 The idea for this panel, it's for it to be very interactive, so I want to call out my fellow panelists, Judy, Andres, Leah, and Maricel, please come to sit in these high shares with me. I hope none of us falls down, these tall shares. I forgot, oh, sorry. I only forgot to mention one more thing. You guys already been in a few sessions here, so I don't want to be repetitive, like saying the same thing, but how the Q&A is going to work is just, we're going to have like the small papers, you can write it down the questions that you have and then just raise your hand at me. And David, we're going to be able, say hello to David. Hey, David. We're going to be together picking up the questions and bringing to Natalie too, so we can put these questions together. Okay? So just this information. Awesome, Rafael. So yes, as Rafael was explaining our panel today, it's about investing in climate solutions in Latin America. And I think like when we talk about climate, we each recognize that now it's like the hot topic. Everyone is talking about climate. Even people who don't work on operating climate, like I live in Cartagena, a city that is 30 degrees all year long and people don't believe this, but it's 30 degrees all year long. And like we talk about climate every day because every day it's getting hotter and hotter and every day extreme events are becoming more common. So even people that don't understand about climate change are talking every day about climate change. And here we are at SoCAP when we are talking about money plus meaning. So of course we hear a lot of finance institution talking about climate. And I was talking to someone yesterday and saying like, ah, now all the investors want to invest in climate, but what does that mean? But we'll hear that like still, even if everybody wants to invest in climate, we still don't have enough money to invest in climate. And now also the entrepreneurs. All the entrepreneurs are saying like, ah, maybe I have a climate solution and so forth, but what are really climate solutions? So I'm really thrilled today because we have all sides of the spectrums here in this panel. We have DFI's, we have BC's, we have impact investors and we have entrepreneurs that are going to be talking about what is it climate solutions and what is to invest in climate solutions? So before I present my follow-up panelists, I just want to do a sense check of the audience. So can you please raise your hand if you're an entrepreneur? Okay. Raise your hand if you're an investor, if you invest in entrepreneurs. Awesome. Raise your hand if you're a foundation or you invest in investors that invest in entrepreneurs like LP or so forth, do we have any LP's? Okay, we have one, two, awesome. And raise your hand if you're a service provider, or a connector, just yeah, make all these connections happen. Awesome. So that's great. So here upstairs we have also the same thing. I want to first introduce Judy. And Judy is the Chief Climate Officer of IDB Lab. He's developed IDB Lab Agenda on Climate so he really has a lot of facts, things to share with us and how climate works on gender and diversity has been with IDB Lab for over 10 years, right? And before that, he worked at IDB office. He has done many publications around climate agriculture. He holds a PhD in economics and his Brazilian and based in Washington. And Judy, I want you to share with the audience the personal fact so that when you caught Yuri in the hallways, you can start a conversation with him about knowing something personal about him. Your personal fun fact. I'm gonna choose one of the two. Remember we had two of them. Hands up those who know who Carl Sagan is. Okay, great because okay, got it. So once I asked Carl Sagan for bus fare because I'd run out of money and I didn't know it was Carl Sagan. I looked up and said, oh my God, you're Carl Sagan. You're like my idol from Cosmos and everything growing up. So that's my personal fact. Thank you, Yuri. Next, I'm going to introduce Leah Gonzalez. She's the regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean for INCOFIN. And INCOFIN, it's an impact investor that provides organizations working in financial inclusion and sustainable agriculture financing. She has also been at INCOFIN for over 10 years, which come on like these guys have been committed to their organizations. And before she worked in public private partnerships for infrastructure projects in Latin America. Leah, do you want to introduce yourself with your phone or personal fact? Okay, so I come from the coffee region in Columbia and I grew up in a coffee farm. I work with coffee. I love coffee, but I don't drink it. I cannot drink it or too much of it. So if you're meeting Leah, ask her for a tea, not a coffee. Next, I want to introduce Andres from Saudi Aventures. He's the managing partner of Saudi Aventures. He's a VC investing in climate tech entrepreneurs. Before that, he was the managing director of NG Factory and his Latin-focused corporate venture fund. And he has been a board member of the Chilean Venture Capital Association. And he's also a professor. He likes to teach about climate and he teaches in the Catholic University of Chile. He's Chilean, but it's currently based in Mexico. Andres, you want to share with the audience your phone or personal fact. If any of you wants to learn how to do a chilengo accent with the Chile-Mexico hybrid combination, just come and speak with me. Thank you. So chilengo accent, that's what we should ask you. Chilengo. Okay, perfect. Awesome. Got it. Six years of training. And last but not least, we have our entrepreneur in the room, Maricel Sainz. She's Costa Rica. She's from Costa Rica. I don't know how to say Costa Rica in English. Okay, go ahead. Maricel is the founder and CEO of Compound Foods. She's going to be telling us all about the amazing work that her startup is doing. She was named Forbes 30 under social impact category. Previously, she co-founded Next Biotics, another startup addressing antibiotic resistance. And she worked before and monitored the Lloyd Incorporate Strategy and Innovative Consultancies. She's based, she's from Costa Rica, but is based here in the Bay Area. And Maricel, can you tell us your founder personal fact? Does this work? There we are. I don't know how fun it is, but I really enjoy scuba diving. I say, cause it's the only time that I can actually shut up. And the more sharks there are, the better. So yeah, the more closer the sharks get, the happier you are scuba diving. So okay, if you love scuba diving or like the ocean, talk to Maricel about it. And my name is Natalie Vergara. I'm Colombian. I think at the end, as I said, and I'm with Mercy Corps Ventures and Impact