 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've 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 color. 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 a 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 in this transition, we 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. Hello and welcome to this session of the World Economic Forum's Sustainable Impact Development Meetings, which is titled Food and Energy Tackling a Global Resource Crisis. When I can get my words out, I am Adrian Monk from the World Economic Forum, managing director. Joining us to discuss this, we have a fantastic panel. We have Sam Kass, who is joining from Acre Venture Partners. He's been both a chef and a nutritional policy expert. We have the co-CEO and CFO of Royal DSM in the Netherlands, Geraldine Machit. They're a bioscience company that specializes in health and nutrition. Joining from Columbia University, where he co-founded the Center on Global Energy Policy and leads the Columbia Climate School. We have Jason Bordoff and from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization based in Rome. Delighted to be joined by chief economist Maximo Terraro. Thanks to our panel for coming together to shed some light on this very difficult topic. I think for all of us, the conflict in the Ukraine really brought to the center the geopolitics of food and energy security. And in both of those cases, it was a conflict that told people that they needed to pay attention to where food was going and where their energy was coming from. But actually, for all of the leaders involved in discussing this, these have been issues that have been on the global agenda for a very, very long time. And a lot of our panelists have been engaged in thinking about them for far longer than the latest crisis. And so what we're going to be discussing in the next 45 minutes is what are the ways that public-private collaboration can really move the needle on these issues and how can we come up with innovative ways of tackling them and what are the things we need to put in place to make sure that we're not having this discussion 10 years from now? I'm going to start, Sam, with you, if I may. You've been on the kind of front line of thinking about nutritional policy from both directions. You've been in the kitchen and you've also been in the kitchen in terms of investment, you know, thinking about the kind of things that we ought to be thinking about. For you, you know, how far has what we've seen about the way food is moving around the world? How has that kind of changed your thinking about nutritional policy and the things we should be doing? Oh, man. How much time do I have to drive the whole session? As long as you have. That's a huge question. I mean, look, I think what these last years really showed us is a window into the future. I mean, the future is here and now. These kind of massive disruptions that are having ripple effects around the world from a relatively constrained part of the world is the norm. And I think it is a real example of just a taste, really, of what we're going to be having to manage going forward in much more intense ways. And so if anything, I hope it's a wake-up call to policymakers around just what's at stake when it comes to food security and the impact and intersection between food and climate. It's largely, it's changing, but if you go through the arc of climate discussions, food's been left out of the dialogue almost entirely. It's the number two driver emissions globally. It's also the system that is most directly affected by climate itself. And I think, and we can talk about this more later, what's emerging in our food system is an opportunity to actually help solve the climate crisis unlike, I would argue, any other sector on the planet. There's a lot of other sectors have to reduce their negative impact, but there's very few that actually could have a net-positive result on sequestering carbon. So for me, I think, you know, when I think put my policy hat on and my investor hat on, there's an opportunity before us that we haven't seen before because people are now opening their eyes up because they've seen what's going on. And wow, we got to act like our very plates of food at dinner are at stake and the future of our ability to continue to put that food on our children and our children's children's plate is really at stake. So I think we have a sense of urgency now that we haven't seen before. And, Max, your organization hasn't just been dealing with this since the Ukraine crisis. You've been dealing with this for decades. Just how much has the Ukraine crisis given us an opportunity to focus on the bigger issue of where we're feeding the world and how we're relating that to the climate challenge that we face? So we need to understand that the Ukraine crisis exacerbated the situation that was already there. And the situation was really in first by conflict. That was the first driver of food insecurity. The second one was the slowdowns and downturns and COVID-19 really impacted through that mechanism. And that's why in the last two years we have 150 million more people chronically undernourished. And the third one is climate change. And of course, they interact and when they interact, it gets even worse. But climate change has two dimensions which we need to look carefully. One is extremes when you have high temperatures of flooding like Pakistan, the fourth exporter of a rise in the world today. But the second one is variability. And that's what makes very difficult for farmers to make decisions. And that's where technological opportunities could help them to do things properly. So the situation is new. But then you have the choke of Ukraine, the war that nobody expected. And basically, Russia, the Russian and Ukraine represent 30% of the serious in the world. Luckily, a big chunk of that was already exported. And that's why there was a supply response and we could compensate by exacerbated prices. And in March, we have the highest price of the food price, the FAO food price index was the record in history. Now prices are starting to slow down, but they're still very high. And