 My name is Kim Hoi Nio, Managing Director at the World Economic Forum and welcome to the Beta Zone on contact deliver on its climate and nature promise. So to answer this question, we have to look at it from two angles. One is what are these technological innovations and solutions? And for many years we have heard about blockchain for supply chain and commodities markets. We have heard about remote sensing for measurement, monitoring and management. We have heard about synthetic biology for new materials and regeneration and also advanced technological capabilities whether it is carbon capture, battery storage, so on and so forth. Then the second aspect of this question is for it to really deliver on its nature and climate crisis is can we actually bring these solutions to market and to implementation? And here when we are dealing with the nature and climate crisis we are talking about speed scale. We are also talking about affordability and bankability, sustainability of these solutions. And to help me answer this question today, I have with me two very distinguished speakers, Jane Burston who is the CEO and founder of the Clean Air Fund and Melissa Lott who is the Director for Research at the Columbia University Centre for Global Energy Policy and I'll just introduce Jane first and then after that Melissa will come on stage. Jane has been an advocate and ambassador and she has changed since she was very, very young. If you read her Wikipedia page and in fact she was the first to actually set up a global corporate alliance on Clean Air and Clean Air is almost what we call the silent killer. And the surprising statistic or rather the shocking statistic is that more than 90% of us actually live in environments that are polluted. And the question is can we actually address the issue of pollution, air pollution to better improve human health and also help build us onto this sustainability journey through technology. So Jane if you could help us share your insights. Thank you. Thank you. So when we think about climate technology we tend to think about renewable energy or carbon capture and storage or electric vehicles. And I bet nobody thinks about little plastic monitors in the shape of a pac-man ghost or sensors that you might be able to hide in a school kids backpack. But I'm here to tell you about how these kinds of technologies could be transformative for the climate agenda. First of all though because I know we're after lunch a bit of audience participation. Who in the room is worried about climate change? A couple of people not. I wish I were you. But mostly worry about climate change. Thank you. And I want you to raise your hands again if climate change has factored into your decision making over the last week. So maybe what you did at the weekend before you came. How you got here. What you chose for lunch. Anybody factored climate change? Okay this is the climate crowd so we're not doing too badly. But I would say at least half, maybe a bit less than half of those hands. Well we're not unusual with regards to our levels of concern. This chart shows what percentage of people around the world say that they're somewhat or very concerned about climate change. And you can see it's quite a lot all over the world. South America it's more than the dark red is more than 80% of people worried. Africa more than 70% in most places same in India. So really high levels of concern. But not in all cases is concern translating into action. Oftentimes the most climate friendly solutions are less affordable, more hassle than the high carbon alternatives. And it makes it hard for us to choose them on a day to day basis. Governments need to implement the policies to make them cheaper and easier. But to do that they need people behind them. So how are we going to get climate change more personal and galvanize people behind these policies that governments need to implement? Well the answer might lie maybe in air pollution. Because the causes of air pollution are very often the same as the causes of climate change. In fact about two thirds of outdoor air pollution is from burning fossil fuels. So if the causes are the same then the solutions can be the same. But unlike climate change air pollution is local, it's immediate and it's personal. The health impacts are huge and they're affecting our everyday lives. Health impacts are the kinds of things that might change our decisions day to day. You'll see from this chart that outdoor air pollution according to the WHO causes early death in more than 4 million people every year. More than tuberculosis, HIV and AIDS and malaria combined. And it's also causing a huge number of chronic illnesses that are making people's quality of life lower. Lung cancer, heart attack, strokes and more recent, very shocking evidence around the links to miscarriages Parkinson's disease and dementia. So bearing in mind these awful health statistics how are people translating it into their day to day lives and how is it galvanizing action? Well we know that we're all affected as well as these statistics we know from the WHO that 98% of us are breathing harmful air. But we don't tend to engage with those statistics. One of the reasons is this. This is a regulatory grade air quality monitor. It's not accessible to your average person. It's big, it's expensive, hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on buying these and maintaining them. And it needs experts to use it. And what that means is there aren't very many of them actually. There's especially in the parts of the world that are the most polluting or the most polluted or where pollution is growing the most. It also means that it's usually only scientists and policy makers that ever