Sustainability is a journey. Let us be your co-pilot.

How can Sustainability be integrated in your personal or professional activities? From business and technology to social engagement, which options might make the most difference for your case? Which opportunities and risks should be considered in today’s context?

We assist organisations and individuals in identifying the best options for their case and in implementing them. Our goal is to help you make a successful, long-lasting change.

Services

We provide external support, dedicated and adjusted to your needs. Our focus is particularly on individuals and smaller organisations, where sporadic or regular support might be needed to successfully achieve a turning point or overcome a critical obstacle.

We like to take each individual case into account when crafting solutions. This enables us to ensure a good fit, identify hidden opportunities and minimise risk of failure. In addition, we focus on solutions that are light and – when relevant - can be streamlined across an organisation. This helps to lower effort and costs. It also makes it easier to evaluate and adapt over time as experience grows.

Our areas of focus:

Our approach integrates technical know-how with an interdisciplinary expertise, covering sustainability, IT and work management aspects.

Sustainability know-how: conservation and management of natural resources; system approaches and integration with socio-economic systems and technological solutions; corporate sustainability, reputational issues and stakeholder management; sustainability investing; NGOs in the Swiss context.
Matching IT solutions with individual needs: oriented towards basic to mid-level users, with a focus on balancing ease of use and budget with data security and best practices. Normal activities range from the selection and troubleshooting of software and hardware, development and management of websites, development of tools for data handling, internal controlling and reporting (e.g. Excel or web-based), and internal training.
Organisation of work: structuring work processes and indicators to achieve goals efficiently and with the capacity to evolve. Planning and managing the organisational setup, from strategy to execution, according to growth stage and available resources.

Strategy + Tools for Sustainability

Depending on the need, support can be given at 4 different levels:

Strategy and planning: evaluating choices, defining goals and main activities to follow. We look for a coherent result, with indicators that enable continuous learning and improvement.
Analysis of work processes: we look for the obstacles to remove and the opportunities to nurture. All so you can improve internally and in your connection to external stakeholders or service providers.
Development of tools: supporting your internal work processes or the reporting and communication to external parties.
Extra capacity: to assist with shortages in capacity, we can conduct or coordinate well-defined work tasks and projects, either alone or as part of a team. If needed, we can bring in additional capacity through our network of contacts.

Profile

Oikonaut is a consultancy firm based in Zurich but available throughout Switzerland.

Paulo Morais

Founder and Managing Director

Msc Env. Sci ETHZ, Lic. Marine Biology and Fisheries Univ. of Algarve
Languages: English, Portuguese, French, Spanish and conversational German.

Paulo has a long-standing interest on Sustainability. During the past 10 years, he has explored how it can be integrated into different areas, both professional and personal.

He is one of the founding members of SUSTINOVA, a NPO devoted to supporting the development of sustainability projects and organisations.
Prior to that, he worked at RobecoSAM AG, a sustainable asset management firm based in Zurich. He was directly involved on the implementation of methodology and running of the yearly DJSI global corporate sustainability survey. In addition, he worked as sector analyst and was responsible for the incorporation of reputational risk data, provided by RepRisk, into SAM's assessment process.
In addition, he collaborated with CareGroup, a Zurich-based firm specialised in the analysis of sustainability investment funds.

Previously, he conducted research in the field of marine resources management. Be it as a research scholar or as project manager, he was involved in several projects in Portugal and Panama, linking ecological data with socio-economic aspects of fisheries.

The application of know-how in the corporate and academic areas has covered the following topics:

Methodologies for systematic evaluation of sustainability in well-defined contexts (e.g. natural resource management, business environment).
Project management and development of business processes, with an emphasis on the articulation between user-side and IT-side.
Development and application of business tools for data handling, product development and reporting (e.g. Excel or web-based).

Oikonaut

Sustainability in practice