what we found as a result of that two things. One is that there is a serious problem of food access this year. People cannot afford. So 62 of the most vulnerable countries have increased their food import bill in $25.4 billion. That means 1.72 billion people are at risk. The second important thing is the link between energy and food, which we have forgotten because we talk about the change in energy mix for climate issues. But that will increase the food, the price of energy, natural gas, and that will increase the price of fertilizers. That is what really is putting at risk right now the next supply. And that's what really could create a problem of food availability in addition to food access in the next season. So yes, we are seeing all the interlinkages. We are seeing that agriculture is a sector under risk and uncertainty. Risk is, you know, you can ensure uncertainty. You don't have the minor idea. It's very difficult. COVID was uncertain. The war was uncertain. And that's where we need to learn how to operate and what tools we need to have in place to cope with it. Thanks. We're used to sort of thinking about governments and international organizations dealing with these issues. But actually, a lot of the way we're dealing with them is through investments that big business is making. And Geraldine, I mean, your company, Will DSM, you've been looking at this from the long term for quite some time. Can you just explain a little bit about the thinking that you do when it comes to investing in some of the investments that you're making that are helping to address some of the issues that Maximo and Sam have spoken about? Yeah, exactly. And I think you said it absolutely right. The world has woken up to the fact that we cannot take for granted that there is food security and even more importantly that there's nutritious food that's available. So as a bioscience company which has the longest history in micronutrients so what goes into our food and the feed of animals we've been thinking for decades around the long term future of these things and to give maybe a couple of examples to make it concrete for people listening to us. A lot of people think about hunger but actually malnutrition is actually even more devastating. So when people don't have the right micronutrients they're stunting and you have the whole generation that is lost effectively. So we've been working on what we call hidden hunger for many, many years. But that turns into not only scientific innovation but real concrete investments. So about eight years ago we decided that we were going to help invest in producing in Africa for Africa the Super Serial Plus which is effectively the relief food of the World Food Program which right now is desperately needed. Why was it important to do that to do that in Africa? Because then you combine it with development. So not only is it helping close the micronutrient gap of extremely vulnerable people but we're sourcing from over a hundred thousand small holder farmers. When you do that you give them certainty of income so they can invest in better crops they can fight aflatoxin which is quite a common disease in crops etc. So looking at really developing structurally how do you improve the ability to produce food, nutritious food closer to the markets. Now if you think right now to what you were saying the supply chain disruptions are massive. The plant in Kigali right now is operating full speed because we're sourcing locally and we're able to produce for the countries in the areas which are very vulnerable. So that's one example. The other one is actually science has to think ahead because it takes time. So if you think of climate change methane is one of the most damaging greenhouse gases and you said very correctly food and agriculture was often not part of the conversations around climate. Yet a third of methane in the world comes from livestock. So about 15 years ago we started thinking about how can we reduce the methane burped by cows which at the time was seen as a rather eccentric thing to put some serious money behind. And I'm talking serious money because the investments over 15 years of R&D have now translated into building a big production facility because we have developed a feed ingredient that you can feed to the cows. It's a quarter of a teaspoon and it reduces the emethanes by 30%. Now if you think of the methane pledges that have come out of COP26 to the 30% reduction and when you know that methane over I think it's a 10 year period is 100 times more potent than CO2 this is the handbrake that we can pull in the world to go down the climate crisis and try to gain time to do all the other things. So these are some of the things that you don't do this in isolation this has to be done in an ecosystem that is supportive and thinks nicely ahead of time. Now the crisis we're seeing right now is clearly showing that all of these things that we do to ensure the resilience of the food system needs to accelerate even further. And you made the link there between cows burping energy I know that probably most people think about when they think about tackling climate change but the energy side of the piece that is something where food has always been thought of in terms of malnutrition, hunger rarely in terms of its impact on energy. We've seen this huge shock both to the food supply system which has woken people up to just how complicated the world is when it arrives on their plate but we've also seen a shock to the energy supply system which has woken people up to just where the gas comes from that powers their cookers that powers their boilers and heats their homes. Jason can you give us a bit more context on that energy crisis and that side of the piece? Yeah absolutely and I think you're right energy obviously the primary driver of emissions agriculture is huge as well but the impacts there in terms of impacts on food security because of drought or flooding in Pakistan or anything else we're being reminded now in what is I think the worst energy crisis in at least half a century maybe longer the first global energy crisis and by that I mean almost every part of the world affected were