Investor working in emerging markets, mainly in Latin America and Africa. We invest in companies in ag tech, food tech, and climate tech. And my fun fact is that I love dancing. I love music. And like if you'll see me around, you'll see me moving, but I don't know any lyrics of any song. So I make up my own lyrics of the songs that I like. Awesome. So now that you know a little about us, we can start talking about the main topic of discussion today. So really, like the first question we wanted to ask about this, and I'm going to start with you, Dury, since you've been studying this for a while, it's really to put us in the scene, like what is really happening with climate change, particularly in Latin America, and why is it different in Latin America than in other regions of the world? No, sure. And this is something that's close to my heart. Also, a passion of mine for many decades. So just to share a very brief anecdote, maybe two months ago, I was attending Yale seminar on climate economics. They have a great seminar that they do monthly. And we're looking at some of the projections of 50 years out, right? We don't do anything, 50 years out what's going to happen. And it was pretty dismal in the sense that both in terms of damages due to climate change, also in terms of migration conflict, and Latin America actually has a lot of these risks. We have a lot of the risks in Central America, we have a lot of them concentrated in Mexico, and we have a huge amount of concentration and risk in Brazil and some of the Indian countries also. So when we're looking at the 50 year projections, we're talking about massive shifts of people and of GDP out of regions where right now are some of the wealthiest regions that we have. So it's a huge deal. It doesn't happen overnight, but it's one of those things that it continues to get worse and worse and worse. Okay, so that's the downer, right? But I'm not a downer person, I'm a very optimistic person. So what does Latin American have? Latin American has one of, and not one, it has par excellence, the largest reserve of essentially natural capital on the planet and not just the Amazon and distributed throughout the region. That means the largest reserves of biodiversity, of freshwater, of air, the largest carbon sinks, and in terms of coastal resources, the largest, or some of the largest reserves of natural capital and coastal resources too. Now what is the problem of that? The problem is that we really don't know yet how to integrate this wealth of natural assets into our lives in a way that's sustainable. We know that estimates are about $9 trillion, okay, in terms of kind of nature-based economics, but when you look at the nature-based economics that are currently transacted on the planet, what do you think they are? They're gonna be in agriculture, they're gonna be in extractives, okay? So essentially that dominates all of our nature-based transactions right now. And for every dollar that we have in nature-based transactions that we're transacting today, essentially in agriculture and extractives, we probably have about 10 or even 20 additional dollars which are in aspects of nature, which are regenerative and which produce additional value of capital that's good for nature rather than being kind of exploitative in nature. So this is, and a lot of it's concentrated in our region, right? And we have people here, well, all of us here who are actively involved in developing these assets, right? Everyone here is doing that. So anyway, I know you wanted to keep it short, so I'm gonna shut up now. But I think that is the huge asset that we have in the region. We have a huge risk, huge risk, and we have a huge asset also. Yeah, thank you. As I said, I love that summary. We have a huge asset and we have a huge risk. So with that scenery, I'll pass it over to Leah to ask this question of what does it look like in Latin? So if we dream and we think about 10 years down the horizon, how do we live up to these risks and these assets, what's the future like for Latin America in 10 years when we think about climate solutions? What's your dreams? Well, I think what we expect is that, for example, biodiversity credits become what carbon credits are today. And these markets around nature-based solutions become mature. So it's not just VC or startups that are starting to create these value chains and building on these market, but that this becomes something that it's almost mainstream and that it's actually part of the strategy of every single company in Latin America. And we also see that our women are taking the lead on this. And there are lots, I mean, instead of becoming like, or being in most of the speeches, like the most vulnerable of climate change. So it's taking the lead on action and it's good to see that we're three women working on this in a panel in Latin America. So this is also something that we believe could be like our vision for the future. Love it, yeah. How about you, Andres? What's your dream or what's your vision when you're thinking about climate solutions 10 years on the road in Latin America? No, how I see it, it's gonna be a completely different Latin America to what we know now. We could deep dive on what Yuri was talking about. We're gonna have climate migrations, we're gonna have different challenges, but we will also have in 10 more years, 50 to 100 unicorn companies in the climate space born from Latin America. I have no doubt about that. So we do have the resources, but also Latin America has the human capital, has the talent. So as a fund, we've seen that firsthand. There are hundreds now of talented, some deep tech, some are not climate solutions that are scalable globally and we're gonna see that we have been seeing that already that's only gonna grow. So 10 more years, Latin is recognized as a global incubator for climate solutions. So climate solutions, unicorns led by women. I like this future. How about you, Mari said, what can you add to this future in Latin America in the next 10 years? Yeah, well, I hope that we're really thinking about how we are making all of the things that we consume with planet in mind. So I envision a future where we think a lot about regeneration and how do we think about conservation of biodiversity and looking at transitioning a lot of our current monocultures in more biodiverse systems where it's gonna be better for the planet and for all of us consuming it. And I'll just add an extra layer there of saying that I'm hoping that 10 years from now, every single government and every single political party has climate solutions as the center of their agenda and that that's what's driving how we're electing our leaders because I totally agree that I hope