 My goal from the age of four was to race around this The route that you take when you sail around the world is you sail down effectively from Europe up here The start line is generally around here the mouth of the English Channel for the record that I undertook You then race all the way down the Atlantic Down underneath South Africa, Australia, New Zealand you come out here basically racing around the bottom of the earth Which is Antarctica Round Cape Horn and then back up the Atlantic to the finish so you really are isolated and if you put yourself in that position for a Moment on a boat down there with the finite resources that you take for your survival for that three months Just imagine what those resources feel like You develop an overwhelming understanding of what finite means because what you have is all you have there is no more Our global economy is also totally reliant on finite resources resources. We only have once in the history of humanity I spoke to chief executives economists experts on resource flows Manufacturers to try and understand. How does this big picture of global resources work? You know, I understood my little picture on the boat, but I could restock at the end We can't know we have a finite world and it really fascinated me that so much of the solutions Around or so many of the solutions around resource flows were to be more efficient at Systems level as in global level you can really start to see patterns Now with these images you can see systems you can see unintended Consequences and you can see how we're transforming things at massive scale and you can see Shanghai Relatively compact in this area a fairly dense city and then over the next 32 years Shanghai's population grows by leaps and bounds And as we reach 2015 You can see what was originally downtown Shanghai is no longer defined It's connected outwards to all the all the cities in the area. It's still relatively dense for a city But it's become quite large during this 32-year period that we can play back time So almost doubled in population, but watch its footprint It spans almost not at all In fact while it was managing to build instead of outwards it built upwards and while it did that it also managed to protect Very large areas very large parks and a whole green belt along the bottom and we're going to turn on lights at night What we can see is color-coded according to how those lights are changing So this is lights over a 25-year period and what you see in green stayed the same So like if we look at the United States Mostly stayed the same mostly it's green you see them ringed in red So red is places that got brighter and then if we go to Asia, of course We see a lot of increase in light a lot of increase in economic output And when you think about the race resources and you think about the materials and you see the sprawl and the growth in the cities And you think there are more and more people across the world now living in cities You can see that as a bit of a challenge because we have finite resources We're using them faster than ever How can that pan out in the future particularly when the way that we use those resources is Linear, but if you start to think of cities as being a connected area if you think about the fact that materials and people and Biological materials are aggregated in cities you start to see them as an opportunity and potential if you could recover Human waste farming waste agricultural waste food production waste and feed that back into the biosphere If you could turn that into energy and fertilizer and get back back to the farms Which we've not done in the developed world for a long time You could reconnect a system which generates fertilizer and energy and the city is a real source for that It's a real source for that value and it is entirely possible today The circular economy is a different economic model which looks at the entire system of the economy You can see how things are interrelated or not in our current linear system And this helps people to see how we can have unintended consequences from one thing that we do And actually if you look at the whole system how you can start to not only stop that happen But be regenerative and restorative in the way that our economy runs The economic studies that we've done at the foundation looking into this circular economy show that there's huge Economic rationale for this not only for the companies because they're not continuously selling these raw materials But for us because we're not buying the raw materials We're buying a service and then you see the opportunity of a city to become restorative regenerative from materials perspective And also from a biological perspective. We're going to move to Grasberg mine in Indonesia This is the largest gold mine and third largest copper mine on the planet You can see it grow Over the last 32 years We're going downhill down the rivers and let's see the tailings from that Mine collect we're looking at tens of kilometers of trees that have been destroyed Let's turn to coal extraction in the Appalachian Mountains in the United States This is a form of coal extraction called mountain top removal and what we're seeing here is The tops of the mountains Literally removed to make access to the coal seams and the tops of the mountains are then dumped into the valleys and this tends to be fairly disruptive for the watershed and Make for a fairly unhealthy water Let's look at the Aral Sea in 1984 Aral Sea was already somewhat Lower than than its original form. We see you know several hundred kilometers north to south And we can watch the main part of the Aral Sea now Pretty much dry up in this 32 year period. We also lost an entire fishing economy here Now most of the water going to the Aral Sea has been diverted into these Green agricultural areas to the south and to the east, but let's take a look at one of them. I'm going to zoom in to this particular spot and follow along the spot here as the agricultural area it spans So 1984 let's move forward 1997 or so It's pretty much doubled in size. So it's expanded out to the east Now as we move forward observe what happens That area can no longer be irrigated And it returns to dirt So what we're seeing in a sense is perhaps a peak green So an over extension of irrigation and then a retreat and what's interesting from what Randy was saying was We saw the effects of a system failure What we wanted to get out of the mines was material which we need for health equipment IT equipment We did that because we needed the material And we have a very high demand for that material. So this was done very quickly But when you saw the tailings down the river and the loss of the forest that wasn't intended That was a consequence much much further away when you look at the Aral Sea the farming was fundamental We need that for our food and the food of animals But the unintended consequence is that that irrigation was part of a system and something much further away was affected And so if you think of the economy as a system and you think of unintended Consequences one other element of that are materials leaking from the economy And when you look at the circular economy as an economic model, that's a system You see the system that the materials flow within be it a plastic or a piece of metal or a piece of IT equipment You build a system that will recover that and feed it back into the economy Which delivers more value if you just take plastics alone between 80 and 120 billion US dollars worth of plastics Are lost just by value of material every single year because we don't valorize them because they're not designed in a way That can be realized nor do we have the systems to do that as a benefit for the businesses that are involved the regions The cities because you're effectively designing out waste But also a benefit for the consumers because at the moment consumers pay tax when they buy a product They own all the materials in a product when they have it yet when it breaks They don't recover those materials and keep them and then they pay tax effectively through landfill tax in most cases when They throw that product away So we're going to look at energy and what you're seeing is that fires across the planet look different in different places And you see three interesting groups of fires one in North Dakota and two in Texas and these are now the the most prolific Oil fields on the planet. These are from hydraulic fracturing shale oil What we see is that when we take oil out of the ground in this way There's a lot of methane that comes out and in North Dakota in particular there really isn't the infrastructure to Use the methane to turn it into electricity or anything like that So almost all the methane that comes out of the ground is immediately flared into the atmosphere So if you look for every three Atoms of carbon that comes out of the ground in North Dakota To leave it in the form of crude oil and one is flared into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide So what I'd like to show now is renewable energy I'm going to turn on solar photovoltaics and wind power and we're going to look at that being installed across the United States We start to see a lot of the blue photovoltaic show up in California now. We're in 2010 And we're seeing a lot more in California. We see some on the east coast for solar We're starting to see a lot of wind in Texas Now let's move all the way to 2015 And we're seeing over half a million solar installations Now the majority of these are going to be small installations on top to people houses But some of them are utility scale as well. In fact, both the US and China have now provided about 1% of each of their Electricity from solar and still when you think of 1% versus 99% globally It seems like a drop in the ocean when you try and power the current system But when you look at the system as a whole from an energy perspective You start to see things differently rather than trying to just replace our current fossil fuel energy with renewables If you change the system, you're able to change threshold energy levels I think one of the opportunities for the emerging markets are that you can build a circular system straight away You don't have to speed up that linear system to create growth Actually, you can decouple that growth from resource constraints I think that's that's highly important when we're looking to have to find new new models of growth for the future