relatively insulated in the United States but that's not the exception not the norm and almost every fuel a strong focus on what it looks like but what's happening in Europe is having ripple effects by pushing up energy prices in the developing world in emerging markets Pakistan, Bangladesh which are having trouble affording natural gas, affording coal everything is going kind of through the roof in terms of prices and because those prices are so high natural gas as you said used for cooking used for heating and for fertilizer that's how we grow food and I think somewhere around 70% of the fertilizer production in Europe is shut down right now because we don't have enough energy it's too expensive and when you're facing scarce molecules, scarce energy sources you know what do politicians do first thing you got to do is let people keep eating their homes you got to keep the electricity going so there's a plan in Europe now to gradually ration energy as needed and the first thing you shut down is your industry and fertilizer is a big part of industry ammonia and that's going to have a big impact in some of the poorer parts of the world in terms of food production may I just jump in and maybe put a number to that if you produce without fertilizers you lose 50% of the yields that is the delta between agriculture with fertilizer and agriculture without so that is really the scale that we're looking at is not just that there is a shortfall now is that actually if you look forward just a year or two years it's not going to be an access issue it's going to be an availability issue I'm sorry but it will be next year I wanted to but also Africa uses 3% of the global fertilizer so it's very low the intensity of use the potential of grow is enormous that's why the dangote plant was built which could supply fertilizers to all Africa the problem is that 95.5% of the fertilizers in the dangote plant goes to South America so why why doesn't it stay in Africa for which it was built with money of IFC so it was in a certain way de-risked people listening in Nigeria it's a factory of fertilizers in Nigeria but most of it goes to South America because it's more profitable for them they're a company they're doing the correct thing the problem is what is happening that this thing is not moving inside Africa but you're completely right what is happening right now with natural gas is closing 10 of the plants of fertilizers in Europe and Europe was an exporter of nitrogen nitrogen is the element that wipes the fastest when you produce Europe will become a net importer when it was an exporter so that will put even a bigger shock over the supply it will affect the poorest who already are facing an economic crisis because they can't afford energy among other things so just to ask you Geraldine how does a company like Rural DSM keep its plants running in the face of this kind of shock is this something that you have planned for is it something you're talking to governments about you just have to look at the newspapers and think how the heck are we going to keep things running when this is coming towards us so extremely difficult planned for absolutely not because this was a black swan to call it that way and it's difficult to truly plan for those black swans now we have industrial footprint around the world so to some extent some of our facilities whether it be in China or in the US etc okay in Europe we are a Dutch listed company we have a big footprint in the Netherlands the gas situation in Europe is critical and you have to position yourself in the context of society as well logically homes need to be heated so what we've managed to do in some cases which we don't like because it doesn't help the climate but some of our facilities we can tilt back to oil so whether we can produce steam and energy out of oil we've done that if the infrastructure is not there you can't build it fast enough so in fact it's some of our more legacy sites which have that duality others are completely dependent on gas supply so it does put companies like us and many others particularly in Europe in a very difficult situation and you look at capital markets and financial markets to hedge for example there's no more market for hedging you could do that over a period of time but it's maxed out because there's so much uncertainty in the system so a lot of interaction with governments trying to understand what the plans are going to be but it is very much a crisis management situation and Sam from an investment point of view I'm sure it's even tougher or are there things that you're seeing coming through where you think actually there's some quite interesting signs of what this has precipitated or this has got people talking much more seriously about things that maybe a year ago they wouldn't have considered I mean we spent our time focused on earlier stage mission driven companies that are trying to solve the climate and health crisis and so from an investment standpoint ironically it actually creates a lot of opportunity because people are now aware of the magnitude of the challenges that we're trying to solve and grapple with and that we do need more innovation and more capital flowing into this sector I mean right now it's still as much as flowing it's still a drop in the bucket compared to the size of our food system globally and the magnitude of the challenges that we face I mean we have to remember that we have a food system that has been built and constructed around the most stable climate that scientists can see in the history of the planet the last couple hundred years had been completely a utopic climate for growing food we're now entering an age of incredible volatility and we just do not have a system that's set up to manage and deal with the risk that is going to come from this volatility Ukraine yes it was a black swan event by our current standards it is that is the norm there will be increasing amount of conflict Pakistan what we saw there will just be that will be happening every year every year we will know in a few years we would no longer call that a black swan event this is the flooding that we've seen the flooding and the