 I'm a member of the decarbonization committee and you heard that we're coming up with our report this fall. I am so honored to be on the advisory committee for climate crossroads and I just started just a wonderful honor to be the chair of the bees, the board of energy and environmental systems. Who are the mighty bees team is here? Yeah, so you can guess I'm a big fan of the academies and I so much appreciate that the team has put together this amazing summit. So thank you very much and I'm really excited about this panel. Let me start by introducing the panelists here and then we'll begin with some questions in conversation. First we're going to go with Kate Lowry. She is with the science philanthropy alliance. I hope I got that title exactly right. By the way, I'm not going to go through their bios. They are stellar all of the panelists are you have the description of everybody's experience and bios and you should read them word for word. Additionally then we have I guess I'm going to go with Lucas Jaffa. I think next let's do that. She's with Haveli investments. And then finally Dan Walker with the American Society for Civil Engineers. So please take a look at their bios. We're going to use this the format that we've used for all the other panels. Each of the my colleagues here will give a couple of couple of minutes of opening comments and then I'll try to lob some questions their way and they will give their insights and then we'll go to questions and answers from you and people online. So let's begin. We've heard today about a lot of interconnections and complexities associated with the climate challenges we have in the solution sets. And clearly there are formal and informal partnerships that are critical to getting the job done. I want to start with Kate. Kate who is in the world of philanthropy. We'd love to hear about your perspective about how you have engaged with charitable foundations in working on this issue and could you share some of your insights about public, private partnerships in philanthropy. We're happy to do that. And we'll thank you very much the National Academies for having me today. It's an honor to participate in this summit on the strategy director at the Science Philanthropy Alliance which is an alliance of nearly 40 foundations and philanthropic organizations that work to advance scientific discovery through visionary philanthropy. I came to this organization about five years ago first as our Ocean and Climate Fellow. That was following my PhD in Earth System Science at Stanford University and a post-doc at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. My research focused on phytoplankton and the Arctic Ocean and Antarctica. So I certainly understand firsthand the impacts of climate change on those regions. And I've seen as well the benefits of collaboration and partnership for expanding knowledge of our planet and the immense valuable of flexible support for research. Philanthropy can play a catalytic role. That's the topic of our panel here today by supporting high risk interdisciplinary projects, seeding new fields of research, supporting diverse sets of early career researchers and nimbly funding activities that the government cannot easily fund. These unique advantages are part of what attracted me to this sector. So the alliance works to increase the amount of science philanthropy and also make it more impactful and effective. We do this in part by advising philanthropic funders and also facilitating opportunities for shared learning and collaboration among funders. Each of our members has their own portfolio of programs and projects. They often span basic science and applied science and other areas that we've talked about today, such as science communication, education and public engagement in science. Many are funding climate science and climate related topics, such as the impacts of climate change on human health. What brings together all 40 foundations is an appreciation and investing in discovery science is essential for enabling responses to the world's challenges. And that's certainly true for the climate crisis, where there are still fundamental questions needed to inform mitigation and adaptation. A couple of our members are here at the summit. You heard from Cindy Atherton this morning from the Heising-Simonth Foundation, who moderated a panel. You'll hear from Evan Michelson from the Sloan Foundation tomorrow, who's moderating the panel. I also had the pleasure of seeing Victoria McGovern from the Burroughs Welcome Fund. And all of these foundations have really innovative projects, programs that fund climate innovation and science and technology. And coincidentally, all three were authors on the Alliance's first strategic plan, which we published last year, and it really emphasizes the importance of partnership and collaboration. So we really are seeing a lot of energy among philanthropies around partnership and collaboration, both with each other and with public partners as well. And I'll just give a few examples to highlight this momentum. So the Climate Leadership Initiative was formed by a group of philanthropists with a mission to scale global philanthropy to accelerate climate solutions. Over the last four years, CLI has worked with nearly 80 philanthropists who have given more than 3.4 billion to accelerate climate solutions. The Audacious Project through TED provides a platform for philanthropies, including some of our members, to collaboratively support big ideas for the world's most urgent challenges, including climate. They've ranged from understanding the ocean's twilight zone to increasing the carbon storage of plants to understanding thawing of art of permafrost. And each of these projects has a wide scope and focus on both advancing scientific knowledge and translating that knowledge into action. You heard this morning as a moderator for the Open Panel for the Woodwell Climate Research Center, and one of the Audacious Projects went to that institution, and I'll just highlight it as a good example of this. So the Permafoss Pathways Project was a $41 million initiative through TED Audacious that's ongoing right now in partnership through the Arctic Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School as well as the Alaska Institute for Justice. And they're working to advance fair and equitable strategies to address Arctic warming. The project combines field observations and modeling to predict how much carbon will be released by pan-artic permafrost melt. And it's also working to integrate the findings into international policy agreements and helping to guide community resilience and adaptation efforts in the Arctic. As another example, the UN Decade for Ocean Science for Sustainable Development is bringing together foundations to coordinate support from around the world for ocean science for sustainable development. 