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IMPACT ONE Making an Impact: Investing in the Future Wellbeing Infrastructure
IMPACT ONE
Making an Impact: Investing in the Future Wellbeing Infrastructure
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Impact One Founder and CEO Mikolaj Sekutowicz seeks to cut through the general confusion and skepticism surrounding the 3-letter acronym that has come to define sustainable investments, ESGs. While having guidelines for impact investments are important, Mikolaj invites those concerned with the topic to reduce the concept down its simplest building block for creating a more sustainable future on this planet: wellbeing.
By Hollie McKay
“We cannot view or continue trying to solve persistent global challenges like we have in the past. Wellbeing establishes an intrinsic link, promoting an aspirational concept beneficial to all. This idea has guided me in conceiving and collaborating on projects where wellbeing is a focal point,” Mikolaj stresses. “Our work is focused on four fundamental verticals: Wellbeing Infrastructure, Ecosystem Wellbeing, Human Health and Wellbeing, and Wellbeing Culture.”
Moreover, the prominent business leader has developed a long-term strategy to cement “wellbeing infrastructure” as a new asset class centered on the notion that ecosystem restoration and nature are critical infrastructure.
“Seeing nature as a solution can help tackle multiple challenges simultaneously, like alleviating poverty and crime, human health, and climate change,” Mikolaj asserts. “Infrastructure and the built environment are critical entry points for cultivating naturepositive and wellbeing-centered cities.”
To understand the enormous learning potential that nature holds, we need to come to terms with the fact that the natural system operates at a level of complexity that far outsmarts the social, economic and technological structures we rely on. Building on millennia of adaptation and evolution, nature has developed as a planet-wide apparatus of exchanges between organisms, the intricacies of which are just mindboggling. Take plants: making up over 82% of the earth’s living mass, the vegetable kingdom has created and continues to maintain the atmospheric and temperature conditions that enable animal life on earth.
Meanwhile for thousands of years humans have been creating artificial environments to cater to our comfort that actively harm our own bodies and the system that keeps us alive. In 2020 the amount of mass produced by humans, which is mainly composed of concrete, asphalt, aggregates and waste, officially exceeded the entire mass of living beings on earth. Cities are the main culprits in the environmental destruction and excessive resource consumption that is putting our planet’s homeostasis at risk, and our urban centers continue to expand at an alarming rate. are expected to arrive in urban areas every week, Mikolaj states, and by 2050 at least 75 percent of the Earth’s population will be living in cities, as compared with 56 percent today. From Mikolaj’s purview however, urban development can become a regenerative force, if it is designed and implemented with an integrative approach that places environmental impact at its forefront.”
With the awareness and urgency to action slowly permeating our socio-economic systems, in parallel with the extensive technical innovation we see sprawling across industries, we are now at a point where the internalization of inevitable externalities of our building practices is possible.
Impact One’s approach to sustainable infrastructure is built on consideration of a building’s impact on humans and the environment, across its full lifecycle. The construction of a building carries social and environmental implications starting with its ideation and funding phase, across the span of its existence, through to its post-use phase and dismantling. Not only is it crucial to use modular compensation mechanisms for the
Mikolaj Sekutowicz
emissions emitted by the construction and use of the building; but we actually need to think about how our built environments impact our health and that of our ecosystems . “The problem with our cities today is that we are completely removed from nature, our natural environment that our bodies became accustomed to over millions of years of evolution,” he says, pointing out that the COVID-19 pandemic serves as a good example of how the virus spread much more violently through large cities at the onset. “The fact that we have created cities where we live 90 percent of the time indoors and our skin doesn’t have enough sunlight exposure to produce all the necessary vitamin D, the hormone that regulates our cell functions including our immune system, caused the severity of the pandemic.”
To address the breadth of problems that have brought about environmental and social crises globally, Mikolaj founded the One Health Research Centre (OHRC) to establish the interdependency between human and environmental wellbeing. The research center operates jointly with the involvement of the University of Greifswald and the German Institute for Climate Protection, Energy and Mobility (IKEM), and is dedicated to establishing the necessary data and expertise for an evidencebased redefinition of the legal code and pricing of buildings, to minimalize and internalize the construction industry’s impact on human and environmental health. The OHRC presented its first results on the topic at COP26 in collaboration with the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research as a policy paper titled “From Building to Growing Cities”.
Mikolaj explains that with poor air and water quality and a lack of sun exposure in congested cities, the medical sector will only crumble under the weight of disease and demand. With the input of the One Health Research Centre’s findings, Impact One hopes to provide some perspective and equilibrium to that grim reality as it endeavors to create the world’s most advanced sustainable buildings, fusing the latest cutting-edge technologies, bringing together hundreds of companies, both in local markets and from around the world.
Impact One’s approach also centers largely around culture: “The cultures in which we immerse ourselves shape our mindsets and values and have guided how we interact with the world around us. If we are committed to social transformation and a greener future, we also need to work towards reshaping individuals’ behavior, consumption patterns and interactions with their physical environments,” Mikolaj details. “Culture
has the power to drive the transformational behavior and policy change needed at the individual and community level.”
For the passionate innovator, his role at Impact One is rooted in imagining and realizing sustainable urban development and represents the culmination of a lifetime of learning.