heat America is on fire other places haven't had rain in 20-30 years this is now becoming what we have to design our system for and which to this point we have done not at all so from a technology innovation standpoint there's so much effort being put into okay how are we going to do this how are we going to run less in the footprint of our ag system like reducing methane from cows in other parts of the system but also in spending a lot of time in this space I think food and ag honestly is our only chance quite frankly to sequester enough carbon to give us enough time for other technologies to come to bear to mitigate the worst of climate a lot of the carbon that is in our air used to be in our soil we have a billion people working in food and ag globally who we could finally start paying them to perform with better practices and start sequestering that carbon back into the soil if we don't successfully do that and I think we have a really good shot at I don't think we're going to come close to meeting the moment so there's a lot of challenges to do that well there's a lot of problems still in the space but I think technology innovation is going to help give us a shot at solving some of these challenges right jump in fully agree I mean right now the land suffers from drought that is not a black swan that has been getting higher and higher and higher the climate disruptions clearly not a black swan it's a trend and therefore the resilience part is what we all need to work on and what gives me hope is that across the value chain what we're seeing is increased collaboration between parties that never used to collaborate but they used to compete and now the scale of the crisis on scaling regenerative agriculture on making sure that we have healthy top soils that can actually withstand these downpours and these droughts etc. everyone is now leaning in and so that's the positive out of what's happening is that because there's the on top factor of the Ukraine crisis and the fertilizer crisis to be honest that has really changed the attitudes could I say something because yes everybody is leaning in but for where because the major problem right now is that more than 60 billion dollars are located in agricultural subsidies and incentives in developed countries which are not for what we are talking about they are for the opposite they are to create more emissions they are to produce grains and cereals which are not healthy they don't have the micronutrients you need and that is mostly developed countries developing countries is not so much so if that doesn't change then I don't see what is going to really change so I think it's really important accountability on our actions we said ok we need to change the energy mix sure we need to change the energy mix for what? to reduce emissions which is a public good it's an international public good how the level of emissions that we have accumulated right now came from historically who is going to be affected by change of the energy mix but if you are say a Dutch farmer and you are told to take certain actions in order to use less fertilizer for example or to make less emissions and you find it hitting your bottom line and you take to the streets to protest because you see your livelihood being threatened how does the message get through to farmers like that or how do governments begin to compensate people for the cost of those changes because what we are seeing is that a lot of this transition comes with a price tag and as you said currently that price is set up to allow people to do certain things that are not delivering what we want to deliver but how do you make sure from a government point of view that people actually don't feel robbed or disempowered they actually you know feel that they are on the right pathway towards achieving those goals aligning the incentives so I don't need to provide to a Dutch farmer more resources to keep subsidizing the production of cereals I can give incentives to the Dutch farmer to innovate in technologies which will provide healthy diets to the world the problem is I am doing the opposite you go to farms in developed countries where the subsidies are at such level that they can make a museum of tractors because they have so much money that they can keep buying tractors and make a museum in a farm and you ask where you make that oh because of the subsidies so it's completely consistent to the reality we are living Jason I just want to bring in for a second on this because we talk about the food system it's really a system is it it's a market that's existed for decades on the back of what Sam says is a very stable climate that suddenly shifted it's existed on the back of the kind of geopolitics that we've seen as very fragile so what are the kinds of things that we need in the public private space that can help mitigate some of these interlinkages are there things, are there discussions are there conversations about how to join up and do something yeah there are obviously a lot of answers to that question one important point I think is we are seeing how climate is impacting food obviously energy impacts climate we're also being reminded now that climate impacts energy Europe is in the middle of an energy crisis it's also in the gas crisis it's also in the middle of an electricity crisis which is not all about Putin let's put blame where it's due it's mostly on Putin and Russia warmer waters are making it impossible to cool nuclear power plants drought is making it impossible to move coal barges up the river high temperatures are reducing the output from wind turbines hydro because of drought so climate is severely impacting energy now and then that is impacting the food system I think part of the broader macro environment that's happening now is one of more disruptive change because of climate impacts more disruptive change because of geopolitics coming out of the pandemic coming out of this conflict completely rethinking what the World Economic Forum is all about the world is rethinking what a globalized economy looks like the trend is toward fragmentation which is why the conversations we're having at WEF are so important