we have unicorns and I hope companies are involved. But if we don't have government setting regulations around how do we use our resources, we won't be able to transform the region. So government involvement and Judy, anything you wanna add to this 10 year future ambition? Well, I think it's regulation, public, public policy. By the way, the region is leading in public. I'm not gonna single out. I'm just gonna say Chile is doing very well, Brazil is doing very well, Colombia is doing very well, Costa Rica is doing very well, could do better, is doing very well, has a trajectory, it's kind of a little blip, but we'll see it going forward. So it's a rich region of climate action and commitment to climate. So I think that's there. I love the idea of the unicorns and I love just multiplying the activity that we're gonna have in the entrepreneurial sector. I mean, it's just gonna be tremendous. And we've worked together for IDB, we've worked together with you for so many years and I think this view of kind of understanding what it, not just for the scientific side and the molecular side, which is so important, but the view of understanding kind of nature and biodiversity from the systemic side, it needs so much nurturing for us to actually make that happen. I think that's absolutely correct. We need to push it in that direction also anyway. So I love it. Yeah, I love this future of thinking how can Latin America be positioned in an unique position to make this drive and before we go there, let's think like how are we going to get there? And I also, we wanted to ask the audience a question what's the state right now? So I'm gonna do like again, like raise the hands and Duri is going to help me with this if I get anything wrong. But basically the question is, we all have like the price agreement which really we have the aim of keeping global average increasing in global average temperature below two degrees. So the question is raise, I wanna raise your hands and like the question is if you believe if we're going to keep the increase in global average temperature below one degree Celsius, raise your hand if you think we're going to keep the increase of global average temperature below one degree Celsius. Have a good audience. It's a trick question. Raise your hand if you think we're going to keep the increase of global average temperature below 1.5 degree Celsius. Come on, optimists in the room 1.5. 1.5, there we go. Someone more for 1.5, no? Two, two, three, four, all right, all right. And now raise the hand if you think we're going to give it at least below the two degrees. Okay, and above the two degrees. Okay, we have some pessimists in the room. So basically like yeah, this is what God get us to the place where we are right now. And I think like we need to work on, like the reality is that we need to work on both ways. So we need to work on solutions that are going to help us that we really don't get above two degrees, but the reality as you can explain better is that we're already mixed the deadline on the one degree. So indeed the temperatures are getting higher and we need to live with that. We need to understand what are the solutions that are going to help us to better adapt to climate change. So now time for the solutions. I want each one of you to present one solution and like please make it on us understand that solution so we can pitch it and explain to anybody else that we're talking about one solution in climate change. It can be either in mitigation or in adaptation, but one solution that you think could lead us to this dream future that we're thinking about in 10 years in Latin America. And I would leave it who would everyone, no first Maricela, which is the one that's working every day on one solution. So please Maricela, tell us about your solution. In a minute. So we believe that if we use upcycled ingredients or agricultural side streams, things that we can grow in countries like the US and transform them using fermentation, then we can create products that are climate proof that can compete in terms of price, but have a reduced burden on the environment. And we measure that in water use, carbon emissions, land use, without having to sacrifice the quality of the product because one of our core beliefs is that we need to empower consumers to make better sustainable choices. And the way that we do that is by giving them actual choices where it's not really a sacrifice, but a true empowering option. So that's our solution. Explain us a bit more how it works, please. I wanna know. Yeah, so what we've done, for those of you that don't know, at Compound Foods, we're working on recreating coffee without using coffee beans, which it's controversial and you talked to Latin Americans about it. I'm originally from Costa Rica. So we are a proud coffee producing country, but coffee has a couple of main issues when it comes to climate change. The first one is that when we look at its resource intensity, it actually ranks fifth in our value chain. That's above poultry, swine, fish, eggs, in terms of carbon emissions per kilogram of coffee, as well as water intensity. And on the other end, climate change is making it harder and harder to produce coffee. So as demand increases and production decreases, there's going to be a gap in the supply. So our thinking is, if we think about what coffee actually is, it's an extraction of chemical compounds that are perfectly balanced. And we started with the question, is there a better way that we can get those chemical compounds? Can we get them from plants that are wasted in other processes? For example, we use grape seeds that are wasted in the winery process as one of our molecular inputs, as well as fermentation. So we go back to the farms and learn from the farmers how they can change coffee flavors using different fermentation processes and try to recreate that in the lab. And our goal is that, by developing the understanding of one of the most complex products out there, it has over 800 different flavor compounds. We developed this ability to understand once we have a molecular map, how do we use more sustainable ingredients and fermentation to recreate that? So in the world that we envision, we're not cutting trees, planting them, waiting five years for us to pick them, going through an incredibly long supply chain to get to the final product, but instead we can use that land and regenerate it to products that hopefully will be consumed locally and regionally. Isn't this super cool? Wow. Like that we can have, I think like next time we need to have like a coffee sample so that we can drink all these coffee, but I think like it's amazing of these solutions that are coming from Latin America