30 foundations, including some of our members, met last month for the third foundations dialogue and we'll meet again next year in Brazil with the goal of bringing in more funders from the Southern Hemisphere and collaborations again span from basic to apply to technology development and conservation and communication. And there's a big emphasis on international collaboration and equitable co-design. And then finally, as you mentioned, Sue, we're seeing a lot of momentum around public and private partnerships for climate, which I think is really exciting. One example is that the NASA Earth Science Division is in the early stages of building philanthropic partnerships, public-private philanthropic partnerships to expand the impact of Earth observation data. Some of the early efforts to date have led to the co-creation of projects on topics such as understanding and reducing the climate impacts of food production and understanding how climate and land use change impact the spread of disease. They hope that such collaborations will further Earth observation research and inform use cases for the next generation of satellites. So these are just a few of the many examples of partnership in this area. But even with all of this momentum, we know that more funding is needed for climate science in action. The latest report by the Climate Works Foundation, which focuses on climate mitigation, found that although funding for climate mitigation has tripled from 2015 to 2021, philanthropic giving to this area is still less than 2% of total philanthropic giving to climate. So we know that more investment is needed across the spectrum from discovery to policy to action to address the many climate challenges facing our planet. Thank you very much, Keith. Appreciate it. Lucas, you have had an amazing career as an innovator in private companies and now in the financial investment world. And I wonder if you could talk about the difference it makes for you to be working in this area and how, not just you, but everybody, and the role of partnerships. Sure. Yeah, happy to. And first of all, thanks so much for putting this panel together. Thanks to the academies. I was watching the kickoff this morning. And I was just thinking about how critical this time is now for the academies to be leaning in and convening in a way that only the academies can. So thank you so much. The time has never been more right. And thanks for the question. I mean, I think the question really is, how does society deploy decarbonization solutions at scale? I think, you know, that's as simple as I can put it. And it's what I've been working my whole career on versus as an environmental scientist, something I'm still active in, but more recently as a corporate sustainability manager, operator and an investor first as the chief environmental officer of Microsoft. And then now as a chief sustainability officer at Hovelli Investments, a software private equity shop where I look after the decarbonization efforts of our portfolio of companies, as well as a specific investment thesis around sustainability software solutions. And so anybody who's been in this space for a hot second, like me, you know, you quickly realize that there's actually problems on both sides of the market. There's a scarcity of buyers of decarbonization solutions, and there's a scarcity of suppliers of decarbonization solutions. And as an investor, market shape like that can be both, well, not both generally, either terrifying or exhilarating. And it's most often terrifying when you find out that the reason for the scarcity is because there's neither a compelling reason to buy nor any good ideas of what to sell. That's a bad, I mean, if you're an investor, you know that that's a bad place to be. Get your money out. The good news is that's not where we are on the on the decarbonization and net zero transition of the economy, right? I mean, the requirement to transition to net zero is basically dictated by fundamental laws of physics and chemistry. You know, the ambition and the timeline for doing so are pretty much agreed by the world's major economies. And, and so there we have it, you know, and governments like the US and the EU are already putting in place the requirement and incentivization policies in order to build kind of the foundation what these current or these future decarbonization markets will look like. And so, you know, as an investor, I think that's a great spot to be. I think that's a happy spot to be. There's a lot of tailwinds and a lot of opportunities. And the way that I think about it, just through a kind of financial landscape, this is a simple framework I call sustainability squared. And it's literally nothing more than just for my simple brain, spend enough time around technology executives and become as simple as a technology executive. I can say that now, I think. But, but it's really just the multiplication of the sustainability investments required for on the buy side to decarbonize operations times the sustainability investment on the sell side to put in to build out and take to market sustainability solutions. And we're seeing tons of activity. I think that's kind of this like untold story partly because I think it's happening so fast on both sides of the market. Actually, I think let's just look at the swing that's happening in the debt markets. For instance, if you go back to 2020 and look at Bloomberg's kind of binary breakdown of fossil fuel versus green bond environmental loan facilities, whatever like environmental kind of loan structures back in 2020, the fossil fuel projects in that sector had raised something like 435 billion on the public debt markets and green bonds and their ill could raise like 135 billion. Three years later, it's 2023. For the first time this year, that ratio has flipped and it's flipped by over $100 billion, right? So in the bond markets, green bonds are somewhere around 350 billion right now and fossil fuel projects are at about 235. And in the venture kind of equity side of things as well, things have been on a tear from 2020 to today. There's been about $117 billion in venture capital deployed. That's across like 2,500 climate tech companies around 3,300 deals that were cut. That's all from a great organization called CTVC. If you guys are interested in following this, they're a great way to get your weekly summary. Amazing stat about CTVC. Their newsletter is opened and read on average within five minutes of it arriving in newsletters or in boxes. I wish that my average of emails that I wrote approached five days. So anyway, it's