because we got to make sure that we don't fragment more resentment sense of hypocrisy in some developing countries against some of the behaviors we just saw in wealthier countries so that's a backdrop that is going to in some sense make it more challenging to have what we need which is a more not less orderly energy transition to your point if you can't if we have more price volatility if we make mistakes along the way if we have geopolitical events if we get the technologies a bit wrong it's a massive transition to go to net zero in 28 years we've never done anything like this and if you want to take a goal like that seriously it is going to be jagged it's going to be messy it's going to be disruptive because people have trouble paying their energy bills heating their homes have issues with energy security affordability they take to the streets and that's not only bad economically and geopolitically it makes it harder to have an energy transition and stay the course with the kind of climate policy we need I totally agree I think to try to meet that goal in the next less than 30 years we're going to not only have to realign incentives around our sub-season but yes they're perverse set of money being spent in a counter-intuitive way and anybody who is from a policy lens who is resisting aggressive policies around climate or not advocating for using those subsidies more efficiently I would just say this is a dereliction of duty at this point the problems are so extreme that we can't waste any more time that being said I think people focusing on food and like to point as subsidies as like if only those were fixed everything would be fine and there's still a tiny drop in the bucket in terms of the global food and ag economy and while we need them to unlock a lot of the change and start paying farmers to make those initial changes and cover that cost of farming in a different way I think setting up the marketplace tools so that people are getting paid from the market as well for commodities that are grown in a much more sustainable manner and that farmers starting to get paid directly for the carbon that they're putting in the soil is the way we're going to actually unlock everything the subsidies have to be aligned to that, no question but without businesses saying I'm going to reduce and I'm going to start paying farmers much more for these kind of commodities or all bi-offsets that are high quality from these growers it's all going to just be incremental and come nowhere close to meeting the moment that we have to in the time that we do we just want to caution ourselves to say it's just government bad policy it's the reason we're not solving this having been in the White House for six years helping to lead on food policy you can see the power of national governments to do the right thing and certainly I would take a lot of issue with some of the ongoing policies that we have here on this specific issue but from it comes to food and ag in most countries governments not telling the farmer you will grow this in this way people aren't I couldn't write a law that says you must eat this steak and thank God cooked in this way because given who came after us thank God that presidents can't tell you what to eat so I just think it's a balance and I do think I do think it has to be we have to understand the role of government in those subsidies to start pointing in a very clear direction about how we have to move and how fast we have to put the tools in from the market to allow that are there governments who you would pull out and say these guys are doing the right thing they've got it right they're the example that we like to show people look I agree with you and I missed a zero in my number it was 600 billion not 60 but the point is that's one of the elements of course it's not the package but there are several things that are not correct like I think the best example of how the system is failing is what happened with the vaccines that's the best example you immediately saw how the game is played who got the vaccination they developed countries the poor countries forget about it you will get it at some point that doesn't make any sense in a world that is so interconnected the same applies to climate because if I am able to use your technology and I am able to produce livestock which lets methane I should do it but I should be able to trade those emissions with somebody else they allow me to trade emissions and that doesn't create the positive results and that's one of the biggest issues agriculture has always been kept out of any climate mechanisms which is wrong because I think you said it absolutely right it's the sector that brings the biggest opportunity for various reasons firstly how do we grow food on soil how do we get to the soil we take away the trees in order to grow so there's a direct correlation of feeding more and more people with loss of forest cover and vegetation cover so that is a very smart then there's the methane then there's the methane from livestock but also from rice paddies and then you've got the nitrogen and then you've got the watersheds etc when you actually look at all of that and you take the opposite lens and you say ok so if all of these things are not quite right that means if we actually deal with them we have a huge upside and the technologies exist today so and they're not so extremely you know they don't require massive capital but what they do require is a lot of coordination and I wonder sometimes in this world is it what's the hard there are a lot of capital to do big capital investments or is it to coordinate a lot of people to do the right things and in the case of food and agriculture that seems to be sometimes the biggest issue but I'd like to add a slight topic which is we tend to talk about food and ag as if it's the same everywhere absolutely not so the battles are different depending on regions and countries and I very much agree with you that while mature economies whether it's the US Europe etc really needs to switch to regenerative agriculture and we need to find the right subsidies and incentives and whatever to facilitate the journey for farmers because