Get to know our Compliance and Sustainability Officer

In previous roles, she worked at Global Citizen and the Global Education & Leadership Foundation on their impact, accountability and grants from New York and New Delhi. Sophie is French and Australian and has a bachelor’s in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science and her master’s in public policy and management from SOAS University of London.  
  
Now almost two years into her role, she shares her thoughts on working with policy together with an investment company focusing on next generation technologies. 
 
“A large part of my job is to understand the important environmental, social and governance questions a company faces in the present and future. Just like a Rubik’s cube, there are several sides and components who all need to work together to achieve long-term value,” says Sophie.  
 
How has Arendals Fossekompani worked to integrate sustainability into their portfolio companies? From hydropower to new technologies relating to the energy transition, sustainability is integrated among our investment criteria from the get-go. It’s important to meet our portfolio companies where they are and support them to reach our ESG targets and the new regulatory requirements relating to sustainability. There is a wide range of sustainability expertise across the portfolio in different ways, and we want to make sure we can all learn from each other. A focus on sustainability is non-negotiable for a company’s long-term survival. 

 
What’s the best part of your workday? 
Making progress. There have been a huge number of changes in the past couple of years and seeing how Arendals Fossekompani and our portfolio companies have risen to meet them has been very rewarding. 

Baked into why I love this is that I get to collaborate with some fantastic people. Working with different colleagues in companies within our team in Arendal and across the world, I feel like a large part of my job is to pull the pieces together to make sure everyone is on the same page.  
 
Your job requires finding a balance. Can you tell us what that means to you?  
It’s really cool to work with companies that are at different stages of maturity. Sustainability looks different in every portfolio company, and what is relevant to one is not necessarily to another. This makes our group particularly interesting. 

Sustainability and profitability are often seen as incompatible. Coming from working in public policy to the business side, I understand the tensions, and I think the trick is to find the synergies – because there are many. 
 

What role do you think ESG can play in supporting value creation? 
Given who we are as a company, the short- and the long-term value are combined. There are many new regulations and requirements on corporations related to sustainability, in Norway and across Europe, that have been quite demanding in terms of time and cost. But these regulations are generating a wealth of new data which we can use for real insights and ultimately, strategic value creation.  
 
Can you share the last time you felt true progress being made?  
This is a space of constant learning and evolution, but there has been so much progress made in recent years. Strengthening our portfolio-wide communication has helped us to leverage each other’s knowledge a lot more, including from those who have come particularly far. Lately, this has been while working on our climate transition plan!