a compelling read. But nonetheless, this is all happening and that's fantastic. And so that's not to say everything's perfect. I'm sure there are plenty of people in this room who understand that not all green bonds are created equal and that some aren't even created green. The broader pullback from the venture equity side of things, 53% down year on year for the Q1 of 2022 to 2023 hit the climate space as well. Climate tech is down 40%. So insulate a little bit, 13% savings there, but still not great. And there's a lot of financial innovation that needs to happen in critical areas of the financing journey, particularly first of a kind facilities. I know all the kind of policy wonks in here are probably pretty well knowledgeable about that. How do we go beyond proof of concept to the first green hydrogen sustainable aviation fuel direct air capture facility at scale, selling into the market and growth, you know, that traditional valley of death. The bad statistic of what I just said about climate being insulated a little bit with only being down 40% is that growth is way down. Growth investment in this space is down something like 65%. And I think the optimist in me would say that that's because a lot of capital was deployed and investors are being smart and they're sitting there and they're waiting to see what happens. But that means there's a lot of pressure on the solutions providers on these companies that made big claims. If those companies start coming through, the world's our oyster. And if they don't, you know, it's I worry a little bit about a clean tech 2.0 sort of thing. Don't you love the way that they both talk about billions? It's great. I guess we're in Washington that works. Dan, you work in a world where there are billions of dollars that are spent on civil engineering projects. You could you give us your vantage point about what it what it's like for professional societies to be working in this areas and the kinds of partnerships that you guys have worked on over time. Well, first of all, I'm thrilled to be here. Some of you may know me, I worked here at the academies for 11 years between the mid 90s and the mid 2000s. So, you know, my heart's always here. The other part of it is that you may not know and it doesn't say in my bio is I grew up on a small family farm in Missouri. And when you grow up on a small family farm in Missouri, first of all, you tend to be a little skeptical. And you tend to be kind of practical. Now, I'm working on myself, you know, we're all trying to improve ourselves. I'm trying to be less skeptical. And but when you work in this space, you know, it's hard not to be at times. I'm here wearing the American Society of Civil Engineer label. I'm a volunteer at the ASCE. I chair the Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate. I work for a small engineering firm out of Maryland. We do work all over the country, including work I'm very proud of with coastal resilience in Alaskan villages, etc. So, you know, we're really kind of at that pointy end of the stick in terms of climate resilience, climate adaptation. Then I also have a research appointment at the University of Maryland, where I have a grant working with NOAA funded by NOAA to build a partnership between NOAA and the American Society of Civil Engineers. And that I think is the primary reason why I'm here. If you're not a member of ASCE, or you're not familiar with ASCE, ASCE has about 150,000 members worldwide. Most practicing engineers, civil engineers are members of ASCE. ASCE is a internationally recognized source of technical information, technical development, and codes and standards. ASCE standards, especially ASCE 7, which is the standard by which you design building, you know, calculate building loads for designs, is adapted in all 50 states as part of building codes and internationally. So, tremendous influence, tremendous significance, tremendous importance of the work that ASCE does in that space. However, the challenge with that is ASCE codes and standards to date do not recognize non-stationarity in weather and climate extremes. They are predicated on the assumption that you can look backwards and take 30 or 50 years of data and characterize what are the conditions that buildings are going to be exposed to going forward for the next 30 to 100 years. Well, obviously that's demonstrably false. ASCE is recognizing that they want to incorporate a better treatment of non-stationarity and weather and climate into their standards, which will then, you know, trickle down into building codes, you know, all across the country. So, it's important work, but they recognize their civil engineers. They're not climate scientists. And in order to characterize future conditions, they needed to work with climate scientists. And this is a subject that we've been pushing, you know, through the Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate in other areas within ASCE for almost 12 years. But, you know, all things kind of finally come into alignment. There's a greater concern among the civil engineering community about the liability they may be incurring by failing to incorporate changes in climate into their designs. They're looking for stronger guidance from ASCE. So, that's created an opportunity where ASCE as an institution is ready to embrace working with the climate science community. ASCE, if you think the academy complex is complicated, ASCE has over a thousand operating committees. They tend to be organized around their kind of practice areas. So, you'll have Water Resources Institute. You've got a Structural Engineering Institute. You've got a Coast Oceans Ports and Rivers Institute. You've got a Geo Institute. So, the first thing that we had to do was really try to break down all those silos and really drive the society more towards setting some priorities for climate. And we've had a lot of really good success. There are a lot of strong leadership, but it's a very much a volunteer organization. So, if you want to incorporate updates into standards, you want to create new standards to inform civil engineering practice, you've got to convince volunteers to do that. That's where NOAA kind of came in. Because of the way we choose to label and fund research in this country, it's easy for NOAA or some of the other federal agencies to argue for budget to either serve their own mission, another federal agency's mission, or basic research, true science. Engineering practice doesn't really fit into that very well. You would assume that the Army Corps of Engineers would be a logical conduit that, you know, they're focused on particular types of civil works and DOD infrastructure. It kind of creates a void. So, as a consequence, we're actively