really look at the data. And that's where technologies like this come in. This is an air beam sensor from an NGO called Habitat Map in the States. But there's many technologies like this and they're small, they're portable, with a little bit of application anyone can use one. And people are using them to measure their personal exposure to air pollution for the first time. We can track our exposure in real time breath by breath. And that's exactly what these young people across Africa are doing. As part of a project led by Professor Tolu Oni who co-chairs the Clean Air GFC, these young people in Lagos Acra and Cape Town are using monitors like these to literally run around their city collecting data about the levels of air pollution and snapping photos of what the sources are and feeding that back to their governments. And as a result, the governments have already started to commit to more official monitoring but also projects to reduce pollution in their neighborhoods. Think of it like this. In computers meant at the IBM Supercomputers of the 80s computing wasn't the kind of thing that we would have in our everyday lives. It wouldn't affect us. But with the advent of the first iPhone in 2007, which this one is not there have been a lot of iterations since it really put the data and the power of that data in our hands. And these kinds of monitors can do the same. It just depends on us to figure out what we do with it. So one last example before I close. I was a project focused on understanding the air quality problem in London. We developed this bespoke air quality sensor, integrated into a backpack so that five different schools around London could be part of that research and understand the exposure levels of school children on their journeys to and from school. So this project managed to calculate that children are exposed to five times more air pollution in their journey to school than when they're in the classroom. But that also by taking the back streets rather than the main road to school they could avoid a lot of that exposure. And the evidence from this project as well as the support of the school children and the families and the communities that were part of it is what's enabled the Mayor of London to expand the ultra-low emission zone. So it's a clean air zone now covering 10 million people, the biggest in the world. So without that using technology we can enable people to measure what they're breathing and that can galvanize them to demand action. The action that we need not just for clean air and healthier cities but also to mitigate climate change. So if you're looking for the next best transformative climate technology you might just be able to fit it in your backpack. Thank you. Questions for Jane in a moment I choose Melissa Melissa also started young because she's been in the energy space for more than 20 years looking at policy technological solutions in new energy systems. And with a very good pulse on the developments what works, what doesn't what are the key road blocks. So I'm hoping to have her share her insights on where are the big bats what are the good bats and what do you think are the key bottlenecks that we ought to look at when we think about technology solutions but also more importantly bringing these solutions to implementation and to skill. So when it comes to solving climate change we are actually doing a lot we have more policies than we've ever had before we're building more renewables we're building more clean energy than we ever had before so let's look at what we need to do to actually bend the curve and to protect human health and the environment. So I want to talk about the speed and the scale of the challenge that's in front of us because this is something I don't think we've absorbed how many things we're talking about building and how quickly we're talking about building them when we talk about things like net zero 1.5 degrees 2 degrees the scale and the speed is absolutely massive and there's not too many examples in our history where we have achieved this type of speed and scale. So when it comes to my work I work in the energy system I work across the system in things like power but also in buildings also in our industries and also in transportation not just electric vehicles not just personal vehicles but also buses, heavy trucks planes, ships everything that gives us mobility everything that moves around and when we look at all those technologies it's a bit of good news that is that we have the technologies we need to actually get on the road to net zero to make these changes happen and when we talk about those technologies what we also know is one of the main things we have to do with those technologies to get to net zero so I'm about to summarize literally thousands of studies around the world in three pictures get ready so when we look at pathways net zero that ensure that our energy systems are affordable, reliable and clean not just one of those but all three at once what we see is that we need to do three main things the first thing is electrify everything that makes sense to electrify I say that very intentionally because it is not everything in our economies but it is a lot and as we do that we try to become as efficient as possible the next thing we do is clean up our energy supplies this is all that electricity that we use but it's also the fuels that we need to actually keep our industry running and to power things like the big planes that go through the air I'm an engineer as much as I wish I could tell you I could electrify that physics gets in the way this thing called lift just stops happening after a point when you put too many batteries in those systems so we need to think about