Hakan Bulgurlu - A Mountain to Climb: The Climate Crisis: A Summit Beyond Everest

The big surprise for me was to finish your book in a very short amount of time. Its surprising because Ive never read a book so fast from the first page until the last, not even close to it. Your book is inspiring, pedagogical, and incredibly colourful

Fatih Birol, Executive Director, International Energy Agency

In A Mountain to Climb, Hakan Bulgurlu uses his life-changing experience from reaching the worlds tallest peak to transform business as a true force for good. A must-read for all who aspire to learn from this courageous leader.

Paul Polman, Co-Founder and Chair, Imagine

Hakans book is an inspiring story of how purpose can lead to daring personal and professional decisions. This book is a great inspiration for how to transform our business and our lives, as well.

Feike Sijbesma, Honorary chairman, Royal DSM and Co-Chair, Global Climate Adaptation Center

With his book and passion, Hakan has the ability to inspire many more to take action to tackle climate change. Thank you for the authentic leadership!

Jesper Brodin, CEO Ingka Group / IKEA

A nice story of a man looking for himself, contrasted with a planet increasingly lost. Humankind will need to climb its own Mount Everest to avoid ecological disaster. Very well written and engaging.

Thierry Vanlancker, CEO, AkzoNobel

This edition first published in English in 2022

In partnership with whitefox publishing

Copyright Hakan Bulgurlu, 2021

The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.

While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the author would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future editions.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-913532-92-5

eBook ISBN: 978-1-913532-93-2

To find out more about the author and book, please visit amountaintoclimb.org

Cover design by Salon Couture Books

Designed and typeset by seagulls.net

Printed and bound in Turkey by PrintCenter.com.tr, Istanbul

To Sasha, Andrea and Oscar;
and all the children of the pale blue dot.

Look again at that dot. Thats here. Thats home. Thats us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

Earthrise by Bill Anders. (Source: NASA)

On Christmas Eve, 1968, Bill Anders was one of three astronauts on board the Apollo 8 spacecraft when he saw something out of the hatch window. The mission was the first manned flight to orbit the moon. The craft was on its fourth orbit, emerging from the dark side of the moon, when Anders saw the blue and white of earth emerging out of the deep black of space. Oh my God! Anders exclaimed. Look at that picture over there! Heres the earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty! Anders reached for his Hasselblad camera to try and capture the moment. The first picture he took was in black and white. Then one of his fellow astronauts, Jim Lovell, found him a roll of colour film. Anders took the shot that would become known as Earthrise the first colour photo of our planet taken from space.

More than fifty years on, Earthrise remains one of the most iconic pictures of all time, a shot described by nature photographer Galen Rowell as the most influential environmental picture ever taken. To see the earth as it truly is, the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote in the New York Times, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.

But for all the undimmed beauty and power of Anderss photograph, the self-awareness and understanding of who we are has sadly not gone on to be reflected in our stewardship of this solitary jewel. Over the five decades since that photograph was taken, the damage done to the planet has accelerated to the point that scientists now talk of the Anthropocene, a new era in the planets history where, for the first time, human activity is having a significant impact on the planets climate and ecosystems.

The world is heating up at a rate that is unsustainable. The signs of climate change are all around us, and yet human behaviour is barely altered in response. Our planet is under threat like never before. Theres evidence of this everywhere, from the bleaching of coral reefs to the melting of glaciers, and in extreme weather events like mass flooding and devastating forest fires. Our oceans are scarred with plastic waste we can see, and microplastics and fibres we cant. Biodiversity continues to decline. Efforts like COP26, the UNs Climate Change Conference, are valuable, but the situation continues to be dire, and we are fast approaching a global tipping point. The clock is ticking.

One of the challenges in talking about the environment is that it is easy for the eyes to glaze over. The problem can feel so large and overwhelming, its difficult to know where to start. The easier option is to change the channel and hope that someone else will sort things out. But as Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians worldwide, puts it, Today there are no excuses for our lack of involvement. If we do not choose to care, then we are not simply indifferent onlookers; we are in fact active aggressors. If we want to look our children and grandchildren in the eye, then we all need to step up: as leaders, as business people, as individuals.

As a business leader myself, Ive been on a journey and a half over the last few years to do what I can to make my company more environmentally responsible. Im the CEO of Arelik, one of the largest white goods manufacturers in the world. We have a dozen household brands that include Beko and Grundig, and have a workforce of over 43,000 people. We have sales and marketing offices in more than forty countries and twenty-eight production facilities across nine. In total, Arelik offers products and services in nearly 150 countries.

Under my leadership, Arelik has continued its long-standing goal of sustainability. For three years in a row (2019, 2020, 2021), the company was the highest scored home appliances company on the Dow Jones Sustainability index an index which evaluates the sustainability performance of the worlds largest companies.

In 2020, Arelik became carbon neutral in its global production. For a company our size, in the industry were in, and in the country where our headquarters is based, this is no small achievement. By introducing innovative refrigerators with high energy efficiency levels, the company was able to obtain sufficient carbon credits to offset the direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions generated in our global production facilities. Its a fantastic achievement for the organisation and a testament to the hard work and creativity of our team. Arelik is the R&D leader in Turkey we have over 1,600 researchers across the company, and from solar-panelled fridges to microfibre filters on our washing machines, we are constantly looking for ways to make our products better for the planet. Im not telling you this to boast, but to show you that whatever industry you work in, change is possible. Its not always easy, but it can be done in a way that is both sustainable for the planet and also for the companys balance sheet.