trying to fill that void. We created a task force, the ASCE NOAA task force on infrastructure, civil and climate change and infrastructure. We regularly meet with the leadership of NOAA. NOAA's leadership now attends many of the ASCE meetings. They're keynote speakers. Rick Spenrad has been there. The Deputy Janie Bavane has been there. Anytime we want to hear from NOAA, they make themselves available to speak to the ASCE society. In February, we signed a five-year memorandum of understanding that's codifying that interaction. NOAA is actively has posted and made available competitions that now entertain civil engineering research if it's working with NOAA data or NOAA scientists. So, it's really been an exciting opportunity to take some of the theory that we all talk about and really put it into practice because you can see how these civil engineering firms that are, you know, they've got labor issues, they've got permitting issues, they've got, you know, their own business challenges, they don't have time to research climate. They need to be able to go to a standard or a guidance document that's going to allow them to do something with confidence, minimize their risk, and allow them to move forward. So, I think it's something that we can build on. I hope we can build on, but it's a very good start in my opinion. Thank you. I'm going to try to connect a couple of dots between these different communities. I'm trying hard here. And to start with some of the themes we've heard about today, we have heard about the urgency and the compelling nature of the climate challenge, starting with the conversation amongst the presidents and Amanda S. We've heard about this being an all-hands-on-deck moment. And we know that it's going to involve millions and billions of individual actions by just myriad communities. And just in the prior panel, we heard about things being local as being the important thing. And I know all of you are involved in scaling things up, making things happen in a big way. And so in your world, how have you used partnerships or other means to make sure that we can get to the scale, the speed, the accelerated pace that we need to solve the climate challenge? Who wants to start? Kate? Sure. I talked already about some of the major ways that partnerships are helping to scale efforts. And that's one of the things that philanthropy can be really good at, is catalyzing some of that work. I think one example of one of our members who's doing just this is the Schmidt Futures Group based in New York. They are funding innovative climate solutions and moonshots even for climate through a couple different programs, including the Climate Innovation Fellows and focused research organizations through the convergent research. And I bring it up in part to help bridge connections here because they are actively forming partnerships with industry partners and with other philanthropies and with federal agencies to help scale some of that work. So that's one example I'll share. I think there's a lot of opportunities to scale. We talked in the earlier panel about the need to bring more diverse perspectives into climate action and climate work and into the summit and initiative even. And so I think philanthropy can play a really big role in helping to scale that by funding through large scale initiatives to fund more diverse early career researchers in STEM and through local action like you just mentioned Sue as well incorporating and we're seeing you know philanthropy is increasingly interested in in local projects, local work to bring community participation and indigenous knowledge into work. And I think that you know there's just a lot of opportunity around multi-sector partnerships and I talked already about you know the NASA Earth Sciences example. One of our members, the Research Corporation for Science Advancement has successfully partnered with the USDA on innovative work to mitigate zoonotic threats. But I think you know we've seen examples across all the agencies NSF, NIH, DOE, you just heard about NOAA as well, and with state and local governments as well. So I think there's really a lot of opportunity here to do that. Before we hear from Lucas and Dan, I just want to ask you a follow-up question. When you think about the foundation funding world on climate and you guys are in the science funding space and there are a lot of climate funders who are all about advocacy, do you all interact or not very much? I think to some degree yes you know many of our members not all but many do fund advocacy work. Certainly a lot of work around public engagement in science and science policy. In fact one of the big opportunities that I see for all types of funding partners but especially philanthropy is to fund science policy fellows. And so we have you know there's a great example of that at the national level through AAAS but there's also individual state programs that are forming. The More Foundation who sponsors this initiative and played a big role in launching a California State Science and Technology Policy Fellows program and that was actually just recently endowed through the state of California to ensure that there'll always be at least eight to ten science policy fellows that are advising California State policy and that's the state investment actually was attributed to the need to have a sustained science and policy connection to address climate change. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity for philanthropy to work with existing state programs, launch new programs, and support the federal programs as well. Thank you. Who wants to go? Dan? I'll do next. I think we have a capacity problem and part of it goes back to how we choose to fund science in this country and the political process. Basically what happens and Kate and I were talking about this a little bit before. We'll gain some momentum in an area then there'll be a change in administration or change in policy priorities and then that momentum will wane, etc. In the meantime we've got communities and we spend a lot of time working with communities who have real needs but they don't have any capacity. So we suddenly find ourselves there's going to be a large chunk of money made available through the for the inflation reduction act, etc. These communities are not prepared to engage in a grant writing process. They don't have the first clue. We work with communities where the mayor may change, the mayor's office may change hands on the scale of months rather than years because it is such a thankless job. And so you know we're in a position now where because for for almost two decades we collectively have been working on adaptation and mitigation. There's a lot of plans out there but