 So many people have been speaking about the climate crisis. So many things have been put on paper. But the real question is why is it that we're still not acting at the scale and speed that is necessary? The extreme weather events that the scientists have long connected to the climate crisis are becoming far more frequent and far more destructive. For 150 years we built up a world based on the assumption that we can exploit the planet for free and it translates to very dramatic impacts happening right as we speak. The climate crisis is a threat multiplier which means it exacerbates existing inequities in our society. The impacts are felt most deeply by Black, Indigenous and communities of colour. We're living through an explosion of inequality. We need to remember we're on the same planet and this is the planet that we need to make sustainable for the whole of humanity. Climate change is impacting food security as well as political stability in many nations around the world. Five years ago there were 80 million people marching towards starvation. That number jumped to 135 million. What caused the jump? It was man-made conflict like in Ukraine compounded with climate shocks. No one is as vulnerable to climate change as farmers are. If you talk transformation the first thing they want to know is what must I do on my farm? We know that this transition will require a fast adoption of a lot of new technologies and the question today is how to find the appropriate way to finance this technology. To put a number around it it's an extra two and a half to three trillion dollars a year of additional finance that we have to find in order to get those emissions down. Financial institutions have a lot of roles to play to bring the advice and provide the financing to make these transitions happen. Younger generations are demanding a sense of purpose. They want to look at companies and say I am investing with you all for this reason. With the upcoming two cops taking place in Africa and the Middle East we have this tremendous opportunity to put emerging markets at the forefront of our collective response to climate change. For international trade has to be part of the solution. How do we all get together to talk about a global carbon price that can guide us and help us to decarbonize the world? The solutions are there. What we need is governments to regulate, to invest and we need business to act with values. History will look at us, people, politicians, corporate leaders. These times require not only solutions but speed. There is nowhere else to look than the mirror. We are the ones that need to do this. So welcome everybody to this session. This is what climate change sounds like. The purpose of the session is to hear about a novel collaboration between a climate scientist and a musician. Exploring how we can bring together science, technology and music to spur climate action. I'm Jane Burstin, the Executive Director of the Clean Air Fund and I'm joined by Eduardo Del Signore. He's a Grammy nominated and independent music award-winning musician, composer and producer. He's collaborated with leading artists from around the world and is president and founder of the A Call to Peace Foundation. He works on the climate music project which we'll be exploring today. I'm also joined by Garrett Boudinot, who's a climate scientist whose research spans climate change from sea level rise and forest fires to carbon cycle changes in the oceans and the atmosphere. He's the founder and CEO of ViCarve, a carbon dioxide removal company and also serves on the New York State Climate Impact Assessment. He's a fellow collaborator with Eduardo on the Climate Music Project. Before we begin, I wanted to remind you all that if you'd like to share any thoughts or insights as we're talking today on social media, then we're all using the hashtag SDIM22, that's SDIM22. The session structure is going to be between the three of us and then before we depart, hear an excerpt of one of the key pieces of music that the team has produced as a result of this collaboration. So to kick us off, Eduardo, I wondered could you just tell us a little bit of background about the Climate Music Project? Background about the project itself. Well, the Climate Music Project is an organization based in San Francisco, I believe, and they bring together scientists and composers in order to produce works like the ones you're going to see today to bring forth a message and information about what's happening, the causes and the effects of climate change. So you have two angles to the same thing, a scientific angle and a musical angle from, you know, the composer or composers. In my personal approach was the human condition, and which is something that I also applied to the foundation. And based on that, we started to communicate and exchange ideas. And that's how this particular project came to fruition. And this is, today is the premiere of it. So we're all very lucky today. Yeah, we're very excited to hear it. And Garret, just turning to you now. I mean, most of us learn about the latest climate science from the IPCC. I mean, we hear about it in the press on a regular basis, but then when the Sixth Assessment Report came out, we got to see it in its entirety. And I remember seeing that the headline from that was very stark and unequivocal. Climate change is widespread, rapid and intensifying. So it's clear to all of us that we need to act now and act at scale. But it's not really happening at the scale that we need. I mean, how does it feel to be working on this topic on a daily basis? And what inspired you to get involved with the project? Yeah, so like you said, we're definitely not seeing the action that we in the climate science community know we need to impart to stop climate change and reverse what we've already done. My whole career has been studying the impacts of climate change using analytical chemistry, studying, as you said, really how the changes in the carbon cycle from greenhouse gas emissions that we're doing impacts ecosystems all around the world. I used to joke that if I was going to stay studying the problem, I'd need to have a heavy dose of antidepressants because it's just a heavy topic to devote one's life to. Particularly because we scientists are not kind of just black boxes that run numbers, we're people and we're also impacted by climate change. And so I was looking for coming out of my PhD opportunities to take what I had learned and the skills that I had developed in climate science and really cater those two solutions. And one of the big ways to create solutions is inspire people to act and some of that's through education, but a lot of that's by reaching out to the human condition through music. And so the Climate Music Project was a blessing for me to be a part of and really