let's be clear the farmers can't afford to do it on their own that doesn't take away that in other regions and I'll take Africa as the obvious continent that's not the battle the battle is increased productivity locally produced nutritious food that is affordable and resilient that they don't depend on international trade to eat and therefore we need to think very differently of the regions and hopefully the two put together you start moving the whole planetary food system up now 3.1 billion people don't have access to healthy diets today exactly okay and most of them are in Africa now the point is that I wouldn't think that trade is wrong on the contrary I think trade is good you use your resources in the most efficient way you can do short supply chains or long supply chains doesn't matter the important is that you assign the incentives properly that's the trick agriculture is the sector with the biggest level of distortions in the world therefore we have to give them a different treatment to any other sector we need to make it more transparent and it's like that in purpose it's not like that by mistake it's of course it's designed to be like that so that's the point the point how we make and that is basically what we talk about the true cost of food we need to understand the true cost of food I use cost and I use value because it's important to understand but it's not accounting cost it should include the value of all those externalities that we generate but that will help a lot to create this transparency and incentives so that things start to align right well we've talked about you brought in the vaccine distribution and you know if you're a national government leader responsible to the nation are you going to be that concerned if an outside party doesn't get the same access you get be it to food, be it to energy, be it to vaccines your responsibility as you see sitting in the chair is to the people in your state and you're wanting to look after them making that bigger argument that we're talking about here which is about coordination and cooperation and collaboration that's a silo view because I am sure if the counterfactual was that vaccines were distributed globally faster we will have been solved of this problem earlier than where we have been right now so the idea of is just to protect my own people in a world like the one we have a full interconnection that anybody can fly from one country to the other and bring the virus and create a pandemic again and this will happen a lot because climate change will alter this process this is not new I think that that vision that way of thinking has to change if it doesn't change we will never resolve the problems it's exactly part of the response and I think part of Putin's strategy in the energy crisis which is to divide Europe and break European unity and we'll see what happens and I've been impressed by how much European unity has held but when people don't have enough molecules to keep the heat on in the winter to your point are they going to make sure they're heating the homes of their people or exporting gas to a neighboring country and I think we have to be careful about that now the good news is that Geraldine has a lot of energy security in the near term we're going to switch to some oil and coal and we're going to build LNG import terminals but in the long term the things that give you more energy security mostly not entirely but mostly point in a decarbonized direction as well and I think that's a really important thing to keep our eye on and keep focused on which is that if we were less dependent on globally traded hydrocarbons inevitably exposed to geopolitical risk if it's not Putin it'll be something else next time you get a lot of energy security benefits from that not to mention what we need to do for our missions and I have to say having COP 27 and COP 28 coming up is really helpful because in the context of now there's a full awareness that climate food and energy actually all hang together I'm really hopeful and confident actually that now we're going to have the right conversations because it's been very much a siloed sort of energy discussion as if energy is a standalone thing which it actually not and we have seen given the civil unrest has happened in many countries when food fails everything fails it's as simple as that people cannot wait three months or cannot put an extra jumper on or go without a mobile phone food is a daily requirement preferably nutritious healthy delicious food the chef but that is true of all culture and of all places and that if there's one thing that unites populations around the world is not only the need for food is the passion for food it's at the core of every civilization and I think if we bring to COP 27 and 28 the passion that this kind of attitude takes hopefully we can break through some of these geopolitical barriers that have been in the way to be fair and I'm with you and distorting too much the system. That's something I wanted to just bring in to get your views on which is we talk about the passion but people have a passion for what they eat and they're it's an incredible part of people's identity you only have to look at a street here in Manhattan to see all of that expressed in every single variety of restaurant but when they hear the kind of discussions like we're having now they tend to think that we're just talking about calories and vitamins and micronutrients and that you could serve it all up in a big pile of sloth and say there you go that's your meal it meets 2000 calories vitamin C it's climate friendly. How do we address both the issues that you're all talking about and make sure that this conversation doesn't happen so you're saying to people no you can't eat that you've got to eat this you can't eat that. Beautiful Mediterranean diets they are healthy I shouldn't have realized I should have realized you had an Italian I'm sorry he was going to take that one but honestly speaking I think it's an issue of behavior and trying to understand that diversity is good and diversity of what you eat is what you really need doesn't mean that you need to have a pill with all the