we don't have the capacity in many instances to actually construct what we've already designed. I don't know whether you're familiar with this but like in the environmental industry there's a labor shortage. There's a driller shortage. We can't characterize a foundation and do the geotechnical work because we don't have enough people to do it. We're going to start changing our priorities and changing our design structures and we're going to start constructing equipment. You're going to have a lot of companies that have no experience with nature-based solutions bidding on work that's very ecologically centric and they really aren't qualified. But yet we've got to you know we've got to get this work done. We've got to make hay while the sun shines as I would say when I grew up. So you know I think there's a lot to go on here but you know I just want to make sure that we can really explore the space about some of these practical non-sexy problems and how we can work together on those. Thank you Lucas. Well I should say I am aware that not every partnership is based on a financial contract but I like they should be but I like the shared incentive structure of such a relationship and it's really kind of defined I've never wanted to be a passive investor right. I mean I liked Microsoft so I bought stock and I worked there right you know I wanted to be part of it. When I was leading sustainability efforts there and we committed to being a carbon negative company to reduce emissions by half or more and then physically remove the rest from the atmosphere by 2030 and then go back in time and physically remove all of the emissions associated with its business activity since it was founded in 1975 you know we have this two-sided market problem. We were one of the only buyers there was no sellers out there. We went and we invested we put up a billion dollar climate fund where we could take equity stakes in these companies oh and then we turned around and we bought from them as well to try to make the market and when we thought that even that might not be enough we became one of the largest you know climate donors and did a hundred million dollar donation to to break through energy as part of their catalyst program to actually go and try to break down those capex hurdles of first-of-a-kind facilities just trying to ensure that you were a partner in creating the future that you knew you needed as an organization and that that's why I went into private equity as well. I want to be able to work with the companies that to your point Dan oftentimes have no idea you know what they're supposed to do. They just know that they need to do something and that's our job is to partner with them and help them through that sustainability journey so that by the time our partnership is over they're capable of operating kind of you know on a net zero trajectory on their own and that I think is another great part of a partnership is that you know and where contracts can come in handy is you know all partnerships not all but many partnerships come to an end and that should be kind of planned and amicable and there should be a reason for that end and for us it's kind of great now when you're able to go and be the great company that we helped you become that's that's a great that's a great you know sustainable path forward. That's great. All right I'm going to put each of you on the spot with a question you're not that I didn't plan to ask you and I'm putting you on the spot because after this question and some comments then I'm going to take I'll be happy to take questions from the audience. If you are advising the climate crossroads initiative and you wanted to have just a really important significant meaningful you know intersection problem in your community what what would be an outside the box one that would be really important for them to think about working on. So Kate I've gone to you first each time so I'm going to give you a moment here. Dan any ideas? Well when you started down that path I had an answer and then when you got through the end I'm not sure it's the same but that's okay. I think the big thing that the shocking thing that I've found and I think it it it explains some of the issues we have with equity with with environmental justice etc is that less than a third of I hope I have this statistic right I've heard it a few times a less than a third of new construction in this country actually is actually is done or even required to follow hazard based building codes. So we have situations where you know I think Marcia talked about it this morning with the renters that live next door to her you know the reality of it is unless there's a building code unless there's some minimum standard that we as a country as a community feel like we need to provide to ensure safe housing etc it's just a race to the bottom and if you've read many of these stories out of rule especially rural areas in the United States doesn't matter what country it tends to be rural you know there's just some real incredible inequities there and so like we can develop better standards we can develop better engineering practice but if there aren't building codes and in and enforcement of those codes we have a problem and so you know I think a greater recognition of that issue and I think you know given the breadth of capacity that the academy has and the intellectual capital the academy has I'd really like to hope that they would explore how we can change that fundamental dynamic because we cannot rely solely on moral suasion to convince people to do the right things at the end of the day people make business decisions and and and we have to kind of figure out how to incentivize that so that we're doing the right thing and is it the drafters of the building codes or the enforcers of the building codes or both it's a little bit of both there was a conversation earlier about you know tax base there's a lot of communities in this country their economic growth plan is development and so they are concerned if you raise the construction costs you know they they see that as an impediment to their economic growth and so you know it's it's a little bit of the adopters it's a little bit of the enforcement one of the other things that was talked about is we've got to monitor projects yeah absolutely we got to monitor projects but that's usually the first thing that falls out of the budget when there's an overrun so you know we got some real fundamental process problems we've got to address and and I think the more we get behind those the the more likely we'll address them well thank you very much for the practical suggestion it's and it's where the rubber hits the road it's where Lucas right yeah I would just I don't