contribute to that larger goal. And for you, what does success look like from this project? Yeah, so the Climate Music Project has two real goals. So one is to instill a sense of urgency about climate change to the listeners, but with that inspire action. And so to me, success means that our audience is not only more aware of the climate science and feels a sense of urgency to act, but also feels inspired and empowered that they have the potential to act and stop climate change. Building on Garrett's points about us all having our own experiences of climate change and feelings about it, how Eduardo, do you work with, how do you communicate that and the human condition and all of our different feelings about the topic through your music? Well, the nature of music, as far as I understand, music comes from a source, which is also to me a source of life itself. And the fact that music puts me in touch with that source as well. When that happens, I feel certain peace. When I feel certain peace, I experience clarity. When I experience clarity, I realize I have options. Then I can choose. And if I choose right, I can feel gratitude. That can be for something that could happen to anybody. You just need to be breathing. That's the condition. So music is a catalyst, in a way, to put people in touch with that intimate part of each one of us. So if my music can cause that effect on somebody, together with what is being exposed with messages from climate music, then they can get inspired to at least think, what can I do? And assume responsibility for it. Absolutely. And given how, I mean, Garrett was talking about even one person having different feelings at different times, you know, at some points, feeling like you need to be on antidepressants working on this, at other times feeling kind of much more hopeful. I can imagine from the people that you've spoken to, there's huge regional differences as well in their experiences and how they feel about the topic. Do you have any concrete examples about how you've been able to represent those differences in the music? Well, it's something that my intention was there. I don't know if people are going to interpret it that way. But I like to work in layers when I work with music and layers of harmonic and also rhythmic polyrhythms and then to incorporate the music that was created from the graphics that the scientists provided. I mean, it's a fascinating process. Yeah. So the other quality of music is universal language. Anybody in the world can understand, you know, it's a melody, a note. It doesn't have to be a C or a D or an A or, you know, the whole thing. But anybody can understand it. You don't need to know a particular language. You just need to enjoy it. So that part of music is very important. And so tell us a little bit about how you worked together, like which bits of the process did you do? How much interaction was there during, who did what? Maybe turning to Garrett first of all. Yeah, go for it. Yeah. And I want to say it's a long process. I mean, it's been 12, 18 months from the very second half. Yeah. Yeah. And so the climate music project where a number of composers and science teams are working on different projects at any given point, brought us together with a number of other scientists and other folks at the project. And we had a lot of open-ended discussions about for a scientist, what are some stories that the climate science data is telling us about the state of climate change or about, you know, where we're headed decisions we can make that we feel are underrepresented, that the public should better have a sense of. And then it was really fun then to hear from Eduardo what are some of the parts of climate change that he wanted the public to be more aware of in his perspective. And through several conversations, we kind of narrowed in on what's a cohesive story that a composition could tell. And then myself and other scientists were then tasked with finding the actual quantitative data sets that would support that. And that was another iterative process where we combed through the IPCC special report on 1.5 degrees warming and looked at some of the historical data that's been that was used in some of those. And then also the different model projections for different pathways that we might take depending on our actions. And within those models and historical data, there's a plethora of different characteristics about the climate, but also socioeconomic decisions that humanity can make that will push us in these different global warming pathways. So there was a lot of behind-the-scenes science data processing going into combing through the data, picking that out, and then eventually presenting to Eduardo, here are some of the data sets, both again historical and then future projections that we think aligns with this story. And then I'll let you take it from there on what you did. Well, they provided me with two sets of graphics. The one set was to project into a positive outcome. The other one was business as usual, right? So they had on their own a force, you know, one of them was like, oh, it's getting darker, it's getting worse. The other one is, oh, there is hope we can do this and something could happen. And then all of a sudden, we're having a good time. So I incorporated both in both sets of graphics they were based on the change of temperature, the carbon absorption and investment on renewable energies. So that was a little bit of my interpretation of what they were providing, and it seems like they like it. Excellent. And this is the piece that we're going to get to hear at the end. Yeah, Odyssey. Originally I called the piece Wrinkled Science, but they didn't like that. But I was basing that name in the, you know, the first year of the pandemic when the world kind of stopped and how nature flourished. It was like, boom, you know, it's like an incredible, beautiful thing. People in the Himalayas that they couldn't even see the mountains because pollution, they could all of a sudden see the beauty of the place, you know, the oceans became cleaner. You know, we have seen that there was a beautiful documentary that documented all that. So I think you suggested Odyssey, but like the Odyssey, the journey, you know, and then we were talking on a conference one day and I say, how about we, we just changed the O for the AU. So implies an Odyssey of sound, right, a journey of sound towards a positive outcome. That's such an excellent name. And I love that you, you both came up with that together and on your journey kind of through building this piece, what kind of challenges did you face as a team? Everything, to me, there wasn't, there were no challenges, other than, you know, just like being able to concentrate and come up with the music. But that's something that happens to me every