cleaning up our energy supplies and how do we do that and what we need to do is clean up everything that's left because the climate cares about you getting to net zero it doesn't care how close you get if you don't actually get to net zero after some point we don't end up stabilizing things if we don't get there so we have to clean up what's left so this is things like direct air capture other technologies that can take all the emissions that might come out of a smokestack or just out of the air and putting them underground or creating products with them it's also nature based solutions so we electrify that everything that makes sense to electrify we clean up all of our supplies electricity plus a lot of other things and then we clean up what's left because we can't leave anything behind and the good news on this is that a lot of the technologies that we need to actually do those things have dropped in price quite a bit so we have policies that support these technologies but we also are benefiting from huge drops in renewable energy costs so the cost of wind and solar if you told me this was the graph I'd be looking at 20 years ago when I started I would have said man that'd be great I'm not going to bet a lot of money on it and I certainly would not have bet on this the dramatic decline in the cost of living my own batteries and battery technologies more generally every week it seems like I'm reading about a new chemistry and a new breakthrough that's going to allow us to do things we just didn't think was possible that we could do before so that's the really good news when it comes to the energy transition I sum it up in this phrase I say that when it comes to getting to net zero it's not simple or intuitive but we need to build a lot of stuff I mean a lot of stuff and we need to do it really quickly so if I have the technologies I need to get on the road to net zero I should be in a really great place I've got solar panels and wind turbines I've figured out how to break apart water into hydrogen and oxygen to create fuels for other things in our industry I'm in a really great place except for the reality is there's a lot of other challenges a lot of non-technical barriers that actually slow down the deployment of those technologies so I'm talking about things like reliability issues the inability to build these technologies for a whole host of reasons the speed at which we're able to build up supply chains minds processing building into things that we want to use at the end of the day whether it's that battery, that electric vehicle that solar panel that might go in a field electrolyzer, any of the above there's a tremendous amount of stuff that has to be done it takes coordination it takes the development of so many steps it takes money it takes financing in huge huge amounts and at the middle of all this are geopolitics are different tensions and priorities because climate is one priority of different communities so I sum these up as non-technical barriers and when you combine the technical non-technical what I see is that we still have really real challenges but here's the good part that I'll end on we know how to lean in to really big challenges when you look at history we have mobilized entire parts of economies in response to things that aren't pleasant like wars and pandemics the good news is in this case is that we are actually all responding to the same challenge a challenge that will affect each of us differently so if you look at solving these barriers to deploying the technology that we do have and that is available we have an opportunity to solve this challenge and to give ourselves the opportunity for continued growth and prosperity I'll leave it there so I'll now invite Jane and Melissa to come on stage and open the floor to questions or comments ah, we get chairs cool any questions from the floor we'll pass the mic around yes, please introduce yourself and then you can make your comment thank you so much to Jane and Melissa my name is Angel Shu, I'm an Associate Professor Public Policy in the Environment my question was actually to Melissa it was really great summary and provide a lot of hope and optimism but I was wondering why you didn't talk about demand side responses as part of the solution picture so I was just wondering if you could comment on that so I said it really quickly in a couple of ways so the first pillar of how we do this is that we electrify that everything that makes sense to electrify while becoming as efficient as possible and efficiency can take a lot of different forms so it can be doing the same things with less energy so we know the classic example of replacing a light bulb or you might have do you guys remember old light bulbs when you sit around them and they were hot, actually did the touch you didn't touch them, now we have LEDs and still accomplish things we want to do but it's also about shifting when we have demand so in becoming as efficient as possible that is my very quick summary of doing things on the demand side that allow us to be more efficient not just on the demand side but through the supply side as well so we're not wasting free electrons as one example thank you and then there's a question at the back as well hello my name is Sophie Punta I'm founder of Smart Rate Center for your presentation I suppose my main question is climate seems to be right in everybody's mind as a forefront issue however there's other things related to it air quality is one of them climate change adaptation is another development in economies another one, how do you make sure or how can we make sure that we don't lose those other very important issues out of sight while at the same time making sure we reach our net zero