Interview Series: Nawar Alsaadi

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This week’s read time: 5 minutes

Welcome to the Green Digest Interview Series, our bi-weekly feature showcasing conversations with the industry’s leading voices - CSOs, sustainability directors, and other senior professionals shaping the sustainability landscape. Each edition dives into their professional journeys, hands-on insights, and outlook on the challenges and opportunities defining corporate sustainability.

These interviews are designed to be quick, insightful reads, offering you actionable takeaways and a personal glimpse into the people leading the way. Stay tuned for stories, strategies, and lessons that matter to you.

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PROFILE

This week’s guest:

Nawar Alsaadi

Co-Founder and CEO of KanataQ

Nawar Alsaadi is the Co-Founder and CEO of KanataQ, a global marketplace for sustainability solutions. With over 15 years of experience in sustainable finance, Nawar has held key roles including ESG Senior Portfolio Manager at the Canada Post Pension Plan and Chief Impact Officer at ScopeFour Capital. He also advises several leading sustainability solution providers through his board and advisory roles.

Nawar holds an MBA from Boston University and a suite of industry credentials, including the CFA ESG and Climate certifications, the Sustainable Investment Professional Certification from Concordia University, and the IFRS Fundamentals of Sustainability Accounting (FSA). He is the author of five books and is recognized as a leading sustainability voice on LinkedIn.

You describe Sustainable Business Intelligence (SBI) as the next evolution of ESG/Sustainability. How do you define SBI and why do you believe it is better positioned to drive impact and adoption in today’s market?

Sustainable Business Intelligence is a 4-layers market segmentation that merges ESG data with analytical, decision-making, and performance management capabilities. SBI provides organizations with a cohesive lens to plan, develop and manage their sustainability, operational and strategic objectives.

This evolution from static ESG metrics to dynamic, context-aware intelligence is critical to accelerating the adoption and impact of sustainability solutions, particularly as companies seek to align sustainability with performance outcomes. In essence, SBI transforms sustainability from a mere narrative into a performance-based strategic asset.

You have framed KanataQ as an ‘ecosystem of sustainability solution providers’. Why do you believe the ecosystem model is the best approach, and what advantages does it offer to both solution providers and the companies they serve?

Complex challenges like climate action, supply chain decarbonization, and ESG data integration are inherently interconnected and cannot be effectively addressed in isolation. Just as no single species sustains a natural ecosystem, no single solution can meet the diverse and evolving demands of corporate sustainability. This is precisely why a platform like KanataQ is essential. KanataQ aims to solve the fragmentation and inefficiencies that have long characterized the sustainability solutions space.

For solution providers, KanataQ offers added visibility, market intelligence, and access to a broad base of sustainability-focused buyers at a fraction of the cost of existing alternatives. For companies, KanataQ simplifies and accelerates the discovery and selection of sustainability solutions. Rather than navigating a fragmented vendor landscape, they can browse, compare, and adopt vetted, trust-ranked solutions aligned with their strategic sustainability and business priorities.

There’s been a lot of noise around sustainability ‘fatigue’ as of lately, especially with regulatory rollbacks and shifting political winds. How do you see this affecting the sustainability solutions market in the short and long term?

Sustainability fatigue is real, its fueled by political shifts, regulatory uncertainty, and economic headwinds that are creating short-term turbulence. In this environment, many companies are pausing or scaling back ESG initiatives, especially when they are seen as compliance-driven or reputational rather than value-generating. This has resulted in slower procurement cycles, tighter budgets, and a more cautious approach to sustainability solutions investment.

Solution providers that can demonstrate clear ROI, support data-driven decision-making, and integrate seamlessly with business systems will come out ahead. Those that fail to connect their offerings to core business outcomes such as cost savings, risk reduction, or business growth, will either exit the market or be relegated to niche roles.

You’ve worked at the intersection of finance, technology, and sustainability - fields that don’t always speak the same language. What are the biggest lessons you’ve learned by navigating those worlds, and what would you pass on to others in the sustainability field?

Working across finance, technology, and sustainability has revealed one foundational truth: alignment only happens when you translate values into value. These fields often operate in silos, finance speaks in ROI and risk, technology in scalability and data, and sustainability in impact and ethics. The key is to find common ground by reframing sustainability not as a moral obligation but as a lever for performance, resilience, and innovation. The future belongs to bridge builders, people who can connect the dots between ESG and EBITDA, between code and carbon. To anyone entering this space, I’d say: be relentlessly curious, learn to code switch across disciplines, and don’t chase trends, build systems that endure.

Nawar reminded us that solving complex challenges means thinking in systems - not silos. We hope this interview left you with new ideas and inspiration.

We’ll be back in two weeks with more hands-on insights from sustainability leaders. 🟢

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