of like super high tech, high innovative of brewing coffee without coffee beans. That's amazing. And yeah. And I think like we have, we need like one of the things that we also been talking about while preparing for this panel like we need all spectrum of solutions. This is amazing and super cool and interesting, but we also need other solutions that maybe are not as high tech or flashy as amazing job that Maricely is doing. So maybe, Leah, you can talk about the other lower tech type of work that you're also doing with coffee producers or related to coffee or any other solution that you wanted to highlight. Yes, and it's actually an example of why we need these type of solutions. And we invest, one of our funds invests in coffee cooperatives in Central America and South America. And we had to develop a project like five years ago for some of these cooperatives in the lower lands. They were, these lands were no longer feasible for coffee production. So they had to switch to cocoa and we finance a project to like make the change from swoleholder farmers producing coffee to produce cocoa and build the value chain within these cooperatives. So this is not something of today. This is not something about keeping the temperatures down. It's something that happened already five years ago that we had to do this investment. And it's also to show that adaptation is needed. Even if we still want to, and we're optimist I think here in this panel on how to keep the temperature or that we are going to reach these goals to keep temperature down or keep growth as low as possible. And we anyway have to start working on adaptation and keep adaptation as a top priority for Latin America. And I loved how that loop closes of like myself is building new coffee without coffee beans and you're working with how to make sure that the swoleholders that we're producing coffee can continue to have lively food now producing another type of product. So it's like, yeah, we need all these type of solutions. How about you, Andres? Tell us about an inspiring solution and climate that you've been working with. I'll be biased as well. So have to speak of one of our investments. Just to give one example, our first investee Strong by Form. It's a Chilean-born company which developed a composite of wood that can replace concrete. So what on earth does this mean? Concrete is one of the hardest industries to decarbonize and one of the industries that cause the most pollution as most of you know. This company has created what you could call digitally printed wood where how the wood is interwoven in the digital printer which is a large installation with advanced robotics. They create a slab that has the resistance to replace concrete, basically. This company was the CTO, has a PhD from the University of Düsseldorf. They started the company in Chile, had clients in Chile, received their anchor investor from a large forestry company in Latam. And now they are receiving most of their investment in Europe from companies like Pfeiffer. That's a big German company on construction materials. They just finished their seed round for 4.5 million which they oversubscribe. And we're talking about frontier tech that can go at global scale. And that was born here in Latin America. Awesome, so also very high tech wood to compost side of wood to produce concrete. So it looks like you can look it up strong by form. They're presenting right now at Verge. It looks like a bit of a slab made of wood. It's the, how to describe, you can look it up in Instagram. And you have what you tell us about some of the inspiring solutions that you're seeing. So we actually don't do any things ourselves. So we just invest in great ideas. Which of course the solutions need the money to grow those solutions so we need you. So I'll also talk about a partnership that we've been developing for, oh I'm gonna say about five years. And it's with, well they're now called the Intrinsic Exchange Group. But back then they were called something else. And the objective of this is to be able to find a way for companies which are developing natural capital to be able to list in exchanges and be able to be recognized and have the rules of listing that accommodate the particularities of what a natural asset company would be. So we've been working with Doug Eager for many years. Well he's been working really, it's his company. And right now we already have the parameters for listing a company as a natural asset company established in the New York Stock Exchange. We hope it'll be established in NASDAQ. We have a project to establish it in the stock exchanges of Latin America. And that means it defines the commitments that the company has to do. It defines in some way also on the regulatory side the tax treatment. It defines reporting requirements or protection of shareholders, et cetera. So we've not yet had a listing of a NAC company in the New York Stock Exchange or in NASDAQ. But maybe it'll be minus. Maybe minus will be the one that says we're gonna list and we're gonna list as a NAC, right? Or maybe one of the companies in your portfolio. So that's super important because it allows you to raise capital in a way that's established but channeling it towards the companies which are gonna have tremendous impact in nature. So I think that's something we've done with Doug and I thought it was really, really interesting. And our follow up question is like how do we make sure that this amazing high tech, low tech solutions, like how do we make sure that they grow and become the future that we were thinking about Latin where we have unicorns, where we have woman led organizations, where we change our production practices, where we change our consumer practices. So also what do you think we need to get there where we are now, where we have all these amazing solutions and young startups, maybe some more developed to get to that future and the dream? I think we need better communication. I think I work in climate tech and I find it so confusing to really know what's going on, when things are gonna happen, how should I be preparing? And one of my friends who worked in the cultivated meat space, he was one time telling me like, the big companies don't really need to say bad things about us, they just need to confuse people because that's enough, right? And there's so much information out there that's like really, really difficult to discern what's actually gonna happen. Like I wanna do a personal project of like mapping out, right? Like what does this domino effect look like as we're hitting or not hitting some of these timelines and I look for that information and it's hard to find. So I think if we wanna empower consumers and we wanna empower