Inconvenient Chats

About Inconvenient Chats

Climate change is real, accelerating, and profoundly urgent - yet the world isn’t changing quickly or deeply enough. In our experience, many important conversations are being avoided, maybe unintentionally. They're inconvenient: messy, emotionally charged, a little uncomfortable, ideologically polarized, or simply complex. This is why we have started Inconvenient Chats, our podcast to create room for some of these conversations – not with all the answers, but with honest questions. We believe that if something makes you uncomfortable, that’s often a sign it’s worth exploring. We’re two friends who both have been working with climate change and sustainability for a number of years. Each week we’ll explore a new topic, we break it down, discuss different perspectives and explore solutions – and hopefully feel more comfortable talking about them. The episodes will be short and will come out every week.We want to challenge ourselves to think, understand and question our assumptions about the world and ourselves. And learn a bunch on the side. So join us when we are making space for the voices in our own heads - the doubts, fears, wonderings. We invite you to come along in that exploration. By having uncomfortable conversations openly, with curiosity, we hope to invite and encourage dialogues that explore difficult topics with critical thinking, emotional honesty, and kindness in a world that often prioritizes perfection and certainty. If it’s inconvenient, let’s chat.

Publisher

Kaisa Virolainen & Jan Kleine

Category

news · science · science

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

7 Sept 2025

Latest episode

9 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

38 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   9 Sept 2026

   Is sustainability regulation too inconvenient — or is that the point? with Andreas Rasche

   Is there a backlash against sustainability regulation? Professor Andreas Rasche joins Kaisa for a conversation about corporate sustainability regulation and unpacks the shift from voluntary CSR to today’s sustainability regulation and the current push for simplification. We discuss what makes sustainability regulation effective, whether good regulation is inevitably a little inconvenient if it is meant to drive change, and how to balance ambition, feasibility and predictability.

2. 

   2 Sept 2026

   How do business and human rights fit together? with Salma Houerbi

   What does it take to make respect for human rights more than a corporate commitment on paper? Kaisa is joined by business and human rights expert Salma Houerbi to explore how the field has evolved from debating whether companies have responsibilities to the much harder question of how to turn them into meaningful outcomes for workers and communities. We discuss the role—and limits—of the business case, why process and reporting are not the same as impact, and why context, power and the voices of rights holders matter.

3. 

   28 Jul 2026

   Why is stopping deforestation so difficult? with Markus Kröger

   In this episode, I sit down with Professor Markus Kröger, who has spent the past two decades researching the political economy of deforestation, resource extraction and global development, with extensive fieldwork in the Amazon and Latin America. Scientists believe the Amazon may be approaching a tipping point — a threshold beyond which parts of the rainforest could gradually shift into a much drier savanna ecosystem. What's particularly concerning is that this could happen long before the entire forest is lost, with consequences that extend far beyond the Amazon by accelerating climate change and increasing the risk of other tipping points. So if we know the stakes are this high, why does stopping deforestation seem to be so difficult and so slow? We explore the political and economic forces that keep deforestation going, the interests and mindsets that reinforce these patterns, what Markus has learned from years of fieldwork, and what more hopeful alternatives he sees.