goals perhaps a question to both of you do you want me to start so when it comes to these three pillars that I put up behind all of them is an assumption that we're meeting our sustainable development goals and we're taking the hundreds of millions of people that don't have access to modern energy but also the billions of people who don't have access to nearly enough to achieve their development goals to achieve the life opportunities they want to have open to them and so behind that all of those pathways those three pillars that is a precondition we're also achieving the sustainable development goals so I'm living that and trying to encourage people to look at where the intersections are the strongest so not just health and climate but also equity and development too so a lot of the stuff that we fund as a philanthropic organization is around the co-benefits and promoting them to the right audience an example is even in the UK we saw that the environment department was quite keen on strong grand bien air quality standards but it was the finance ministry that was blocking the move because they thought that there would be a huge cost and very limited financial benefit the public health authority had calculated it was in the hundreds of millions per year benefit to the health system but actually the productivity benefit of having people not have to stay off work sick because they're ill because of air pollution or because their kids are off sick with air pollution was huge it was for the UK if they were to meet World Health Organization guideline limits at the time from where the current standards were it was 1.6 billion sterling a year from when the targets was met so that's not an eradication of pollution that's just meeting a reasonable target and on development it's the saying air pollution affects crop yields affect solely yields tourism there's so many different sectors that are affected that maybe people don't know about that if you promote those co-benefits then you can get actions that are a win-win question at the back thank you both my name is Padma and I'm the head of air quality section Ministry of Climate Change Environment thank you for the example of the UK this is really the message need to pass to everyone because when they see it in an economic or dollar sign they all afraid from changing the standards but anyway just an information for all of the audience here we have almost 54 ambient stations around the country and this is one of the biggest network in the MENA region and the information is accessible and it's online for all of the public just a note for you and thank you both thank you I was actually quite curious how much does this pegman cost I don't know whether Tully can help me out on that it's in the hundreds of dollars how much? 200 and you're going to see the cost curve come down and more people start carrying around I mean it's worth saying it is absolutely nowhere near as accurate as the big one there are hundreds of thousands and then there's somewhere in between they're called low cost sensors that are maybe a thousand dollars but they're you need to factor in the cost of optimising their location and the energy that they use so they're maybe not as low cost as they seem but they're a hell of a lot cheaper than the big one and it's not about replacing the big ones either there needs to be a network of lots of different types of monitoring it's just the new data that it gives us about personal exposure when you can use things that are hundreds of dollars for other than hundreds of thousands Yes, thanks I have another question to Jane Burston what I didn't really understand is I'm coming from Germany when I I look at at my app the weather app I can also real time see what the pollution is in my area so why should I use this device in developed countries I think in other countries it's similar to Germany isn't the device which is only for developing countries and then perhaps it's a little bit expensive or is it also for developed countries or why is it used in London Thanks for the question so air pollution can vary very significantly from street to street so you might remember I mentioned in London where the kids were using this very sensor actually they were using a Dyson sensor in London there when they took the back streets to school their pollution levels were significantly lower than on the main road and it's because some types of pollution are quite heavy so it sits low to the ground and the buildings trap it and so if you're trying to optimize for your health and you maybe have a little bit more time and these other routes are safe and there's no personal monitors to decide which is the route that I'm going to take to school today also within that project using this data and some data that Google produced by driving a very high quality monitor around in street view cars and we were able to produce an incredibly granular map of air quality street by street level across London and that helped the mayor's office detect specific hotspots and they didn't know about using the big monitors which are the number that the weather apps use to produce their data so even if you had I think it was 58 monitors across the UAE I don't know how many London has it's fewer than that but they located it kind of major street junctions all of the kind of big areas you might expect so you miss hotspots you do the modelling and you just don't know what you don't know so in London for example there was a bus station that was a big hotspot because the drivers were idling their vehicles including when they were on their lunch break just to stay warm in the London winter rather than using the staff room so that's an easy one that you can