organizations to make better decisions, we need better sources of information and sources of truth that we can go out and find what's really gonna happen. And I will say digestible information, no, because as you said, it's sometimes really hard to understand it, right? Yeah, not everybody goes to sit down and read the scientific academic papers. Or nobody has a PhD. How about you, Andres Lee and Yuri, what do you think we need for those solutions to really become the dream? I agree, it's the communication piece and the education behind just putting the commercial opportunity out there. So as fund manager, part of my work is we speak with investors, so the investors in the fund, they're called LPs, about the climate of opportunity. And everyone here I think is aware of the climate of opportunity, how big it is. But there's a large part of the wealth in LATAM that see it as something very distant still in terms of commercial returns. Some may see that fintech or other verticals are profitable, but they don't still see the opportunity behind. It's called a sustainability to be brought. So I think that's gonna be one of the game changers that investors, entrepreneurs will start seeing that there's a huge opportunity for financial returns behind climate solutions. And that's gonna bring in more capital for more projects and enable a lot of these dreams we've put out there. How would you, Yuri and Leah, what else do we need to get to the dream and vision? Education, more investments, more money, the commercial opportunity, what else? Yeah, well, in our case, we've been investing for impact at INCOFIN for the last 20 years in Latin America. And we started with financial inclusion. So that was, I think, one of the key developments at the time to also make sure that entrepreneurs and micro-entrepreneurs had the opportunity to start talking about or thinking about ideas and have the funding for developing these ideas. 10 years ago, we started investing in agri-food systems, sustainable agri-food systems. And I think this was one of the biggest learnings from us to actually learn from the region and the communities and how smallholder farmers operate, how communities operate. So I think what we really need is solutions that are close to people. And actually, going back to what our panel, the person that introduced their panel, I don't remember them. I'm fine. I'm fine. Said it has to be social, environmental, and financially sustainable. So it has to meet all three criteria. Because if we want to attract capital, we need to have also investable opportunities that are attractive, not only from the environmental impact side, that can be profitable, but that are also taken into consideration, people. So for us, I think that's why we're working on developing two funds right now that have this link between social, environmental, and financial as any other impact investor. But with bringing our experience from the field, and we're actually working in a fund for the Amazon, that it's focused on Mezzanine Dept for the Amazon for supporting SMEs in projects that build climate resilience and or have a component of biodiversity protection. But we think this is the type of solution, because we think this is the type of solutions that mix the three objectives and that consider the local knowledge that it's developed in the communities and that value nature on its own, but also that create opportunities around nature. So I think that's the main challenge, how to combine these three and how to also be linked to the reality of the countries, because it's very easy to say, okay, the solution is plant trees, just plant trees in deforested areas, but how, with whom are you going to do this? So are you going to buy land and plant trees there and just promote a lot of migration from these regions or how are you going to actually do it? So it's not like a solution of plant millions of trees and that's it. No, it's having the connection with the communities. I think that's a great point and I'm gonna ask you to here because we were also discussing before that one of the big challenges to get to that dream is like, how do we measure progress, right? Because when we're talking about climate mitigations, there's simple indicator, how many CO2 tons are you capturing or preventing to get from the environment, but when we're talking about climate adaptation, coming back to your point, like, how do we even talk about it? What is actually the climate adaptation? How do we measure it? And I don't want it to completely get derailed because that's a very technical conversation, but if you can just give us a bit of sense of how do we need to move forward to work towards what Leo was saying of how are we going to be measuring this positive impact that these solutions are having so that we can attract greater investments to these types of solutions that can prove that they're actually having that impact on the people, on the planet and the commercial returns. No, I couldn't agree more and I would say that the two challenges that we have internally are, as you mentioned, mitigation is a standard and kind of given by the goal almost, but the two challenges that we have are on measurement and tracking of adaptation and measurement and tracking of biodiversity. There are two things which are terrifically important for us to do and where every day it seems like the science has moved, the science has advanced and we're looking at it from a different angle. So that's good. That means we're not stuck in the same place. We're making, we're certainly making progress. We're understanding it better, but it's still far away from where you need to be for it to guide action, for it to like serve as a rudder of where you wanna go. So certainly we have a kind of ecosystem approaches to adaptation, how resilient is an ecosystem. It's not necessarily the person level or the household level or the company level. It's how all of this is or the community level even, if it's how all of it's brought together. So there's public policy layer on the ecosystem approach and then there's kind of the individual areas of measurement at kind of household and firm level. And they're very interdependent in the sense that progress in one area could inadvertently generate problems in the area right next door, right? So you really have to be aware of the interdependencies and the interlinkages in measurement. So I think that's a challenge for all of us, but I think it's something, and related also is kind of the MRV frameworks that we have set up on the public side and increasingly on the private side related to tokenization related to biodiversity credits, carbon credits, et cetera, and making sure that those are kind