Kristian Rönn

Meet Kristian

Kristian is CEO and co-founder of Normative, a company that, through software, helps other large companies to automatically calculate their impact on the climate. He has studied both mathematics and theoretical philosophy, and started his career as a Project Manager at the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) in Oxford, an institute that did research on existential risks before closing down in 2024. While he had potential to do a lot of good in this role at FHI, Kristian chose to pursue an entrepreneurial path, after reflecting on his marginal impact.

Tackling climate change through helping companies to reduce their emission

A useful concept for understanding climate change is what economists call negative externalities . This means that costs arise in transactions that neither burden the buyer nor the seller, but instead affect a third party. The use of fossil fuels causes e.g. damage to the environment that producers or consumers do not pay for directly, which means they lack financial incentives to change their behavior. The realization of the consequences of such inadequate incentives led Kristian to start Normative.

“To create a sustainable future and reduce global disaster risk, we must change the way we price goods and the way we record economic success. We are in the middle of a mass extinction where one million species are at risk of disappearing, four million people die from air pollution and tens of billions of animals die annually for human consumption. Despite the fact that these phenomena have enormous moral consequences, they are not included in the companies’ balance sheets and income statements.” 

Normative has created a software that helps large companies to automatically calculate how much indirect negative and positive impact they have. The goal is that the increased transparency of previously invisible costs (and benefits!) will contribute to changing the incentives.

In addition to running Normative, Kristian has also released a book, “The Darwinian Trap: The hidden evolutionary forces that explain our world (and threaten our future)”. In the book, Kristian explores how humans are wired to seek short-term success at the expense of long-term survival — an evolutionary “glitch” that explains everything from toxic workplaces to climate change.

Kristian’s thoughts about marginal impact 

I thought about whether there was an opportunity cost in my role. Even if a job has a high impact, your marginal impact may be minimal if someone else can do it just as well. If, on the other hand, you are trying to develop a new technology through a start-up, you are almost by definition irreplaceable for a period. “If you don’t do it, no one else will”.