 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the World Economic Forum Sustainable Development Impact Summit. I'm Amanda Russo. I'm head of media content here at the World Economic Forum. I'm joined by Olivier Schwab, one of our managing directors, and welcome to our uplink press briefing. We have a very exciting 30 minutes planned. We have some of uplink's founding partners. We're going to hear from the CEOs making impact, and we're also going to hear about the next steps for one of the forum's most exciting projects and programs. This is the one-year anniversary of uplink, and we have a lot to talk about. So what we're going to do here is if you have any questions and you want to get involved and engaged in this session, please feel free to ask those through the chat box. And we're going to try to get through as many as we can while we hear from these innovators. But there may be, maybe, some people out there who don't know what uplink is. So Olivier, thank you for joining us today. Tell everyone what is uplink and talk us through some of the impacts. Sure. Thank you, Amanda. So uplink is very simple. It's an open digital platform which we launched a year ago with the objective of sourcing and scaling innovation for reaching the 2030 STG goals. We developed a platform together with our partners, Salesforce and Deloitte. And today we have, after 12 months, we have a thriving community of 30,000 users. These are entrepreneurs. These are investors. These are multinational organizations, and we've selected 150 impact solutions out of this ecosystem which we've built over the past 12 months. And so over the past 12 months, we have this report. Can you tell us some of the key findings, maybe some of the key figures? Sum it up for our audience. Sure. So just a handful of numbers. We're launching, we're very excited to launch the uplink impact report today. And we'll showcase in that report, indeed, what has happened in the past 12 months. But just as a summary, I can say that through the platform, we've channeled about 100 million in worth of venture funding for some of the impact entrepreneurs. And they've had real impact on the ground, such as, for example, removing a combined 40 tons of greenhouse gas emissions out of the atmosphere, or, for example, providing drinking water to 2.7 million people. So these are just very concrete examples of some of the impact that the entrepreneurs who've translated through the platform have had. So it's really a new way to address some of the SDGs and a new way to create a community of entrepreneurs and investors and organizations who are interested and want to have impact. And so I think one of the coolest things about uplink is that it's an open, public, free network, that the forum is creating this ecosystem where you can actually connect if you have an idea, if you have a solution, and it's creating a network. Exactly. Exactly. It's all about the ecosystem. And we have a lot to get through. I mean, the team has been very busy, I mean, 39 million tons of greenhouse gases captured in the past year, 150 different solutions that we're highlighting today. But I would like to go now to one of the uplink founding partners, Deloitte. We're thrilled to have the global CEO, Puneet here. Please tell us the importance of crowdsourcing and supporting these entrepreneurs from emerging markets. First, it's great to be with you and a very exciting time for Deloitte. We will announce tomorrow top innovators for Deloitte's world-class education challenge. Before I get to uplink, which I think I agree with Olivier is a wonderful tool, even though I might be biased. The world-class challenge, Deloitte has made a commitment that we will impact 100 million individuals leveraging our core strength, which is our people, through education, 100 million people. Education is by geography in India. We are focused on women and girls. But across the 150 countries that Deloitte operates, then that's what we are focused on. So, and back in May, we reached out to educators, entrepreneurs, and innovators across Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, and asked them to share their ideas for disrupting the status quo, particularly around education, which was impacted gravely as a result of this COVID-19 crisis that we've been navigating over the last 18 months. And the challenge really had three focus areas, providing equitable access to students that are being left behind, investing in teachers' development, and equipping students with the skills that they will need in the future. We got 400 submissions, 400 submissions, of which 12 top innovators were selected. And they are going to propose, and we'll announce this tomorrow, creative ways to ensure equitable access, train teachers, and help students learn the soft and technical skills so that they can be successful. Deloitte is going to announce a special million-dollar grant, a pro bono grant, tomorrow. And we announced these. Three of them are in India, which I said is a key focus area for Deloitte, where we are focused on women and girls. 