Terry Blackburn: A transparent and trustless way of measuring operational sustainability

This week, the TTI Interview Series covers our network member Terry Blackburn. Terry is an investor and entrepreneur with a focus on climate change solutions. He's the founder of Tuu, an eco-tracking and sustainability rating app headquartered in Singapore. He also founded the Asia Property Awards, the region's largest real estate awards event and the Asia Real Estate Summit, a leading prop tech conference where Asia's leaders and innovators meet.

In this interview, Terry talks about encouraging carbon reduction and better sustainable behavior in real estate operations.

Blockchain technology and eco-tracking

Terry, tell us about how your work intersects with the impact space.

I am the founder of Tuu.eco, an eco-tracking and sustainability-rating business based in Singapore, and an investor with a focus on environment and climate change solutions. Tuu was first conceived after I heard about a Booking.com survey stating that 67% of guests wanted to stay in eco-friendly and sustainable hotels. I wondered how they would possibly know, especially in cities. I also have an investment in IAP blockchain company with a strong cybersecurity focus and a toolbelt of apps for creating trustless business solutions.

Putting the two together, I thought there might be a market for a transparent and trustless way of measuring operational sustainability-performance in hotels. Tuu gives monthly ratings for energy, water, food and beverage, waste, facilities, supplies and other measurable data and uses IAP’s CyberTracing tool to store proofs of activity on the blockchain.

Making amends for a sustainable future

What is your own definition of impact?

Encouraging carbon reduction and better sustainable behavior in real estate operations. Previously I founded and ran the Asia Property Awards, the largest real estate event in Asia covering 17 countries at its peak. During that time, I certainly helped encourage a lot of development and a lot of it was purely profit driven, unsustainable and had a high environmental cost, so hopefully Tuu will help make amends for that a little. 

I did well out of the sector personally so it would be disingenuous to be hyper critical, but I always ensured that we had several green development and CSR awards in every country we operated in to encourage and reward more engagement and better understanding of the issues and to celebrate developers who actually did make an effort of course. It wasn’t enough but it was a start.

Genuine accountability to improve sustainability performance

Terry, what do you see as the most important issue to address in the next 10 years?

Opportunities for small, incremental change that can have a big cumulative impact

Terry, what is your long-term vision and how do you measure & quantify your impact?

If Tuu can get traction in one sector, be it schools, restaurants, hotels or offices, help nudge positive changes in behavior and encourage greater transparency I’ll be fairly happy. I don’t think every company needs to be world changing or should even try to be - there’s plenty of opportunities for small, incremental change that can have a big cumulative impact. I have the same attitude to investing. Although the funds I invest in have to chase unicorns constantly, I’m just as happy to look at smaller companies with interesting ideas tackling a specific sustainability issue for personal investment.

Accountability. If you’re happy to say that you're running a business that cares about the environment, you should be happy to be open, transparent and accountable about it. Now that almost every business makes this claim in one way or another, it’s increasingly important that we have ways of measuring it and believing them before it loses all meaning.

I hope that schools will genuinely engage with the issue and want to improve their sustainability performance. Hotels and restaurants will ultimately react to public pressure to improve their eco behaviour, which you can already see happening now.

Emerging economies and sustainability in real estate

What is the greatest challenge you face to scale your impact?

Greenwashing in relation to the need for accountability previously mentioned. Also as noted, I think schools, restaurants and hotels will be okay on the sustainable development front. My bigger concern is how to encourage massive residential and commercial developers in South East Asia and beyond to do the same. I don’t think that you’d find many buyers willing to pay a 5-10% premium on a condo in a greener building and until we have standardized and widely accepted ESG ratings encouraging sustainable development, which in any case only has an impact on listed developers and there are hundreds that aren’t, I just can’t see it improving much.

I lived in South East Asia for 20 years. It’s only in the last couple of years that it’s being talked up as the next big growth destination. I already thought I’d witness rampant over-development in Bangkok, Hanoi, Jakarta, KL and even in Yangon and Phnom Penh, so the thought that it’s only just beginning is pretty frightening. People in rapidly developing economies understandably want homes to live in, but it’s sadly commonplace in all of the cities I just mentioned to have thousands of empty units bought by investors from China and elsewhere as a means of storing capital, draining resources, depleting the environment and encouraging yet more building. The solution can probably only come from legislation, but outside of Singapore it’s hard to see that happening or being adhered to, so I can only assume the worst and hope for the best.

I was one of the first LPs in Lionheart VC. Their founding partner David Langer introduced me to Top Tier Impact. I like his investment philosophy that focuses on mental health and financial inclusion, as well as climate change and he definitely has a few moonshot companies in the Lionheart portfolio. I’d be delighted if one of those took off and changed the world.

Corporate actions for meaningful impact

What are some misconceptions you’ve noticed regarding what “impact” is all about?

Things have improved a lot since a friend who’s a property developer and major advocate of sustainable real estate development in the Philippines, Ramon Rufino of The Net Group, told me that a fellow developer there believed a green paint job on a building was the starting point of sustainable real estate development. In the South East Asian real estate sector, there’s still a long way to go to take things seriously and to get the sustainability balance right with the profit margin. Most developers only paid lip service to the concept and greenwashing was rife. Things got so bad at one point in Thailand that we had to drop our Green Development Awards for a few years because no one appeared to be taking it seriously, but standards are definitely improving now.

I was also intrigued to learn recently from the excellent The New Climate War by Michael Mann that BP has invented the first carbon calculator in order to shift responsibility for the environment from corporations to individuals. Whilst there is a space for carbon calculators, they need to be aimed squarely at companies to make any difference and it’s definitely a huge misconception that individual actions alone will have any meaningful impact.