of working better, technological innovation in space, technological innovation in ground measurement. So that's all gonna allow us to move this really, really quickly in terms of the measurement space. So another question later, I'll answer about something else, but I think the measurement is super important and missing. Yeah, and just to add, that's also something that we're very actively working on because we say like, oh, we invest in climate. And then the first question is like, okay, but how do you measure it? So we're actually currently developing our climate adaptation framework to just to try to understand like, how are we measuring progress? What are we doing here? So yeah, happy to collaborate and to exchange notes with anybody working on the sector because we're also trying to figure it out. And the other point that we're also doing is like working with some of the companies in our portfolio that have a clear climate angle, then working with the other ones that don't have the clear climate angle, but how do we make it clear? Like you need to worry about this because this is going to affect your business, your users, your employees. So I think that also brings back to the point of what we were talking about, education, mainstream and government, that it's important for all. And just final question before we open it up to the audience, what questions is, how do we attract more investments? Like we have in the audience investors and LPs and we're saying that one of the key important things is that we need more money in the region to make sure that the solutions grow and scale and become unicorns and stand their way of working. So what's your pitch to the audience that has money and saying like, why they should invest in climate solutions in Latin America? What's our competitive advantage? Who wants to start? Andres. Yeah, what's the pitch? We have hundreds of startups in the region that are resolving climate change. And on the other side, we have this spiking demand from corporates for climate solutions. So corporates are committing to the same goals you see in developed markets. They want to get to net zero by, some by 2030, some a little bit later. So we speak on a regular basis with sustainability managers, corporate affairs managers, and we're seeing this sort of desperation in the air because they see their goals coming closer and closer. They need climate solutions and it's not gonna be as easy as just importing all of them. So the demand is there, the startups are in place and we're seeing startups that have more traction at lower valuations than you will see in Silicon Valley. That's a huge opportunity to invest, scale solutions in Latin where we have the natural assets and take them at a global scale. So commercial opportunity, great traction, lower valuation that can lead to higher returns. How about you, Marisol? Why more investments in the region in climate solutions? Well, I have a different perspective. I think when we think about climate solutions, we should come at them with like, is this gonna be a big business or not? And take out like, let's not invest in it because of climate as well as like, we don't want to invest in women just because they're women. We want to invest in it because they're amazing businesses. So the great opportunity here is that a lot of the people that are working on material innovation or food technology innovation is the goal, we want to make the best quality product at a competitive price. So if you think about this in the market, I was gonna say if, but when we make the best tasting coffee possible and we can also make it at the cheapest cost, the opportunity is gonna come from a market potential and not because it's more sustainable. So a lot of the companies these days have gone away from thinking about how do we meet goals? And it's like, how do we give the market something that they could never turn away from? So higher quality, lower prices, big scale and giving consumers what they want. So basically we would only want to buy your coffee. It needs to be everywhere. I love it. I like it. It's the best. What do you, Liga? Yeah, I would add a little bit on what has been said and I think it has to be a vision on the financial opportunity and if you want to attract more money into Latin America, it has to be a great business and it is and take coffee. It's billions of dollars of a sector that it's worth billions of dollars but you have Asahi that it's growing at rates that are, yeah, huge. And there is Palmito and there is a Buruti and there is like all these very exotic products that we don't know much today about as a consumer but that are like really game changers in how we will be consuming in the future and it's adding or even raising awareness on the value of all these natural resources that are there that we don't have or that are not commercialized right now as the huge or like the big businesses but that will be in the next 10 years and the cosmetics company, the cosmetics sector is growing a lot in Latin America based on nature solutions that have components that are, yeah, that are like what you said. It's like millions of components of one little plant that creates things that are very, very, maybe yeah, that could be very profitable. Okay, so the business opportunity of all these exotic plants that can be used for cosmetics or to be eaten that we love, it's based here, like it. Yuri, what else? Why invest in Latin America climate solutions? I mean, I'm gonna go back to the two degrees where everyone raised their hands and two and a half, three. So the reality is that infrastructure is gonna have to be essentially reinvented, materials have to be reinvented, agriculture reinvented, what do I mean by reinvented? I mean, you just have to turn on the news to see where it's happening, right? It gets too hot and suddenly the metro in Washington doesn't work because the rail's separated. Uh-oh, that's a problem, we need to go and rebuild all that infrastructure. It gets too hot and oh my God, the planes can't take off anymore because the air density has changed and the air over the wing is less dense, that means there's less lift, that means it needs more runway, that means it can't go. So they have to be parked there and waiting. All of this is gonna continue and continue and it's a business opportunity, right? It's a business opportunity. Coffee is a business opportunity. If we didn't have anything going on in climate change, probably the motivation would be slightly less, I'm sure it's delicious and we're all gonna go to your coffee but the motivation would not be as strong as it is right now. So I think that part of communicating in a medium term what is going to be