175 million women and girls are uneducated in India, so they don't have access to the development that India is going through right now. And these three top innovators have very creative ideas around supporting crucial earlier education, delivering microcourses through SMS and WhatsApp, and empowering youth with an entrepreneurial mindset. I'm really excited about this. It's really the power of the tool, uplink, that allowed us to identify these innovators and to get them focused on addressing a difficult problem that plagues the entire world, but particularly India, Africa, and Southeast Asia. So I'm very excited about this. And as I said, we'll be announcing this tomorrow. Yeah, we have a lot of news coming up from Deloitte tomorrow. So thank you so much for that overview and your participation as a founding member. Turning now to our other founding partner from Salesforce, Simon Mulcahy. Thanks so much. He's the chief innovation officer. Simon, uplink's role in driving an ecopreneur revolution. Tell us a little bit more about what that is. Well, thank you, Amanda Olivier, and thank you, Puneet, for Deloitte's incredible partnership. I can tell you there's an enormous amount of excitement around Salesforce about uplink. In fact, we're going to spotlight it tomorrow at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference, which is tomorrow and the day after. But we're really proud to be a founding partner alongside Deloitte for this incredible platform. And it's worth calling out that Professor Schwab had a really powerful vision to engage younger generations who feel such passion and ownership for our planet and its future. And the fact is that uplink is really proving to be the platform to help achieve this. It's a platform for mass mobilization. It empowers a new generation of social entrepreneurs to really kind of tackle the climate crisis. But what it really does is it brings together all the networks, all the insights and the capabilities that the forum has. And it makes them available for young, passionate entrepreneurs who want to change the world. Now at Salesforce, we call these entrepreneurs, these trailblazers, we call them ecopreneurs. And they're amazingly unique with powerful next generation technology, proven local solutions. But what they all also have in common is basically frustration. Their voice is too small. They don't have the right reach. They don't have access to the right finances. They don't have the right connections or access even to the right conversations. What uplink does is it brings them together with the right experts, the right investors, regulators and influencers to really solve that. And the good news is that we're seeing it happen. We're seeing it happen at scale. Now it's really just the beginning, but they're collaborating. They're developing high impact solutions and then making measurable impact on the SDGs. So in short, uplink with anyone with the right idea and uplink can actually make change in their community. But it's not good enough just to have tens of thousands of them. We now need to empower millions of them all over the world. We actually need an ecopreneur revolution. And we need it now because of the climate crisis that we're in. The good news is that uplink has created the foundation to then achieve that. And by doing that, I think that will really energize this bottom up revolution and hopefully get to half a billion ecopreneurs. And we're seeing some great examples of really inspiring ecopreneurs. And you're going to hear amazing stories from Ariana and Brie in a second, I think. But and these are two incredible ecopreneurs. But there's another one, which is Seawater Solutions. Now, they're a winner of the uplink. A major challenge actually called the Generation Restoration Youth Challenge that the forum just launched. And Seawater Solutions is kind of a multi-award winning startup. They're based in Scotland, in Glasgow, where COP26 is going to happen soon. And basically they focus on coastlines. They take two of the most abundant resources on the planet, degraded land and sea water. And they create wetlands that capture carbon, that create jobs, produce food and improve and stabilize the coastline. Now coastal wetlands are important for many reasons. For one, mangroves, seagrass meadows and salt marshes support food products that are really, really nutritious, like seafood, saline, vegetables. But I don't think anybody here probably knows that mangroves can store four times more carbon than a rainforest. And they're actually called the wonder tree. And yet we've got globally more than 35% of them have been deforested. So Seawater Solutions, they've been going since 2017 and they've launched wetland farms in Ghana, in Vietnam, Bangladesh. And actually over the last year they've planted over 100,000 mangroves in Ghana. So I'm really excited that because of through uplink, Seawater Solutions has really managed to get the support and profile they need and frankly deserve and the world needs them to have. Simon, thanks so much for that overview. I think one of the best things about working on this project is you continue to learn and hear about some of the solutions that people have come up with that gives us a little bit of hope that tackling climate change is actually something we can do if we do it together. So I appreciate that. Thank you to Puneet and to yourself, our founding members. But let's go to our innovators. Let's hear a little bit more about their companies, their solutions and how they're helping us to change the game. So I'm going to go first to Arianna Deyun. Sorry, she's the founder and CEO of Forested Foods. Arianna, tell us a little bit more about what is Forested Foods? How are you working with uplink and talk to us about some of the impact you guys have been having? That