know if this is out of the box or not uh but I would just say you know focus on the problem in the pathway which is decarbonization electrification digitization hopefully virtualization is as much of the physical economy as is humanly possible like that's the only way anybody's ever shown a potential path to decouple carbon emissions from from growth and that's either a Ponzi scheme or it's the solution you know and so I think focus on that and then dive into the details I mean I know everybody's like already sick of the logistics the permitting the standards to whatever but that's where the problem lies I mean there's a recent statistic around like there's more energy projects you know in the in the pipeline then there is energy on on the on the world's goods and 95 plus percent of that is renewable energy so that's great but are we are going to build it right so focus in on that and then the last bit I would just say is do not give up on basic discovery because I think that there's this there's this almost like moral hazard argument about talking about scientific discovery right now we have all the solutions we know how to do this it's just political will it's just permitting that's kind of true but there's never not a place for basic discovery it's not wrong to continue to talk about fusion we can talk about fusion and deploy renewable energy at an unprecedented pace if we can't do that then I mean we got bigger problems you know so don't give up on discovery that's what the academy you know like the best minds in science figuring out how to crack undiscovered scientific problems cannot be forgotten in in the transition to net zero it just simply cannot all right you said this to the right community I think yes a little clap there could you just I just have one follow-up with you because of my simple mind can you connect dots about digitization and innovation and overcoming permitting issues did I hear that right well I mean I said all those words in one long winded answer and I don't know if I put them all together never mind but I would just say hey look technology technology what we call computing technology and and particularly you know I continue deposit that the advent of what we call the public cloud is the culmination of the greatest kind of technology innovation that we will see people talk about AI and whatever that's just all built on this platform like this platform of digital computing is something that we just keep building solutions off of so when you think about you know software defined grids or grid responsibility all these sorts of things that's all going to be driven by digital technologies that themselves are consuming the output of the technology that they are building and so we just have to get ready for this ever increasing kind of loop but we have to acknowledge the fact that like you know I mean utilities are still talking about digitization is like a potential innovation you know I mean it's kind of crazy when they produce the fundamental feedstock for the core of modern economies so I think that part's got to break down but they are in in extricably intertwined moving forward so I'm geeking out because my work is in the electric industry so that was really exciting to hear hey well I'm geeking out too because of the the focus on discovery because that's exactly the point that I wanted to drive home you know I mentioned already that there's many underfunded areas of climate related research that still need work to really address the climate crisis and I want to share that we met recently with our external science advisors and asked them to share with us what they thought were the biggest gaps and opportunities for science philanthropy in across all fields of scientific discovery and actually the majority of the the gaps and opportunities focused on on climate even from our biomedical science advisors and so just a few examples from my own field of ocean science include understanding the timing and the implications of an ice free Arctic understanding ocean and atmosphere carbon dioxide exchange to inform ocean and carbon dioxide removal and sequestration efforts to make sure that those will be effective understanding melt processes for Antarctic glaciers and ice sheets and developing an ocean internet of things to revolutionize ocean science we also talked about fundamental plant science food security zoonotic diseases and investing proactively in resilience and adaptation so there's you know really a lot of of work so I think my biggest advice and I am fortunate to be on the advisory committee for the climate crossroads so I look forward to having these conversations with you Sue and others but you know I think just to really focus on the underfunded areas and there's a few tools for that you know not just round tables and things that I've described here but you know the climate works foundation I already mentioned their report and they identify some gaps and opportunities and trends and one of the gaps is investment in Latin America and Africa and just generally outside of North America for climate and then there's also a climate finance tracker that's led by vibrant data labs that looks at both philanthropic and industry investments and so that can be really helpful for under identifying underfunded areas as well thank you now do any of you have questions that you want to follow up with and I am looking out at those blobs of color as well to see who's standing up I see somebody going here and if you have a question online with Sligo please go ahead I'm going to go here and then there okay in the blue shirt and a beard I meet both of those requirements we're not here we're not hearing you maybe others now with the Emmett Institute UCLA great Don mentioned that non-stationarity is a challenge unresolved by the engineering association recently the Supreme Court decided that the EPA sorry it wasn't the EPA that the student loan approving authority should not make decisions on major questions that was also the EPA decision so we're left with well what do we do while we're waiting patiently for Congress to provide guidance and I would like to suggest putting it as a question whether catalyzing or interaction between partners could be the solution while we're waiting that if the engineers industry and even philanthropists were to set standards I should include the engineering community as well that politicians might be presented with a set of accords amongst stakeholders and that might both provide an interim process and also guidance to decision makers I love your optimism thank you very much any comments or observations well I guess one of the reasons I became very interested in engineering standards is because you know the