micronutrients that you need to survive that's not what you are looking for because it's culture also behind so the diversity is what we are looking for and to be careful on what you eat but the most important thing is to understand that there is other people also that is affected and they don't necessarily will have access to that diversity that you have access right now and I would say to preserve the diversity of diets which actually is the pleasure of food you have to be looking at every possible opportunity to reduce the footprint and look at how we produce that food so it's what we eat but it's also how we produce it and then when you combine it together if we have enough of this work then you will be able to have on the one hand the net positive direction of food production and preserve the pleasure and the culture of diverse diets and that is something if you actually look at the green revolution we managed to feed three times more people on this planet which from a scientific and a technical point of view is a real achievement but the diversity of what we eat has narrowed massively in fact and you probably have all the figures the percentage of what we eat is now in the hands of sort of five crops and you know it's extremely narrow and that is actually destroying our soils and our climate so diversifying what we eat is actually part of the solution and I'm sure the chef would agree on part of the pleasure as well you know I think diversity is the foundational theme you know from a strategic standpoint look I think we have to bake the impact into the products that people are eating we have to make it really easy for people to have a positive impact if we're going to ask everybody to become experts on all the things that are happening globally while they're trying to raise their kids and work a couple jobs and deal with their aging parents it's not going to happen the products themselves have to carry the change and it's good to educate and communicate but we can't ask people to go on a mission to transform the whole diets because they don't have access to those kind of products to do it easily so that's up to us, that's up to policymakers investors business and industry to make it much easier on people and then I think we have to do the hard work over time to shift the cultural values to include better nutrition and climate sustainability in what we expect from our food system from a consumer standpoint companies can only go so far unless people are saying yeah I really am expecting in that product that you're considering the impact on the environment or what you're putting in that package that chef is cooking and that's the hard slow work that we all have to pay attention to because it is exactly who we are and so you can't tell somebody if you eat this you're bad because it's like I'm not a bad human and I do like to eat what I've always eaten with my grandparents and grandparents have eaten so that's why you have to sort of shift those values over time to include a different way of thinking and then we express it then chefs can start cooking up new ways of expressing those same that same identity and I think that is really important is information especially with kids but we are observing in the schools and the bad information that is being provided to kids so what is a healthy diet for example vegetarian diets are not healthy and everybody knows that scientifically they are not healthy diets it's true they are not they have just made some news right here no they are not healthy diets they are not defined as healthy diets they don't comply with all the micronutrients to make it a healthy diet but the problem is I don't have any problem with you deciding to be vegetarian or not but if you are misinformed about it you can create a behavior in children that will end because if they don't have the vitamin compliments that they need they will end in serious problems and many kids are ending in serious problems right now so I think information will be very important on this topic your social media or your inbox is going to be full today that's good it's been a really interesting discussion I think maybe what we have seen is that there is a diversity not just of opinions but of issues and the kind of links between them are both what economists call wicked which means they can't figure them out and also the kind of issues that need conversations like the ones we are starting to have today which is to say conversations that help people understand some of the changes that they need to make on their side in order to meet other people where they are so that we can try to move things in a direction that achieves the kind of change that moves the needle on these two very very thorny issues I hate to leave a discussion without offering people a little bit of optimism and whilst I'm excited that not being a vegetarian is good news for my own personal health I really want to ask each of our panelists what aspect of what they do gives them optimism about tackling these crises and I just heard a deep sigh there Jason so maybe if I turn to you first is there something that you come across in what you are doing that gives you optimism about tackling the energy crisis yeah well it was your introduction to me which said I run an energy institute at Columbia but also the Columbia Climate School it's the first climate school in the country there are a lot of institutes or a lot of centers University of Columbia is a couple schools a law school, a business school, a medical school we've decided to create the first climate school because it's the largest commitment institution like that can make to this issue we just graduated our first class of 90 master's students with a degree in climate and society and I will say to stand on that campus overlooking 30,000 people bestowing degrees on those extraordinary young people who are committed and passionate and brilliant and care deeply about this issue it's hard not to work with young people these days and not really feel inspired by hopefully their ability to do a little bit better than we did Maximo you've given us some very honest and sometimes gloomy advice a