reduce quickly it's affecting all of the houses in that neighbourhood they put posters up they train the bus drivers they let them know about the availability of the staff room the hotspot comes down quite quickly so it's the granularity and the personal exposure it's a single figure you get from the regulatory grade monitors through the weather apps Thank you, that's very helpful Any other questions? Yes, maybe we'll make this the last question We'll have the mic So I'm just thinking about the UK Can you introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Jan Godsell I'm the Dean of Loughborough Business School in the UK In the UK they've just extended the Eulah Zone in London and it wasn't universally popular and in fact some of our political parties have used it as a campaigning tool to potentially not expand it So what do you think the role of the media or more general education to perhaps educate or encourage people to care about these things because when push really comes to shove in the UK for instance, we do have evidence that some people would still go for the cheaper option rather than the option that's better for their health I think that that is the crux of the matter really, there's the equity issue of our people able to afford the new cost that is being imposed on them So in London for those who don't know the ultra low emission zone is a restriction on which vehicles you can drive into the city and for the oldest vehicles you have to pay a fine and it was the first two times it was expanded people were pretty happy and now it's going to the outskirts of London there's a lot less public transport so people are asking for more public transport routes and those borrowers are also less expensive places to live and maybe people on lower incomes so the mayor did finally provide a scrappage scheme for vehicles for the people who could at least afford to switch and a commitment to a significant amount of additional bus routes but it's still tricky for some families or small businesses to afford the change and I think this was where a lot of the media coverage and discontent came I think it's also worth saying that the majority of people are in favour it's just they often end up being silent a silent majority in favour of the thing that's healthier and quality does now seem to be being pulled into the culture wars somewhat so there are also groups fanning the flames of what were genuine concerns but making them seem a lot greater than they were I'll make a comment just because I was part of the design of the ultra low emission zone and I worked with the mayor of London before he transitioned to something else and within it the loudest opposers of it were again very small groups who had very small interests and no ability transition to the next thing I remember some very spirited discussion with the duck tours people for one example where they were saying this is the vehicle that is our business we cannot replace it with something else so they didn't see a path forward for themselves in terms of how we brought information which I think is to your question to people I'm part of something called the Lancet countdown and we break down at a very local level the co-impacts that June talks about are on air pollution and local health and within it we mapped out one of the most impactful projects we did was mapping out the actual air quality readings again at the local level around hospitals elder care facilities and educational facilities of children of different ages but predominantly focused on the under 14s who are still very much developing their lungs and are completely susceptible to this and within that it was the hospital numbers and the elder care facility numbers that at least the feedback we got back and also providing people with information to say this is what's happening I have data on it I have the numbers and I can do something about it and I can actually transition and I know where that pollution is coming from how much is transport, how much is some other source and as Jane said it comes back to the energy system so often which includes all the cars that run around the city so within it I would say exactly what you said the conversations would become contentious at the edges but there was a core of harming our health and we're paying for it in the UK's case through tax dollars through the national healthcare system through literally the health of our children and of our society and we know we can do something about it which is really powerful there's a very strong cultural dimension as well to the implementation of technology I would like to leave the last comments to both of you if you were to leave a thought with this audience here can tech deliver on the climate and nature promise Well I would echo Melissa's point from before we have all of the technologies we need we don't have the political will which is why I think to Sophie's question emphasizing all of the co-benefits of this I'm trying to maximise areas where there's multiple wins will help us to get the political will as fast as we can and I often just carrying on from that have these conversations where people go well those challenges are massive like geopolitics, finance huge amount of money around and when we look at the challenges by leaning into the magnet acknowledging how tough they are that's where we find solutions just either acknowledging that there's a problem in walking away or never acknowledging it in the first place that's not how we figure out tricky things and we have a history of figuring out these really sticky issues so they are huge challenges but there are solutions and we will find them when we lean into them Terima kasih Terima kasih kerana menonton