sounds good. And thanks to the World Economic Forum team, CNL's Forest and Deloitte for really launching uplink, which has been an incredible community to be a part of, even just over the past few months. So Forested Foods is an agroforestry enterprise that serves to combat deforestation and biodiversity loss. And really, it's about unlocking more value, notably commercial value from conservation-based agroforestry for all. We build and work with networks of smallholder forest communities. We're starting in Ethiopia with about a thousand smallholder farmers to regeneratively produce and then process and finally distribute things like forest honeys, spices, gums, resins and fruits, really anything that can grow in a forest. We're very much a nature-based solution to climate change and what Forested Foods is building is the cargill for deforestation-free and regeneratively produced agroforestry products from the global south. And so a question from our side, how are you working with uplink? What was, you know, how did uplink support the opportunity that you and Forested Foods had? Yeah, so I think when I joined the uplink community, I was, at this point, I looked at several different accelerators and it just, it was pretty tricky to find one that made sense for Forested Foods at the time. Forested Foods is an early-stage venture. We are name-based. We are working with emerging markets. We are doing smallholder agriculture. I think each of these three pillars for an early-stage startup independently is not good, but, you know, when you put them all together, it felt like we were a niche to the power of three. And I think the uplink community had kind of curated the different challenges just enough that made sense for us. We are part of the Sahel and the Great Green Wall Challenge. And, you know, there's something really powerful about having a community of eco-preneurs that, you know, all touch this special region of the world. I would say that as an early-stage startup, obviously our resources, notably human resources, are incredibly spread thin. And so even just in the few months of being a part of the community, it's really felt like the uplink team and community in my cohort have been like extension of us, you know, lots of sharing of different resources and just a lot of information and connections that, you know, the Forested Foods team would not be able to even be aware of on our own. Thank you for that, Ariana. We're going to get back to you. I know we've got some questions in the chat box for you and our other CEO, Bree Warner from Atlantic Sea Farms. Bree, thank you so much for joining us. Tell the viewers a little bit more about your company and your experience with uplink. Maybe give people some tips of, you know, if they were in your shoes a year ago, how would you, you know, tell them to engage on the platform? Thank you very much for having me today. I mean, I think this is one of the perfect examples of how uplink is fantastic, is putting me on this panel with all these incredible people and hearing what you all have to say and learning about what you're doing to build a better planet. And what we do at Atlantic Sea Farms is we are the first commercial seaweed farm in the United States, but we are now by far the largest. We have 24 partner farms in our network, all of whom are fishermen looking to diversify their income in the face of climate change. So what we're working on is an adapt, a climate change adaptation solution as well as a mitigation solution. We now provide more than 87 percent of all the land-grown seaweed in the United States. And our products are available both in our CPG brand, Atlantic Sea Farms, for food, and that is distributed across whole foods and sprouts in a number of other national chains, but also as an ingredient, as a fertilizer and feed supplement. And basically anywhere we can put kelp to help expand and amplify our impact on the coast here in Maine of getting more fishermen in the water. Here in the Gulf of Maine, our coast is warming faster than 99 percent of oceans in the entire world. And we are almost completely dependent on a lobster fishery that is increasingly volatile as a cause of this climate change. But the opportunity statement here is all these fishermen have their own boats, they all have their own licenses, they all have all the equipment they need to kelp farm in their off season, and we're providing that alternative income source by aggregating their farms, as well as providing free seeds and a buy-back guarantee that can help provide kelp for the whole United States. So that's what we're doing. We joined Uplink because we really wanted to get our voice out there beyond our national borders. Right now we're selling in the United States mostly, but we want to be able to prove out a concept of adaptation and mitigation for the rest of the world to look to and see that fishermen, the people who are on the water every day, are the ones leading climate change adaptation here in the East Coast of the United States. And I think that story is both exciting and can be such a compelling group of concept for others to look at, people who might see only desperation in the face of climate change and actually find hope in what we're building and find ways that they can build something similar for themselves. And Brie, I don't think a lot of people maybe know or understand the role kelp plays and how that can actually help protect the planet. I know you touched on the livelihoods bit, but can you give us a little bit more on the environment impact of this? