 So our format today is that we're going to hear keynotes from each of our four speakers that are on the stage that will lay the groundwork for the sessions that you'll be hearing over the course of the next couple of days. We'll hear from each of our speakers on some of the big ideas. So we'll hear from Tom Chi on sort of the physics of the task at hand and the sort of the climate impact opportunity that we need to realize so urgently. We'll hear from Eric on the data on where climate capital is flowing and some of the gaps and opportunities. We'll hear from Aparna on how we can think about adaptation and resilience beyond the emphasis on decarbonization and mitigation as well as how public and private sector capital can work in partnership. We'll conclude last but not least with Sean on the topic of the emerging solution set and how we can change our means of production to continue to grow with both abundance but also with sustainability in mind. So without further ado, let me introduce a little bit about each of our speakers to orient you. They all have really incredible backgrounds and represent a really important diversity of perspectives here in this ecosystem. So in proper order, so we're joined by Tom Chi here on the far right. Tom is the managing partner at At One Ventures, an investment firm focused on accelerating solutions that are net positive to nature. Tom's previously held roles ranging from astrophysics research to being a corporate executive to pioneering and rapid prototyping and innovation and incubation. And he previously served as the head of product experience and also as a founding member of Google X prior to building At One Ventures. I'm also joined here by Eric Burlow. So Eric is the CEO of Vibrant Data Labs, which is a social impact data science company building open source tools to accelerate and enhance the impact of the dollars flowing into climate solutions. He's really widely recognized for his research on ecological complexity. He actually has a fantastic TED talk that has gone by viral that I highly recommend that you check out and is really an expert in helping sort of find simplicity in the complexity that we all navigate. I'm also joined by Aparna. So Aparna is the deputy chief climate officer of the Development Finance Corporation. She's a climate adaptation and international development specialist. You know, prior to her leadership at DFC, she also served as the climate finance leader at Mercy Corps, and she's worked across public health and gender empowerment and advocacy in her career. And then finally, we're also joined by Sean O'Sullivan. And Sean is the founding GP of SOSV, a venture capital firm focused on improving human and planetary health and also enabling industrial independence. It's one of the world's most active investors in both life sciences as well as hardware technology and runs, you know, programs I think probably many of us are familiar with, Indie bio and hacks, which both, you know, accelerate early stage deep tech startups. So with that, I'm really pleased to welcome all of our esteemed speakers today and let's get the meat of it. So I'm pleased to pass it over to Tom to kick us off. All right, we're going to do this thing. Nice. So let's talk about the scale of the challenge that we actually need to go after. What you see on the screen here is kind of an accounting of most of what's happened, at least in terms of net greenhouse gas emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution. So if you look at the graph, if you look at the bar all the way on the left, that's basically the concentration in the atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution. Then we burned a bunch of coal, oil, gas. We made a bunch of cement and notably we did a lot of land use changes that all substantially contributed. And these are all these human activities that are on the left hand side. And if that was all that had happened, we would already be up at around 580 parts per million up in the atmosphere and it would already be kind of a fully unlivable planet, at least given the life on earth that is around recently. But luckily it wasn't just up to us over the last couple hundred years. The ecosystem has already responded quite a bit. So the oceans have absorbed almost 600 billion tons. The land has absorbed more than 600 billion tons. The remainder is still up in the atmosphere, driving climate destabilization. So over a trillion tons of carbon dioxide is up there that still need to up in the atmosphere. And even as we start to pay back the trillion tons that's in the atmosphere, then the atmosphere and the oceans are in kind of constant dialogue with each other and basically the 600 billion tons that went into the ocean will also need to be paid back as well. Right now the oceans kind of hold it on to all that extra carbon and it is driving the current oceans to be about 30% more acidic than before the Industrial Revolution. So it's it's already highly consequential. If we keep on putting stuff in the atmosphere, it will keep on both intensifying the destabilization of weather as well as will drive more acidification in the ocean. If you want to address these things, you kind of need to address all of it. You need to pay back the trillion tons in the atmosphere, plus the 0.6 trillion in the in the oceans. And unfortunately, that's kind of where things are right now. That is not the end state of what we will totally need to pay back because if you look at kind of this moment in history relative to all the nations of the world kind of coming together or not to be able to go meet some of these targets, then one can kind of look across, you know, just as a function of how optimistic or pessimistic you are, you can kind of look across these scenarios as as to how many additional trillions on top of the 1.6 trillion, we're going to need to do. Right. So if we if we end up in the scenario where we are 1.5 or two degrees sea hotter than, yes, then there's still in another trillion tons that we need to pay down. If we go beyond two degrees, then we might end up needing to pay back four or five trillion, which there is a point where it stops being totally plausible in any kind of reasonable amount of time to pay back that much. So you definitely don't want to be on the higher end of that stuff. I think paying back three would be really astronomical to pull off. And and it's valuable to take a couple steps back and think about this actual scale of things because, you know, in the absence of the full step back, I hear a lot of people kind of pushing for like megaton kind of solutions and sounds OK. I mean, you're just off by a factor of a million, though. So we kind of need a million of those. Right. So unless you happen to have a million of those million ton solutions, then we're not going to make it, which means that the things that we're going after definitely need to be kind of in this order of magnitude and we need to be thinking on the scale of trillions ultimately. Now, let's say you needed to pull down a trillion, then kind of putting on the physics hat for a second. Then one can