higher costs, and those trade-offs deserve honest and robust discussion. But the assumption that any meaningful transition is financially out of reach is, in many cases, a failure of analysis rather than a reflection of reality. The role consultants and advisors can play here is specific and practical: model the actual numbers, not the headline input cost.
One of the more productive tensions in the conversation is between the work UrbanEmerge does at a large institutional scale and the work being done at the level of individual businesses.
At the macro end, UrbanEmerge is involved in programs such as the FCDO-funded Green Cities Infrastructure and Energy Programme (GCIEP), operating across multiple countries including Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia and Vietnam, where the focus is on sectors including transit-oriented development, renewable energy transition, solid waste management, and accessible urban design. This kind of work involved partnerships with national and sub-national governments on policy frameworks, multi-level government engagement and mobilising finance. The outcomes are measured over many year.
At the micro end, Circular Kitchens CIC, an UrbanEmerge innovation project, is a social enterprise working with a cluster of ten founding members, small food service businesses in the seaside town of Whitstable in the UK, helping them understand and act on circularity across sourcing, waste, and customer communication. Five participants, Bears Ice Cream Imaginarium, Grain & Hearth Bakery, Nomad Pizza, Harbour Grind and The Cheese Box were all founded on the principles of local and sustainable procurement, such as using no plastic and sourcing locally and ecologically, and have been operating on those principles since their inception. Circular Kitchens has helped them further raise their standards and offers them the recognition they deserve with a 3 Star certification.
Together with the other founding Members such as Le Petit Cafe, Farm & Harper, The Umbrella Centre Cafe, Hubbards Bakery and the Pearsons Arms Pub, Circular Kitchens has co-developed a practical framework and sustainability standards, ahead of scaling their guidance and certification across the UK.
What is valuable about holding both macro and micro perspectives simultaneously in their consulting work is that the learning flows in both directions. Patterns that emerge from working with small businesses on practical transitions can have useful lessons on what advisory work looks like for larger organisations and governments. And the enabling environments created through policy work determine what becomes financially and operationally viable for the small businesses operating within them.
Andreas frames this as systems thinking, i.e. thinking about multiple scales at once, and recognising that what is required to make change happen at a given scale may be interdependent with other scales that may determine the enabling conditions for transformation.
Asked about the biggest risks they see, both teams converge on something similar: governance that responds to short-term pressure rather than evidence, and the resulting permission it gives to businesses and individuals to step back from longer-term transitions.
Andreas expressed concern that when political leadership signals that environmental protection is not a priority, it gives organisations a much larger justification to treat sustainability as too complex, too costly, and optional. The backlash against net zero commitments in some markets has less to do with the underlying economics of the transition and more to do with the political framing of it. Heat pumps are expensive, but the absence of the right incentive structures is a policy choice, not a natural condition.
On the flip-side, Naji's reading of the opportunity is instructive. The circular transition, framed correctly, has the potential to appeal across a political spectrum that has been unable to agree on climate. Clean water, clean seas, local economic resilience, reduced waste, stronger communities: these are not left or right positions. They are things that communities across very different political orientations actually want. The framing of sustainability as a progressive elite concern is not inevitable. It is a consequence of how it has been communicated, not what it actually is.
Frank's concern points inward as well as outward. At the individual level, a real risk is hopelessness: the sense that the problems are too large and too far along for personal choices to matter. At the company level, the risk is a return to short-term cost-only logic. At the political level, it is the absence of leadership willing to take the necessary long view on policies and initiatives related to climate action and environmental stewardship. These are not hypothetical. These are the conditions many sustainability practitioners are working with right now.
The clearest note of optimism in this conversation is not rhetorical. It is practical. Both teams point to the same answer to the risk of hopelessness and political drift: evidence, demonstrated at a scale people can observe.
The Circular Kitchens pilot is doing this in a small but replicable way. It is producing numbers on cost transitions, customer response, and supplier relationships that can be shared with businesses of similar size and type. Their 10 founding members are working example that sustainability and commercial viability are not in tension. The organic milk pricing analysis is a tool that any food business can use.
Net Positive Labs operates from the same conviction: that the transition needs proof, not just advocacy. Frank's framing is direct. "You have to prove it because otherwise you're only an advocate, only sharing the words."
This matters because proof, unlike argument, is difficult to dismiss. A company that has absorbed higher costs from sustainable procurement, strengthened customer loyalty, and reduced waste while becoming more sustainable is not a theory. It is a reference case. The more of those reference cases exist and are documented, the harder the cost-based objections to the transition become to sustain.
There is also something simpler at work. Naji describes the personal dimension of this directly: making choices that align with what you know is right, whether it is buying from a circular supplier, sourcing a second-hand chair, or switching to organic ingredients, produces a genuine quality of experience that is independent of the external argument. "We are asking people to do something that actually feels good." That is not a small thing. Transitions that feel like sacrifice are fragile. Transitions that are personally rewarding are sustainable.
In the end, the sustainability, or circular, transition will not be driven by better arguments. It will be driven by better examples. The companies that really take advantage of this don’t just become more sustainable—they’ll become more competitive.
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