Lam explains, “We want to make onboarding fun, without the boring, mundane focus on high grades and pushing resumes. We want to infuse sustainability and ESG into the process and empower individual students to promote and foster low-carbon lifestyles.”

He notes that the global market has put additional stress on young people to be competitive in the job market. Rapid shifts such as increased globalisation and remote work practices have meant that people are competing with a much larger talent pool. Zero2 will issue Live Local participants on its app with a certificate marking their contributions of energy and positivity and the low-carbon lifestyle they’ve achieved. This will then hopefully demonstrate their value as they hunt for jobs.

As Lam puts it, “They can put it in front of an employer and say, ‘You want to employ me because I am responsible. Here is my certificate of what I’ve actually achieved through months or even years of effort.’”

Read more: How this Hong Kong entrepreneur is matchmaking impact startups with the right investors

Lam sees Live Local as an evergreen project with long-lasting results to tackle climate change. The goal? To change the concept of responsibility into a sustainable idea far beyond one-off events and put it into people’s everyday lives. He wants the free Zero2 app to get into the hands of not just students but every community and age group in Hong Kong, before eventually taking it overseas. 

This ambition has powered a growing list of partnerships. In addition to Cyberport, Negawatt Utility has partnered with the Junior Chamber International, the Sustainable Impact Investment Foundation and a wide network of merchants. This includes startups that promote low-carbon lifestyles such as indoor farming company, Farmacy HK.

“As a centralised platform, Zero2 can bring together multiple sustainable idea initiatives,” says Lam. “Everyone talks about ESG and sustainability but everyone has their own figurative car going in their own direction. With Zero2, we can put everyone in the same car, with all the wheels going in the same direction. When our interests are aligned, we can move forward in sync.”

Lam knows that there is still an uphill battle to overcome; a somewhat cynical stigma regarding ESG. Over the past couple of decades, the concept was largely driven by compliance in the financial sector, pushing ESG to counter risks for stakeholders. He sees that era as ESG’s outdated 1.0 version, and that Zero2 is heralding the era of ESG 2.0.

“With Zero2, we’re disrupting that version of ESG, based on compliance and ticking boxes,” says Lam. “Many companies I’ve spoken to have said they’d organised ESG activities like beach cleanings, but when I asked for their engagement rates or how often they did [these activities], the answers were shocking. With companies of over 3,000 people, they were lucky that even a few people showed up once a year. Despite this low takeup, they still take photos and put these in their annual reports to show impact. That’s why people still think of [ESG] as greenwashing.”

Read more: 4 ways for companies to avoid greenwashing

While companies measure impact on a company level, Lam believes Zero2 can target and quantify behaviours on the level of individual employees. But events like the launch, which had a range of activities including a wellness workout with fitness trainer, Utah Lee, and a DJ set by Jessie Li, show how Lam believes that the human touch is necessary. “Technology alone does not solve everything. The most important part is to convert and engage.”

Having an app, he says, “does not mean anything in itself, it’s a medium. It’s about engagement and how to create the right messages. It’s better to do that by celebrating and having fun, rather than sitting through hours of presentations and regulatory updates where the engagement rate is 0.001 percent of society.”

Lam muses on one day holding a sustainability festival to reach more Hong Kongers in person but clarifies that while Zero2 is swiftly making a name with its public appearances, the mission is what’s paramount.

“Our business model isn’t making parties,” he says. “We hold events to engage our members about our application so it has meaning and isn’t far-fetched digitised data being put on a report somewhere. Our model is creating long-life learning experiences in sustainability.”

Meet more advocates in Sustainability on the Tatler Gen.T List.

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