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot we still don't know, which is one thing that's really exciting about kelp is we're learning something new every day. It's one of the most nutrient dense foods on the planet, so it can feed people in a way that nothing else out there can. It has omega-3s, which most people don't get enough of in their diet, iodine, calcium, potassium, all these things. But it's also a product that's done without any arable land, any fresh water, any pesticides, no inputs whatsoever. And so it's replacing all the other foods that you could pick on your plate that don't do any of those things. And in addition, it helps remove carbon and nitrogen from the water column where it grows, which once you eat it, it's not like it permanently sequesters climate change, but what it does is it helps change the pH of the water in that water column and can help mitigate some of the effects of climate change in that local area by making it less acidic and helping shell-bearing organisms in that area, while also not adding anything bad to the planet. So it cleans the water, it reduces, it changes the pH in a positive direction, and it provides one of the most nutrient foods in the planet for people. Brie, thanks so much for that overview. And we can tell by the beeps in your background, a CEO's job doesn't stop. So thank you for even taking the time out for you and Arianna to talk to us and tell us a little bit more. I'm going to open this up for questions. I have some questions. We have some questions that have come in on the chat. We have one from Jennifer Schenker. She is the Editor-in-Chief of The Innovator, which is the tech magazine at Lazeckos. She's interested, this is mostly a question for our Salesforce and Deloitte panelists. She wants to know a little bit more about the partnerships between large companies and startups in uplanking and how you guys can kind of work together. What is that system like? So Puneet, can I please come to you first for this question? Well, I'd love to hear Simon's view as well. First off, Brie and Arianna were exceptional. I mean, it was just wonderful listening to you and it gives certainly me hope that all of us need to do our part. Some of these problems, like the education challenge that I talked about and addressing the need in India, can seem overwhelming, but I think each one of us doing our part, which is what Brie was talking about, it will help us get a handle on this problem. But to answer your question specifically, the example that I gave you with the innovators and what we are trying to do with Deloitte is a perfect example of how Deloitte, leveraging uplink, leveraging the wonderful, enabling ecosystem power of WEF and helps us address a vexing problem in India. As I said, 175 million women and girls are uneducated in India and therefore don't have access to the same opportunities that everybody else does. Deloitte by itself can't solve this problem. We must create an ecosystem of partners, NGOs on the ground, governmental entities, but also innovators and entrepreneurs. And that's why uplink is such a powerful platform. It allows us to identify those individuals, to get their ideas, and then to help enable them through either Deloitte resources or Deloitte personnel so that they can actually have an impact. Simon, over to you. Thoughts on how you guys make that connection between the big corporates and our startups or ecopreneurs? Yeah, absolutely. This is incredibly a good point. So let me use the work that we've been doing with uplink around one trillion trees as a great example. So the problem is that there are right now about basically only three trillion trees left on the planet. There used to be six trillion. We've cut down three trillion. And a trillion trees basically sequesters about 200 gigatons of carbon dioxide. It's an incredibly important carbon mitigation opportunity. And so working with the World Economic Forum, we launched the one trillion trees initiative, 1T.org, and we sparked a program, a challenge on uplink. And what this has done is bring together lots so many, I can't even know the number, hundreds of different ecopreneurs focusing on tree planting. And this has provided a platform for them all to come together to learn off each other. It's allowed investors to join that community. But maybe even more importantly, regulators have joined that community. And that has really effectively catapulted all of this big program. And now we have organizations around the world who are focusing on one trillion trees. In fact, so much so that in two weeks' time, Global Citizen is launching a major event series in New York, Paris, London, focused on one trillion trees. And all of that is driven by the Forum's ability to create awareness and bring these communities together. Thanks, Simon. We've got a question that's come in for Arianna and Brie. If you were to talk to yourself one year ago, what would be one or two of the lessons learned? Or what do you wish you knew now that you knew that? Let's start. Arianna, can we go to you first, please? Sure. I guess I would say don't be too hard on yourself. I think a lot of us who are entrepreneurs are highly ambitious and very motivated to solve some of the world's most complex issues, but they're complex, especially when it comes to climate