day. Yeah, from the science side, we put, there was a lot of behind the scenes discussion on what's the right data. I mean, okay, so even if we narrowed it into we want to pick data from the IPCC special report on 1.5, there's still a ton of data. And so combing through, of course, that's all compiled from other data sets and reports and studies. And so really picking out what we wanted to do there and processing it in a way that could be then sonified for a musical composition. That was an enjoyable process, I think, for, you know, so much of my job as a scientist is data processing. And so using it, that quantitative data that tells, as Eduardo said, much of that data told a depressing story of what the world might look like if we don't act. But then leveraging that to tell a really compelling, powerful story through something that we're hearing, not quantitatively, that was, it was a challenge, but one that was central to the process and fun. Yeah, I agree. And did you get any, what was unexpected along the journey? How was it different than you? Unexpected? No, actually, I I challenged myself not to have expectations. And I actually do that every day. And to me, it was a very enjoyable process. I never worked with scientists before. And I thought it was fantastic, you know, just because I like to look at the person, I like to find the person, you know. So that was, I didn't find any additional challenge other than, you know, my own commitment. It was, it was surprising to hear the first presentation that Eduardo provided us of the actual music, right? We spent all this time working on it and talking about it very kind of abstractly. And then we have this data that we provide. And so I remember the first time Eduardo kind of played us a snippet of it. And that was unexpected just because, I mean, we, it was, it was a blank canvas that Eduardo was able to paint on. So that was a fun expect or a fun surprise. I'll also add that part of this process with all of the climate music projects compositions is that they also bring to the table visual artists. So all of the performances are live for an audience that helps stimulate the discussion about action. We have public policy experts in the room to help again kind of guy going from urgency to action that we all have. But a lot of the way that the climate music project conveys the science through the music is with visual imagery as well. And so that was another part of the process. And again, something that was unexpected was seeing then how a visual artist took the data and the music and then conveyed that visually to really put a bow on top of the whole thing. And we're going to hear the excerpts at the end. Before we do, I'll come to Garrett to get from you your kind of feelings and thoughts when you first heard it and how far you thought it represented the data and the actions that need to be taken. But Eduardo, maybe you could just talk us through a little bit. I know we're only going to hear two minutes of what's a 10 minute piece. Can you tell us a little bit more about what we're going to hear and what you hope people will take away from it? Okay. You're just going to hear probably the first half of the piece. It's going to be visual, too, for people to see. So it's a poem that I incorporated from Mary Oliver that I just love. I love her writing. And then it's kind of like a journey. It just comes from nowhere. And all of a sudden, this whole thing starts to happen and there is tension that represented by the music coming out of the graphics and the music that I compose to accompany that. And so that's the first part. If you want me to keep explaining the rest. So it's a journey. It's like the both outcomes are presented simultaneously. The minis and the good ones. So they are doing their thing, saying their thing. The changes proposed that project a positive outcome. Keep insisting. Keep insisting. It has to keep happening. It's like a trip. Out of a sign, you have a river. And halfway through the song, the whole mood changes. And people start, I can see people celebrating, you know, having a decent, simple, beautiful life, which is we are not built by default to struggle and to just survive. We're built to thrive. That is our nature. So that's what I want to represent at the end of the piece. And it just fades into eternity. Yeah. And Carol, what did you feel then when you first heard this? Yeah, so in working with Eduardo leading up to it, one of the fun things about working on a team we should say is just getting to know each other and the whole group and having, you know, talking about what our future sounds like, the state of the climate. It's a very personal experience. And so it was cool to see Eduardo's thought processes through all this. And he's a very thoughtful person. He's put a lot into not just, you know, where I come from of how was the climate changing, but on a human level, what brought us here? And what does that mean for our future? And so that was the backdrop upon which I was hearing the piece. And it was cool to hear those juxtaposing data sets. And here, really, Eduardo's thought process progressing forward on this journey, this odyssey, playing out what that future looks like. And so it was, for me, a great experience to tie what's the music, but then also knowing the composer and seeing that process, it really brought it to life. I like to add that whenever it is presented live, I will be improvising things on my bass that it's going to be always different. Every time that this is going to be presented, and if I'm there, it's going to be with an additional element. Excellent. And you're presenting it live for the first time this evening, I believe, at the UN? Yes, exactly. And where for our listeners today who want to hear the full piece, where would they go and when to hear that? Well, I don't know yet. The Climate Music Project people are going to take the initiative on that. And once they do, then I will borrow that and put it on my own social media and websites. Great. So keep an eye out for the Climate Music Project and odyssey. And I might just plug climatemusic.org. Yeah, thank you. Excellent. So we know exactly where we're going, climatemusic.org. And so we're going to hear the piece in just 30 seconds, but one word from both of you before we close on what would you like the future to sound like? Do you want to start with me? Yeah. I remember they asked me once in an interview and I said, I imagine like, you know, in kindergarten, when the kids have a break and go to play, that sound. Nice. Nice. Garrett? For me, rhythm. I think climate change is a disruption of the Earth's natural rhythm and I want to hear that restored. Thank you. Well, thank you so much, both of you, for the piece and for your time today. And I think we'll now close with this exit.