After studying philosophy and sociology in Hamburg, Mikolaj completed training as a lawyer at Berlin’s Humboldt University. In 2009, he joined legendary German innovator Josef Wund – one of the few creatives who revolutionized the real estate and infrastructure industries – in the development of what would become Therme Group, a leading global wellness company, unprecedented in its fusion of wellness and entertainment elements that continue to transform the health arena. Mikolaj has served on the board of Therme Group since its creation, overseeing business strategy and culture and developing the company’s entry into the North American market, among others. Further, he initiated Therme Group’s cultural component, Therme Art. The role of Therme Art is to design and catalyze a debate about art, architecture, sustainability, and the future of city planning. As part of Therme Art’s identity, Mikolaj has also initiated and overseen the creation of an advisory board comprising some of the most well-regarded figures from the fields of art and design and has developed partnerships with prominent institutions worldwide – including a strategic investment into experiential art trailblazer Superblue.
As part of the experience economy, both Therme Group and Superblue cater to a shared appetite for experiences and meaning, rather than consumption. Superblue and its roster of artists are working to redefine the role art occupies within the fabric of the city and society, as visitors undergo an act of immersing themselves into experiences addressing the pressing issues of our times, rather than acting merely as spectators. In much the same way, Therme Group facilities are designed to provide visitors with memorable experiences and, taking it a step further, provide healing benefits for the body and mind. Therme Group’s wellbeing facilities welcome millions of visitors to its properties each year and, in doing so, nurture their guests’ physical and mental health by offering a dip into social infrastructure – combining the traditions of global thermal bathing with an indoor tropical ecosystem.
Taking the concept of healing through experience even further, Impact One and Therme Group have partnered with neurotechnology leader MindMaze, to develop the first evidence-based neuro wellbeing centers, under the name MYND. Designed as species-specific environments providing all the health-promoting parameters our bodies need, MYND Centres provide healing through preventive health therapies and mental health training. Having launched with a series of art activations, including the presentation of a collaboration with media artist Refik Anadol titled Sense of Healing, MYND is already carrying through its mission to increase mental health awareness and accessibility through art and to bring new environments of healing into our cities. Yet there is much more of the
globe to cover, and Mikolaj and his team make it clear that they are merely just beginning.
“If you want to summarize our goal, it is to create an infrastructure and environment that is recreating the optimal conditions for the human mind and body on one side, but also contributing to the restoration of the ecosystem,” Mikolaj enthuses. “Each (location) will be rolled out with a positive impact on the human environment. So, on the public health side, reducing many chronic and rare disease triggers. And on the other side, to have for that afforestation, a system that allows us to be positive for the environment, while still building and expanding.”
Such a vision also entails shaking up the way the back end is typically done, emphasizing the need for investors to reframe how they view impact agendas and their effects on company returns. In Mikolaj’s words, this will ultimately require a shift from a world of financial shareholder primacy to broader stakeholder capitalism, beset with tradeoffs that business leaders must navigate.
“There are two sides to this that make it very profitable. One is the public-private partnership element, which allows us access to subsidized additional equity,” he conjectures. “Based on a long-term service agreement that supports the social accessibility on the one hand and the profitability of the investment on the other. An additional element that makes us very profitable is cutting off the middleman. So, if you have a shopping mall, for example, the shopping mall creates its revenues for tenants, and the tenants need to sell their goods. In our case, we are not only building this infrastructure but also operating it. We fully control the cash flow created within this infrastructure.” Typically, tax breaks are also part of the plan, given that Therme is developing new zones, and Mikolaj highlights that his team is “experienced working with public entities.”
However, disrupting the market isn’t always smooth sailing. The business challenges vary from difficulty in creating policy frameworks that will enable them to adequately assess environmental impacts to crippling inflation levels and supply chain dilemmas.
“Now, we have a lot of disruption within the supply chain. But the problem of the supply chains is also self-made. We can replace (building materials) with much more holistic and interconnected ways of sourcing materials, for example, by creating a forest that will provide the timber we need with utmost efficiency. Nature is permanently growing; it is an amazing supply chain,” Mikolaj proposes.
From an outside perspective, one cannot help but question whether the driving of an impact agenda does, even in a small way, mean sacrificing company returns. However, Mikolaj assures that impact investments are anticipating regulations that will be implemented in upcoming years to internalize environmental effects and are thus optimally positioned in a market that will experience exponential growth in the future.
“Even so, investors should not discount the value that an active impact agenda grants companies in terms of the license to trade — the right to operate a business, which governments and regulators grant,” he cautions. “Impact investing could also be reframed as an investment in the company’s future. The shift from a world of financial shareholder primacy to broader stakeholder capitalism encompasses a far-reaching agenda. These aspects of the ESGs are beset with tradeoffs that business leaders must navigate.”
Whatever potholes linger on the path, Mikolaj remains steadfast in Impact One’s dream, underscoring that business leaders across the board need to focus on impact design and a system of thinking that applies to how the economy will be shaped in the future — not just how it is structured today.
“We believe that all cities will be completely integrated with nature in fifteen to twenty years. We need to overcome this kind of idea that the city is the antithesis of the natural environment; it needs to completely incorporate nature. Nature needs to be everywhere; we need a strong element of cohabitation,” Mikolaj advocates. “At the beginning of the last century, the statistic was that one of 20 people would be diagnosed with cancer. When I was born, already 25 percent of the population were at risk of being diagnosed with cancer. Today, 40 percent of people will be diagnosed with cancer. And in another 25 years, that number will likely increase, if we continue doing business as usual.”
He pauses, taking hold of the dark outlook, reminding us that it does not have to be this way.
“It comes down to strengthening the resilience of global urban centers is a matter of urgency for humanity, the economy and the earth’s stability,” Mikolaj adds.
And that is precisely Impact One’s unrelenting mission.
