 Hello and welcome to the Uplink Daily. I'm your host, Emanuela Orsini, joining you from the Sustainable Development Impact Summit here at the World Economic Forum headquarters in Geneva. Throughout this summit, we'll be bringing you the latest updates from Uplink, the World Economic Forum's open innovation platform, including the launch of our latest innovation challenges, as well as the best innovations submitted to our previous solution sprints. Today, we're excited to launch Uplink's Trillion Trees India Challenge in partnership with our friends at 1T.org to highlight some successful examples of forest conservation and landscape restoration that support India's goal of restoring 26 million hectares of degraded land by 2030 and to create an additional carbon sink of up to 3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent through new forests. The best solution submitted to the challenge will then participate in a four-month accelerator program to help scale their project and maximize impact. But before we begin, let's watch a short video that explains the Trillion Trees India Challenge in a bit more detail. Joining me now to talk more about the India Challenge is Bhairavi Jani, Executive Director of SCA Group India and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. Welcome Bhairavi, thanks for joining us. Pleasure to be here in Manila today. Tell us a bit more about India's commitment to restoring 26 million hectares of degraded land. Why is this so important? India has one-seventh of the world's population, but only two-and-a-half percent of its land mass. When India talks about restoring 26 million hectares of land, it is talking about taking its green cover from 25% today to 33% in the next decade, which translates into an opportunity of planting, growing and protecting 10 billion trees in the next decade. That is an important target because land in India, considering that large part of its rural economy are still agrarian, is cultural, political, economical and ecological issue. And when we try to put in a framework for such kind of reforestation and restoration of land at that scale, we are talking about massive changes at community level, at state level, at policy level and even in the way businesses run and markets operate. How can increasing India's tree cover help the country in its goal to mitigate climate change? India is the only country of the G20 nations that is meeting its Paris climate goals. And whilst India is doing everything it can in terms of renewable energy and mitigating carbon footprint, the way India can really accelerate some of its Paris climate commitments is by using nature as a partner in the story. And India has that ability to work with land, restore it, protect its forests, plant trees, while doing work in partnership with nature and using nature-based approaches. What are the significant interventions needed for India to meet its commitments for land restoration and increasing green cover? There are three major areas of work. One is, of course, one has to engage the Indian private and public sector to commit resources and not just financial but human knowledge on ground. Then, of course, you also want to make sure that you're able to scale multi-stakeholder action in terms of making big businesses work with young startups and innovators and making public policy work with community organization. And I think the third intervention that we can do here is to encourage eco-proneership and scale promising innovations and solutions. And India has a rich history both in entrepreneurship and ecological commitments. So it's not just a response in between an obligation. It also becomes something to pursue as a growth story in a developing economy. Thanks for joining us here today by Ravi. Now, let's speak with Ria Mazumdar Singal, CEO of EcoWear Solutions in India, the country's first and largest sustainable packaging company. Welcome to the Uplink Daily, Ria. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here this morning. Tell us about your company and being an ecopreneur in India. Sure. So I founded EcoWear in 2009 with the aim of solving India's plastic pollution problem. And, you know, the idea behind EcoWear is that we use agricultural waste such as wheat, rice, sugarcane once the process. That's our raw material. And through a thermofoaming process, we converted to packaging. And the beauty is that it's 100% backyard biodegradable. So if you've got access to a garden or a compost, you know, a pit, then you can dig a hole, you put our products in soil and cover it with soil and it breaks down into soil in 90 days. It's completely compost. And we've done that for the food and beverage industry predominantly and now we're trying to support other industries such as e-commerce, medical, et cetera, to help reduce their plastic footprint. Why do you think this challenge is so important? When the rest of the world looks at a situation, they see a problem. When an entrepreneur looks at the same thing, they see an opportunity. And the exciting thing about it in India specifically is that it's bringing entrepreneurs from all walks of life, right? So whether you are a rural entrepreneur or an urban entrepreneur, it is including absolutely everything. Now what would you say to young entrepreneurs listening in and why should they submit their solutions to this challenge? The only impossible journey is the one that you've never begun. We need ambitious, hungry entrepreneurs who've got some fantastic solutions to come up and apply to this challenge. You know, and ultimately if you are purpose driven, this is only going to help scale your impact. Make sure you apply and we look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for that inspiring insight, Riya. Now we know that an essential ingredient in solving challenges like climate change and land degradation is, of course, innovation. So let's get the perspective of an innovator who is on the front line of this fight. Ajay Middle, World Economic Forum Global Shaper. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for the opportunity. You're working directly with farmers and have seen firsthand how unsustainable some of these traditional agricultural practices are. So how do you think innovative practices can help with land restoration in India? So I think this is a great opportunity to kick start in a process of building an ecosystem to support some of these innovations that already exist. And the uplink challenge is a great opportunity to kind of bring those some of these innovations to the limelight, introduce them to all the different stakeholders so that they can come and support them because this is the need of the art. One of the biggest challenges that they face that he understood from them is they are unable to scale these innovations because the traditional funding methodologies do not understand these innovations. They are new. So they find it risky to invest in them. But these kind of challenges can add both credibility to those innovations and introduce it to the right stakeholders where the government, NGOs and everyone to scale up those innovations and pack them so that they can be then scaled up to the traditional funding source. Why should those watching this session today join uplink and submit their solution to this challenge? I think it's clearly because we don't have time. Well, there are so many negative kind of events, the negative news around everything telling us how everything is so serious, it's so bad. I think these innovations are our hope. We need a lot of these positive stories to come out about how these solutions can really help us address the climate crisis. That's the fact that it builds hope that we still have time, we still have the solution. All we need is to accelerate this solution. So I think everyone who is watching this and is hearing about this innovation is this challenge. If you have a solution, you must participate because the World Economic Forum through this uplink challenge gives you a very big platform to get out your solutions to a larger community of stakeholders who can then come out and support your solutions. It also opens a lot of possibilities for mentorship to learn from your community of like-minded entrepreneurs who are building this solution. You work together with them, you can collaborate, you can learn through their challenges and see how you can scale your innovation. Lasky, I think even if you're not having one of those solutions, if you know someone who is working on it, you must introduce them to this because this is not a zero sum game. Even if you are a computer solution, you should introduce them because the scale is such huge of this crisis, we need more and more innovations to scale up. Thanks for joining us, Ajay. The uplink trillion trees India challenge is now open on the uplink platform. Coming up right after this session is an opportunity to hear some of uplink's top innovators pitch their amazing solutions and you'll even get the chance to vote for your favorite. The session is called innovating for sustainability, the entrepreneurs who could save the world and will be live streamed to the World Economic Forum's website and social channels. That's it for this edition of the uplink daily. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.