little bit of optimism for those hoping to not turn entirely vegetarian but what's your look I think that despite of the chokes we had the COVID-19 and so on the agricultural system work you've got food during COVID-19 and we will go out of the war in Ukraine so I think what the sector is telling us that this resilient it needs to be a lot more because of the chokes that is going to happen but he has been resilient and the second thing is that this is a huge opportunity to make big changes I think the window we have is very small because the financial crisis that is coming will be very bad and if we don't take opportunity of this little window I think we lose a very important chance to the transformation that we need Sam from your perspective looking at new interesting businesses and other things coming through what's your look I live from the vantage point of hope and optimism and you know urgency given how bad things are getting but every day I'm working with entrepreneurs that I think are setting out to solve the fundamental problems we've been discussing all day I mean I could start I could have a long list just a couple meaty is bringing probably the most delicious but healthiest food I've ever seen both from a macro and micronutrient standpoint to the market right now do good food is collecting food waste from retailers and turning it to animal feed so you have carbon reduced chicken so that somebody can just eat a piece of chicken and have a pretty big impact spring food is trying to bring regenerative bread to everybody that I've been helping for a long time I think the place though that so just like a long list of brilliant entrepreneurs that are trying to tackle so without us having to make the change the products are going to get better and I think that though the big systemic opportunity is how we actually value our ecosystem and the services that these ecosystems are providing us and I think we are called to change how the economy fundamentally reacts to these natural ecosystems right now we only pay people to take things out you cut the forest down for the wood you take the plant out you harvest it we haven't figured out how to start valuing what the world provides humanity for life on earth and I think carbon offers us an opportunity to start paying farmers to relate to the earth in a fundamentally different way and I think that is the near-term opportunity which will lead us to a different way of valuing what these ecosystems mean to humanity what a forest actually provides for humanity and an incredible company called Lone Bios doing sequestering three tons per hectare of carbon per acre per year in a much more permanent forms and you got companies like Intrinsic Exchange Group that are creating actual market mechanisms to invest in these natural ecosystems and I think you start to see this lineage of different companies putting together and organizing our economy in a fundamentally different way and that is the kind of transformational shift that I do think is actually beginning that is going to be bumpy and messy and have a bunch of problems along the way but that we are actually starting to move to a direction that could as on a global basis really solve a lot of these challenges because we are starting to pay people to do the right thing and until we do that this isn't going to work there is no policy that is going to change this the market is too powerful we are going to have to align our policy and our market to actually reach these goals we have the chance I don't know if we are going to do it but the pieces are starting to be developed so that gets me out of bed every day ready to go Thanks and Geraldine from your perspective you have talked about some of the things that Royal DSM has done over the last 10 years and it is starting to do but are there other things that you have in the pipeline that give you optimism about what we are doing and you have also talked about coordination which is I think a really important piece of the puzzle that people don't sometimes don't understand the public-private coordination piece that not everyone is talking to each other on a big WhatsApp group there isn't a kind of interaction and there are a couple of things that have opened up for you in that space I think what gives me a lot of hope is the scaling of the food innovation hubs they really are now extremely active to your point connecting the new science to the scaling the other one is the fact that we are now as a world bringing together climate and food and actually now flipping it the other way we need to protect the ability to produce food and that points to the farmers so for a long long long time to be honest farmers were somewhat neglected in this equation and I'm sorry to say it in a rather brutal way but certainly from a big part of the chain it was assumed that the right stuff would be produced and then we focused on all kinds of things and brands and whatever now that's not the case it's back to the fundamentals of where does food come from that basically enables companies like us to lean in and to connect with all and to really say how do you scale affordable, nutritious pacy because let's be clear people only eat things that they like to eat foods and for that you need the farmer at the table and we've been doing that and we're middle of the chain so before we would never have thought about it and now it's everyone together and that's when you see that the positive energy is there and one thing that I would really love to see is a fresh generation an excitement in the young generation coming at you you triggered me with your comment on graduates in energy two of my nieces are doing exactly that I would love to see that strong generation come up on food food and agriculture and food production because it's been an underrated activity for too long so that's what gives me hope is that I think everything's now there to create that thank you for joining us in this discussion please follow along with the rest of our meeting material to Sam to Geraldine to Jason and Maximo my thanks thanks for being with us at the sustainable development impact meetings goodbye from Manhattan