necessary. We all started with insurance and fintech and this stuff and now we understand it's everything. So I think that's the business case that we need to be making right now. I love how you put it, changing the challenges to a business opportunities. So now I'm gonna open up, I know there are questions, there are small rooms, so anybody has any questions? Yeah, no, I mean, data availability is always a concern. I wouldn't say just the emerging market, so I would say it's a concern everywhere. If anything, I think that the gap in data availability has been reduced in emerging markets because of tech innovation mostly and some of the dependence on kind of brick and mortar legacy infrastructures to produce data have been overcome with technology. And not just in the financial sector, but I would say across the board. So I think that's certainly, I mentioned satellite data, ground measurement. I think the MRV frameworks are super important and I think they're important for investors and they're important for not just investors, but everyone who's gonna participate because they're going to be also purchasing or consumers at one point. What I would say is, compared to where we were even five years ago, the data availability is vastly better, vastly better. So I think it's not saying it's not a problem, it's a problem, but I think we're really moving in that direction. And I would just add that I think like in Latin America, there's also a sense of collaboration among actors that maybe it's not the same in other regions in the world. So if you reach out to other investors or entrepreneurs, I think we still have this feeling that we have to figure this out together. So my other advice would be to reach out to actors in the region and looking for the data that you're looking for collaboration because I do think we do have the spirit of building this together because we still need so much more money. So even when everybody's raising money and talking to LPs, we are rooting for our neighbor because we still need more money and more investors and more entrepreneurs and more actors in the region. So that will be my other thing. And I would add that technology plays a key role for that too. So with this is also that something that we're seeing in the region, that technology is actually, and actics and fintechs and all these technology-driven companies are actually building these data and measuring and making it a little bit more transparent for all the stakeholders. And we have a question from the audience. How can we involve the government to the climate solutions? And am I gonna put you in this one? Maricelda, I think you were leading some initiatives. So if you wanna tell us about a practical way of how to make this happen. Involve the government? Yeah. Oh, I'm not sure if anyone has ideas. I'd love to hear them. I mean, my approach has been with the government of Costa Rica. I've been very open about what we're doing and it's actually been interesting the amount of research that they've done. For example, Costa Rica went through this process where they had 250 different crops and went through an analysis of which ones are we most competitively positioned to grow. Turns out it's not the things that we're growing. But there are 10 items that are ideal for us to be growing in places like Costa Rica where we would be able to grow them at better efficiency than anywhere else. So we're working with not the government but an adjacent partner to help coffee farmers transition into more climate resilient crops. So we're donating percentage of our revenue to actually do intercropping systems where we're getting them to diversify their income. My goal is that if this works and there are case studies that they've already tripled their income in many ways, we can use it as a case study to bring it to the government and say, like, why do we have 90,000 hectares of Costa Rica planted in coffee when we don't even make that much money? Most of our coffee farmers are actually below the poverty line. The money is being made by the roasters here and across Europe. So why don't we transition our country to grow where we are most competitively positioned to do? They have the research and my goal is that we can come in with the data of saying we've demonstrated that and that has been our government relationship so far. Any other insights or examples? I mean, I think the government is, governments are fully engaged in different dimensions of this problem already. A few things that I would focus on. Yesterday we were talking about facilitating financial flows into the sector and that has a lot to do with the government's enabling this to happen. We're talking about open banking initiatives in Brazil which are gonna recruit capital from outside. This capital can easily be directed towards the highest impact and the highest return on the climate agenda. So I think that's super important. R&D efforts in Latin America are not where they should be. They're lagging behind, they're underfunded, the talent is not well managed, the relationship between research develop and companies and innovation is not what you see in Silicon Valley. It's not, so there's a lot more to be done on that, not just putting more funding but working in a more collaborative way and in a more dynamic way with between government and enterprise in Latin America. So I certainly, I think that is absolutely necessary. And then there are like public goods that governments need to be doing more of. Understanding the characteristics of land. It's not reasonable to have every entrepreneur company go and understand what the characteristics of land are. This is something that governments have to do. They have to make these maps and data sets opening available for everyone and everyone can compete in a fair marketplace but these are certain aspects which are really specific of what government should be doing. And in Latin America I think they need to be, they need to be pushing this clearly in a better direction that they've been doing. I would add quickly that I think at least in Latin America, from the countries that we work with, it's a topic that governments have in the agenda and it's a key element of the agenda. For example, South America right now, it's becoming bio-economy is like the top, one of the top topics in the political agenda, things move slow, so it takes time. And coming from the private sector, I also think that the solution is not only the government. So the solution is it's from everyone, even consumers. So it has to be, it has to be like, I think the role of the private sector is also key. Even when maps are not available, you see institutes and you see universities and you see all these