Pearl Ayem

Hi, I’m Pearl 🌿

A climate scientist by training, a stubborn optimist by temperament, and an engineer by trade. I grew up in rainy Vanouver, Canada, ended up in the UK, and along the way got convinced that climate, policy, people, and business are the same story told four ways.

These days I lead climate and nature risk modelling at a climate tech firm, where I build the models that FTSE100 boards use to figure out what their next few decades look like, and lead the applied AI work making those models faster and sharper. My current favourite project is a first of a kind water balance model that quantifies water stress across the supply chains of some of the world’s biggest food, fashion, and entertainment brands. It’s the kind of work I love most: deeply technical, genuinely useful, and quietly consequential.

Before this, I led data engineering for the Climate Data Utility at Bloomberg, a free, open climate platform launched at COP28 with President Macron and Mark Carney, and now hosted by the UNFCCC. Before that I was at the British Antarctic Survey and the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, modelling surface melt on a billion point Antarctic dataset. And before that I was flying LiDAR drones in British Columbia and lecturing 1,000 undergrads on Python. A varied path, and I think that’s the point. Hard physical science gave me the depth, software gave me the speed, and working with Bloomberg, the UN, and FTSE clients taught me how to talk to a board and a backend engineer in the same week.

What I’ve learned from all of it is that passion alone won’t move the climate transition at the speed it needs. The companies, governments, and investors making the biggest decisions need solutions that are technically rigorous, commercially sensible, and genuinely easy to adopt. That’s where I try to live: at the intersection of climate science that holds up to scrutiny and business cases that hold up to a CFO. The most exciting part of my career has been watching that intersection get bigger every year, and watching real money, real regulation, and real engineering quietly start to bend in the right direction.

Outside work, I sit on the board of the Compassionate Eye Foundation, where we fund grassroots projects aligned with the UN SDGs. Loving the planet, for me, has always meant loving the people on it. The world is in genuine trouble, the solutions are genuinely interesting, and the people working on them are some of the most thoughtful, generous humans I’ve ever met. If you’re one of them, or want to be, I’d love to know you. ✨