civil engineering community by and large is small c conservative they do things the way they've been done in the past because they're risk adverse I mean there's always exceptions to every rule and when you get into major projects and there's some real innovation going on so don't don't discount that but most of it tends to be risk adverse and so if we can establish standards then as the political wins change and emphasis in congress changes or funding streams change the standards won't because the standards are set independently now a se only is responsible for a subset of standards there's many other standards that that would come into play into this broader discussion but I do think that to some degree you know some of these different communities of practice working with other groups can provide some additional leadership rather than waiting for elected officials to decide what what they're going to do and as a follow-up to that given the the conservative risk orientation that you've just described and the and I'm interpreting that to mean you know what's worked in the past we want to rely on that going forward the past is not a good predictor of the future uh in a lot of things associated with our infrastructure so are the standard setting activities really looking at a different world in the future yeah that's that's at the heart of what we're doing with NOAA ASCE 7 I mentioned earlier you know as the building design load standard uh uh they're right now basically incorporating you know we're having discussions with NOAA about how would we use climate projections to characterize the 15-minute rainfall in 2080 because that's what we need to design to not the not the 15-minute rainfall last week or last decade or the last 50 years and and so you know that's a big change that you know if you're a civil engineer I'm sure you can recognize what a fundamental change in worldview that is and that's what we mean by non-stationarity okay thank you yeah I would just jump in and say I think um I appreciate your optimism as well I think though one thing to recognize is that partnerships are how we got here the only partner we haven't had are governments and my entire career has been predicated on voluntary action and so I probably I think anybody that's worked on climate in the private sector it's probably more well versed in partnership than they than business school prepared them for that's for sure um and and so it is time for government to step up it partnership can work but government plays a critical role in society and um I would just say that I'm not excited about the prospect of going back to you know mid 90s kind of corporate voluntary partnership because it can get you so far in fact we wouldn't have the government leadership that we see today I don't think if they didn't feel so bolstered by the support that they've seen over the past one to two decades of voluntary corporate action but to your point and stated another way what got us here is not what's going to get us there and we need to change tax and at the very least we need an additional partner at the table well and many of these are systems or common good types of problems to be solved where it's hard for partnerships to capture all the value yeah okay is there something you want to add on this one before we go to another question you know I think just just building on on what you said Lucas I think you know one of the advantages of philanthropy can be to help fill gaps you know one of the reasons why the science philanthropy alliance was created 10 years ago was out of a concern that that government investment in basic science was declining and in fact investment in the 1960s from government was around 75 percent of the total at universities and non-profit research institutes for basic science in the US and now it's only around 50 percent and meanwhile the contribution of philanthropy and higher education institutional funds has doubled from about 20 percent to now 40 percent of the total basic science that's being performed by universities and research institutes so I think the the broader theme of you know different sectors coming into play you know is important but I do agree that the the federal government still needs to play the majority role and leave the other players to you know do things that the government can't do as well sir I thank you very good discussion uh so I'm frank stein from Virginia Tech uh so a local uh you know academic uh my question is how do we catalyze more action from the universities both from the research perspective uh as well as from the educational perspective I believe that the existential threat of climate change won't be my generation but will be those younger than me and they're going to have to provide the the capabilities uh the labor force to make those changes that are necessary and yet I don't see a lot of catalyzed action to build that workforce so both sides of the university mission thank you great question anybody have some comments I would just say the education part is critical and you starting to see stutter steps towards you know trying to build an inclusive uh curricula around around climate and I think that um we will struggle to ever achieve our goals if we don't build if we don't start putting more well-versed people out into the into the workforce the second thing though that I would love to see universities go much bigger on taking bets on their faculty's research all the way to profitability I think you know when you're out raising funds you're always looking at university endowments um I uh think that university endowments have a significant role to play in if they believe at the level that I think they do in the importance of this topic it's critical for them I think to to start building a more incentive aligned structure for their faculty let's put it again finance in the middle of the contract like yeah I know they're there but when you look at that contract you're not you're like oh isn't that nice you'll let me do this uh you know there should be a much stronger more straightforward alignment across every university that's capable of investing that's cool you guys Dan um I guess I look at it a little bit different I'm a father my son just graduated from University of Toronto in first science and urban planning he's doing a master's degree in contaminant hydrology so he's going to go into environmental work and the the the programs that he experienced at University of Toronto and now at Guelph seem such a departure from what I'm exposed to at Maryland um their coursework is really you know and I know this is going to sound shocking but their coursework is really aligned around professional certificates so that you can work you