Sarah Humphrys is one of the Co-founders at the climate and sustainability training start-up AimHi Earth. Its mission is to activate 100 million nature-first employees through training and working with clients including PepsiCo, Unilever and Molson Coors.
As an anthropologist and conservationist, Sarah Humphrys is fascinated by human relationships with nature and how we communicate about the climate and nature crises. Sarah is an RSA Fellow and graduate of Imperial College’s Sustainability Leadership Programme. Sarah spends her free time climbing the Wainwrights in Cumbria.
How did your background in anthropology shape your approach to conservation and rural behaviour in Madagascar?
I’ve always been fascinated by how humans think about the world and their place within it. I think a lot about how people cross-culturally think about the rest of nature and the impact this perception has on the protection of wildlife and habitats.
During my research in Andasibe, Madagascar, I zoomed in on ‘customary institutions’ that govern behaviour. Customary institutions inform what people can and cannot do – but are based on social norms of behaviour rather than explicit, written rules, laws, or formal institutions.
I studied one type of informal institution called taboos (locally called Fady) which hugely influences people’s daily behaviours. These vary from outlining which days of the week it’s permitted to plant crops to which animals you’re allowed to eat. Taboos also influence a range of other behaviours including which areas of the forest you can enter or what activities you can do and when.
I think that conservationists or anyone trying to encourage behaviour change for environmental outcomes need to have a cultural understanding of the context that they’re working in if they’re going to succeed. Taking an anthropology-inspired approach will make sure your initiative makes sense and is relevant to the people you’re reaching when you’re reaching them.
My research on customary institutions also crystallised for me that formal legislation is only part of the solution when it comes to protecting nature and overcoming the climate crisis. You can have comprehensive laws or policies – but you need local people to be on board for real success.
Can you share a memorable experience from your time in the rainforest in Madagascar that had a significant impact on your understanding of the balance between nature conservation and poverty alleviation?
In Madagascar, I saw the very real impacts of climate change playing out and heard about the consequences experienced by the local people I worked with. Several times when walking to remote villages, my researcher and I had to wade through deep rivers after the bridges had been swept away by cyclones and extreme weather – happening more and more frequently as a consequence of the climate and nature crisis.
The year after I left, there were even more severe cyclones and deadly floods – The kind of floods they’d expect to experience once every decade are now happening multiple times in the space of weeks. This small town in the rainforest where I had lived and worked only a year before was now almost underwater.
Meanwhile, the south of the island experienced prolonged drought and a terrible famine – the first caused by climate change rather than conflict.
This had a significant impact because it can be easy or tempting to think of climate change as a faraway thing that we’ll have to deal with in the future. My time in Madagascar brought home the reality that people are already suffering because of climate change. The poorest countries and communities are already struggling – and so our actions and decisions here, today, have the potential to make a huge impact (either positive or negative).
How do you integrate your knowledge of different cultural relationships with nature into your current work at AimHi Earth?
Social norms and cultural narratives are hugely influential in governing the way people behave. Facts alone rarely shift people’s behaviour – to achieve this, topics must resonate with individuals on a human, emotional level. To achieve this, at AimHi Earth, we communicate about these issues using approaches informed by story-telling principles and behavioural psychology.
The social learning experience of our training is also in part influenced by this understanding of social science – As humans, we give weight to topics we believe to be important in our social circles; if our friends or peers aren’t talking about a topic the assumption is that it’s not important to them. Likewise, acceptance of new concepts as a wider group is more likely to make sure these principles stick in the long term.
How do you apply the principles of creating magical and memorable experiences, to your educational events and sustainability programs?
I spent almost a year working as a roller-skating waitress at an American-style diner at Disneyland Paris. The job cemented for me the importance of performance in creating magical experiences for guests. Attention to detail, commitment to the format and high energy are what create memorable experiences that stick with people and evoke strong emotions.
These learnings influenced a lot of our approach at AimHi Earth – and tie into how we deliver our training: Our sessions are live and super interactive, delivered by energising and engaging climate communicators who bring people along on a social learning experience. I think about our training as a combination of science and storytelling with a sprinkling of ‘showbiz’ – It’s the polar opposite of a click-through PowerPoint presentation that might spring to mind when you hear “online training”.
How has the sustainability leadership programme at Imperial College influenced your approach to leading AimHi Earth and pursuing ‘Ikigai’?
During this programme, we worked with Frank Brueck, from Imperial’s Leadership Lab and Author of IKIGAI for Leaders and Organisations. We explored this Japanese concept of Ikigai – which suggests that a person’s ‘purpose’ or ‘reason to jump out of bed in the morning’ comes down to the intersection of four things:
1) Doing something you’re good at
2) Doing something you enjoy
3) Doing something that gives you security (financially)
4) Doing something that makes a difference.
This also links to how you can flourish as an organisational culture – because these dimensions can also apply to your business: Doing work that we’re good at, that we enjoy, that benefits the world and that meets the market need.
The programme clarified to me that you can’t dictate what the culture of a business will be with words on a page. All you can do is embody it. A key responsibility of a leader of any organisation is to live the values and culture of that organisation – while making sure that the whole team are clear about how their role and their actions contribute to keeping this ‘ikigai’ in balance.
Can you describe a time when your resilience was tested in your professional journey and how you overcame it?
June 2024 (this month as I write these answers!) has been a particularly tough test of my resilience. With multiple client deadlines looming, contract negotiations coming to a head, multiple live public training sessions planned (for London Climate Action Week) and numerous sustainability events in the diary – I had a lot on my plate at the start of the month and was focused on getting as much done as I possibly could. But sudden illness wiping me out for over two weeks, followed almost immediately by a family emergency requiring multiple hospital visits in quick succession put a stop to those plans!
It’s been an extremely trying time and the worry of unanswered emails, missed opportunities and unattended events did weigh on me – but the experience has pushed me to think carefully about my role as a co-founder, my priorities and the importance of prioritising rest and wellbeing.
With incredible support from my colleagues, great understanding and flexibility from contacts and partners and amazing help from my support network, I am now back at my desk – but with a new, slightly more realistic, plan of action for the upcoming months, more distributed responsibility amongst my colleagues and a greater appreciation for the saying that working to overcome the climate and nature crisis is a relay-marathon, rather than a solo-sprint.
What advice would you give your 20-year-old self, knowing what you know now about business and life?
- Move away from perfectionism – good enough is good enough
- If it’s not a “hell yes” then it’s a “hell no” – establish and protect healthy boundaries and move away from people-pleasing
- Time resting is time well spent
- Embrace consistency and trust the process – every 1% count
- If you don’t live by your values when times are tough – they aren’t values, they’re hobbies.