change. They're intersectional challenges, creating the problem, and the solution is going to require a lot of cross-sector, cross-player collaboration. And it's just going to take a little bit more time than your average startup. And I think the other thing I would say is just find joy. Building a startup is obviously pretty challenging, but it can also be incredibly gratifying and fun. And so just to keep things light when it's even possible. Yeah, and just to really enjoy the journey because it will be a very good journey. Brie, over to you. Your thoughts on this question. I think if COVID hadn't been such a game changer in every single way that we work and operate in the world, my thoughts would be different. But I will say something that's universal is that if you feel overwhelmed, hire someone to help you with that. Hire, don't wait until you actually can't do the job anymore before you hire someone to help you out in your company, a COO or a VP of operations or whatever. We do all of our seed farming, processing, marketing and sales. We are not only the potato chip company, but also the potato seed maker and the potato farmer. And there was four of us and we didn't add people. And when I added people, I realized how much better we could be when you add really good people. If they more than pay for themselves very quickly. And then you can actually be a business that actually does what you say you're going to do because you have the time to do it because 40 hours a week, 80 hours a week isn't enough to get anything done if you don't have the right people. I think the second part is, and that's related to COVID, is don't underestimate people's ability to adapt and your own ability to adapt. And if you have the best laid plans and a straight line to somewhere and you can see that goal, actually think about seeing that goal and seeing all the zigzaggy lines that could possibly get you there rather than following that one straight line because the world will continue to throw things at you, especially in the world of climate change, mitigation and adaptation. And we need to see the goal, but the strategy to get there, it needs to be able to change on a dime when you see what happens in the world and the pandemic really highlighted that for us. So just keeping your chin up and your head down, which we say here a lot because you can't do both at the same time. But that's really what we need to do is really kind of focus on the end goal. Thanks so much. We have another question that is in the chat box, Puneet, Simon, this is another one for you. We only have about a minute or two minutes left. So it's going to have to be a little bit of a quick fire situation here. Puneet, I'm going to come to you first. It's talking about what else needs to be unlocked from a public-private cooperation standpoint to really kind of supercharge the next wave of climate action. Is there anything that you think should be unlocked first? I think an acknowledgement that this problem will only be solved through a public-private partnership. It can't be done by the public sector by itself. It can't be done by private enterprise by itself. I think it requires that cooperation. And Simon, same question over to you. How do we unlock the next kind of wave of efforts? We need regulators to step in and really make the climate crisis mitigation a priority. And we're seeing the dance around the edges, but we need to see real change in the regulations. And that will then trigger business to lean in forward. I think business leaders need to understand the role they can play in really driving this change and that they should partner more. Every business should be measuring their footprint and should be looking to the eco-preneurs that they can support as they do their job. No business should just be about growth. It should be about supporting the environment in which it's living and working. Just one quick point here. This is not only the right thing to do, it is the right business thing to do. At 350,000 professionals that comprise Deloitte, 86% of them are Millennials and Gen Zs. This is their number one priority. If I want to retain them, if I want to motivate them, I must address this. So this is, as Simon was saying, the right thing for business to do, it is also the right business thing to do. I mean, Puneet, we should just end there. You can do this job next year at the next press briefing. You're in charge, sir. But Olivier, I know there's a lot of other ways people want to engage and learn a bit more about uplink. Send us home. Give us a couple of points for how else uplink is involved here at our Sustainable Development Impact Summit. No, thank you. Thank you, Amanda. It was great to hear very inspiring startup stories and also excellent advice from CEOs. So indeed, during this week of the Sustainable Development Impact Summit, we have a number of uplink activities going on. We're going to continue showcasing some of the fantastic entrepreneurs we have on the platform. We're going to launch some new challenges. So you heard it. The challenges is the way the companies interact with the entrepreneurs to find specific solutions. And then we'll have some startup pitch sessions. With some of the entrepreneurs on the platform. So that's all planned for this week. You can find out more at uplink.weforum.org. Find us there. Find out about all the exciting activities. And thank you very much to all of you for joining us here.