can gain experience you can be actively involved in the work you're doing and then your coursework helps build that professional portfolio I know when I was here at the academies you know we had a lot of conversations about you know are we just growing a next generation of PhDs how many how many full faculty you know tenured faculty how many PhD students should you uh produce over the course of your educational career so I just you know I sense that you know we're at a time where we you know we have more and more people are concerned about the cost of education I think we need to if we could think more strategically about how to align some of the the important aspirations of the of the next generation with like they're being able to get out there and do work quickly and effectively I think that would be I think that would be a really important step but that's my perspective we are seeing examples of this at universities already certainly we need more you know at all universities and I think funding interdisciplinary work focused on on climate and the environment is a great way to do it we heard earlier from a student at the Stanford door school of sustainability and that was you know created recently through a major philanthropic gift to have a whole school that focuses on sustainability in my backyard at UC Santa Cruz there's a new coastal climate resilience initiative that's funded through state state funding from California but also through industry partners and I think there's room for foundations to engage in that as well and so I think that that it's happening maybe just not as quickly as we'd like it to I'll answer with one little factoid from the the company that I am an employee of is a almost a 2000 person consulting firm we work on economics and finance across different sectors people come into the organization in the supply chain from universities with degrees in math or computing or statistics or finance or economics and when we say we've got a clean energy project or a project dealing with climate they're all just raising their hands we don't have enough work to actually feed the the the interest that we have in this area so there's a lot of interest that is not to disagree with the premise that that there's really a challenge still in resources for research and education but there's a lot of interest amongst the young younger generations last question I think I'll go over here and it's Alex hi from Kiran Sohi online and this is for Lucas Joppa but others are also welcome to answer many in the climate change community believe that carbon credit markets aren't serving the greater need of carbon emissions reduction what is your take on carbon markets and how do you think we should fix the problem of greenwashing by businesses and if you want you can broaden that to how can the entire private sector be engaged in this work in a way that supports carbon reduction at the pace and scale that's needed in addition to making for good publicity well I am guessing that online questioner did not see that I had a minute and a half to answer a two day two day long question look I think that there is a reason why when Microsoft made its carbon negative commitment to move towards carbon removal that said and I think that that's where you're going to see the markets move that said we do have to find a way to incentivize people to stop destroying nature and our climate it's not enough I there are many ways for net zero to occur theoretically one of them could be incredible growth in emissions and even more incredible growth in carbon removal I don't think that that's a viable option it's definitely not a viable option for the 10 plus million species in which we share this planet so I don't know what the right answer is but I I do know that we've lost a lot of trust the carbon markets have lost a lot of trust with with basically the rest of the world and the only way that we will have a viable carbon market moving forward is if carbon removal is a preponderance of that market and that governments get involved and help set the standards for what counts and the accountants and assurers and auditors are on board with that as well and thus the standard setters this is why I say voluntary action can get you so far I don't want to get in the business though of saying that looking back and casting aspersions on what people of their own accord for no other reason than whatever they did but they are spending money did something 10 years ago and now we're looking back and saying oh can you believe it's like focus on the future think about how we can meaningfully incentivize carbon removal how we can meaningly incentivize or regulate people to no longer emit egregious amounts of carbon in the atmosphere and I think that is when trust will finally be restored to the fundamental markets that will underpin and net zero economy so philanthropy can help us solve some standard setting problems and then we can innovate with the private sector so okay last last question for you guys in your negatives time right here is that what that red light means yeah uh what is the takeaway that you hope people will leave this day of the summit with from your vantage point hey I just really emphasize that philanthropy is a key sector of the scientific enterprise and has a big role to play in the climate crisis and that more investment is needed across the spectrum from the discovery science and technology to drive future breakthroughs as well as policy and action to equitably implement the solutions that we already have thank you Dan I guess my comment would be you know the national academies is such a special place and it can do tremendous things but I think to some degree you need to actively partner right when I was a staff here we didn't really do that we it was an academy product we kind of kept everybody at arm's length and that's a good thing but if you could take the power and the innovation that's at the academy and work with ASCE or AASHTO or others like TRB works with you know I think you could find some force multipliers out there don't try to replicate what we're doing try to think of how you could work with us to advance what we're doing thank you yeah Lucas I would say never forget that if you align the financial incentives of both discovery and deployment that's about the only thing that humanity has ever figured out on how to get something deployed at you know societal scale human beings have this thing about a carrot right it's great so my big takeaway for you is to ask you to join with me in expressing our appreciation to this panel but also to the amandas for the work that they have done to get this climate grassroots going and amanda stout you're the final word here