stakeholders participating in building the conditions to have a market for nature. And relying only in governments will not take us very far. Can I add one more thing? I also think we need more citizenship participation. Like it just feels like we've all checked out. At least my generation, I feel like none of my peers ever considered working for the government. They were initially like, I want to go to a startup where I want to go work for a big company. But it's like, if it's not us who have a vision of what the world should look like and what we want the world to look like that are working to build it, then who are we letting it enhance up? But government also seems like such a scary place for a lot of younger people. So how do we actually get citizens engaged in saying what we want government funds to be invested in and what policies do we want driven? It's more of a question than an answer. But then supporting those that want to take that step and working government, that's a good one. Just a quick one. No, navigating doing lobbying with governments, it's highly complex, depends on the, a lot in the country. One of our investors is the former ministry of environment of Chile, which she promoted the framework for the climate change law. We've had this discussion and you need to find the avenues for each country where there are some, for example in Chile, you have the corfuels, you would translate it at the promotion corporations, part of government, and they do all sorts of subsidies and they want to be close to what's happening on the tech space. So the appetite from governments to get closer to the climate solutions, we see it there. They just are a bit distant to what's happening on the ground. And we've seen that appetite to increase that dialogue. It's just a matter of finding the right pathways and stakeholders. Yeah, it's a great collaboration. So just to close, I'm going to allow you to interview, please, to one or two phrases to close up, call to action, announcements, reflections. Just. We're out of time. So I'm just going to remind everyone also that the single largest investor in climate is a government, by a long shot, that for nature swaps that we're doing in Ecuador, these are all government-leveled initiatives. So what can the government do more, I think is kind of the discussion. It's not to say that they're not relevant. They're absolutely central to the climate. The COP is an agreement of governments. They sign agreements there. They always follow through on them, but they do sign them. So that's their natural purview, their natural function. So the closing. Yeah, you call it to action, announcement or reflection, two phrases. My call to action, announcement. Well, the announcement that we have is we are, Carlos is not here anymore, but we are launching a decarbonization initiative. We're actually going to launch it at COP in December. So I think it's a super exciting opportunity to work with companies in decarbonizing their carbon footprints and also bringing in entrepreneurs and innovators to be able to get that done. So, you know, Latin Pacto and IDB Lab will be launching that in COP. I think it's going to be great. And anyone who's interested, you know, we can discuss that it's super needed. Leah. So we have two announcements. We're launching two funds, one for microfinance, climate smart microfinance institutions in worldwide. So if you have a FinTech or a financial institution that is active in this talk to us and, or an investor also. And we're also launching an initiative for the Amazon on, as I mentioned, climate focused on for SMEs. So climate resilience and biodiversity protection. So also if you have you're an entrepreneur, reach out or investor interested in this, reach out. And maybe the, call to action as a consumer. I think it's, we're all consumers. So we really should be thinking about valuing more nature as consumers. Andres. We are with Savia, our first fund, Savia One. We're on this dead set mission of finding their best deals in Latin America. We're going to invest in approximately 20 companies. So if you know of any startups are interested in the space, follow us on LinkedIn, feel free to reach out or also producing regular content. That's one ask. And the other one is a big thank you to the audience, because all the ones that are here are the ones that know what the urgency is and are the climate rebels we need. So yeah, thanks everyone. Mine is an invite. So if you are still in town this Friday, we are hosting an event where you can try two of our products and we're also raising funds for our partners in Central America. You can ask me for information or it's also on our LinkedIn to register. I'm going and my announcement, have I called two? One, we have a climate tech facility where we're looking for climate innovations in Latin America to try new solutions and new products. So if you're interested, it's in our website, you can apply and we're providing grant funding to provide to test the solutions. And the second one is that tomorrow we're going to be in the investor's speech deck, talking a bit more about what we do at MCD. So you're all invited, it's at 1 p.m. tomorrow. And just before you take the microphone away, Rafael, since I'm the moderator, I just want to close out with my three points that I was taking from all the conversation. Thank you again for such a big brand conversation. Like the first one, I think like was raised upon, it's like really, we need solutions to prevent the weather and the temperatures to continue to rise, but we also need to invest in solutions and to look for solutions that are going to help us adapt to the new law, the new world that we're going to live in because it's a reality that world is getting hotter and we need to adapt to it. The second one is that Latin America has a unique and an incredible position and that we have these amazing solutions, entrepreneurs and overall ecosystem that it's working towards those solutions. So we need more financial investments and like the opportunity, it's there, the market, it's there and the solution, it's there. And the third one, it's like related to the communication and the language, like even for us that work in the climate space, sometimes to like be honest to ourselves and have the real conversations and when we're talking like, how do we measure this and how do we do it? Like to not start to throw all this jargon away but try to keep it simple and try to understand that like, yeah, maybe we're not experts on the matter, but we all care about it. So how do we, can we work together and communicate in a simple and effective way towards investing and supporting to scale more climate solutions in Latin? Thank you.