understand this problem basically to be a mass transfer problem. So there's trillions of tons of stuff in the wrong place that needs to be in another place. And let's not take the highest scenario of the lowest scenario. Let's pick a in between scenario of needing to pay back roughly three trillion tons. Well, that ends up being about 40 billion tons that needs to be sequestered per year for the next 76 years in order to get to three trillion tons. And one way to go understand this problem is as a mass transfer problem where the mass needs to be collected through a specific collection aperture. Right. So imagine you have a aperture that you're collecting that mass through and 40 billion tons per year needs to come through it. That's the effectively the mass flux, which is the amount of mass that will come in through a specific time unit. Now, two different ways to get up to mass flux of that scale. One is to have a really huge aperture where you kind of pull in the the carbon dioxide little by little across a huge aperture. The other is to have a really small aperture and then just try to suck a huge amount of air through a small aperture. And we actually see this in the two major ways that we are trying to address this problem right now. We are largely calling them nature based solutions in that first category where people are restoring, you know, 50,000 hectares of forest, for example, or, you know, working on restoring extensive wetland or working on on trying to improve soil carbon, for example. And these are examples where the collection aperture is enormous. It might be, you know, 10,000 hectares, it could be 100,000 hectares, dependent project could be a million hectares. So very large collection surface. Luckily, that collection surface is largely powered by the sun. So photosynthesis and other natural processes largely powering the thing. Because the collection aperture so large, you don't actually need to pull in a huge amount of air through any given square meter in order to go make this work. It basically just works in natural air flow. And this is in comparison to a lot of stuff that we've been doing on the technical side. On the technical side, we have these direct air capture plants where costs $2 billion to make the plant. And metaphorically, it's very similar to try to suck all of that carbon through like a tiny soda straw. So if you look at the balance of plant for those plants, then there is a lot of energy that's spent just sucking a bunch of air through so that there's even the possibility of touching enough air to potentially capture enough carbon dioxide to make it interesting. Even then, the calculations actually don't pencil out particularly well for technical. But right now, like people are hot on this because people will pay a lot more for ton for technical. So I think either on the technical side, people are going to need to bring that down really substantially and then that might be able to get to interesting scale. Or we just need to sharpen up the way that we're doing the nature based side of things because it is probably the one Well, it is definitely the one that is physics advantage by, you know, a factor of a thousand or more. Now, why, you know, why nature based potentially work a bit quicker here is because, you know, of all the habitable land on the planet we already manage more than half of it for agriculture. So we're already actively touching these areas that could be really large collection apertures and slightly different ways of managing those areas from the agricultural perspective from the industrial perspective could lead to substantial sequestration on a very large collection surface and also do so in a way that's really in concert. Like if you if you look at this initial graph, most of what has been repairing the problem actually has been nature based sinks. So to the extent that we can go and put a bit more in these nature based But in a thoughtful way then fantastic. There's not a single project in the world that has done even 10 gigatons. So the idea that something's already pulled down 1.2 trillion, you know, tons on our behalf, it's worth paying attention to because we don't have anything that's even close to that that order of magnitude right now. All right, we have finished this up in two minutes. So this is where all the carbon in the entire planet is actually only a tiny bit is kind of moving around in the atmosphere and that's the stuff that's been destabilizing everything. So if you look at the zoom in of the zoom in of the zoom in, then you can see that 273 billion tons of carbon not co2 co2 heavier than carbon. So about 273 billion tons of carbon since 1750 and that little slice has been the displacement that has driven all of the climate destabilization so far. And this graph is just to show you that honestly, there's a lot of places to put the carbon, including things that natural systems have been handling quite well over time. And this is kind of gets into a little bit more detail of the kind of nudges that you would need to do to pay down a trillion. Of course, we're going to need to do that about two to three times depending on how much additional emissions we do from this point on. But this is once again to say that there actually is plenty of room inside of nature based sinks in order to go do this if you are collecting through the aperture in a skillful way. And man, there's a bunch more to say and I'll say in less than a minute. So animals have a huge amount of splay over these things. So just putting some beavers back, for example, can lead to massive sequestration over an area because beavers help to create the ecosystem would then manage a huge, you know, biomass of plants much larger than the biomass within the animals themselves. So just being in concert with some of our more than human can can help us quite a lot on this front beavers, whales, tapers, you know, a bunch of things, sea otters are all quite helpful for this type of thing. Oh, actually, I even have someone there nice. So we can work with all of those things. Oh, actually, this is a really fun one. So the Occidental plant is projected to cost like three to four billion dollars. They're going to break ground on it in 2024. Their claim to fame is that it's going to be 100 times more sequestration than all 19 direct air capture plants currently in existence combined. I calculated it'll do about as much sequestration as 200 beavers. So we're maybe investing wrong right now. And then lastly, this is one last point about this, like there's been a lot of push on the policy side to incentivize direct air capture. But the difference between the concentrated flue gas is coming from an ethanol plant called firepower plant or steel plant. The difference between, you know, the ethanol plant is when you grab it from the ethanol plant, the carbon dioxide is one part in one. Like literally everything you grab is going to be carbon dioxide. If you wait 20 seconds, now it's one part in 2500. Right. And the only difference is about 20 seconds. But we've written a lot of policy for the stuff when it's out there 20 seconds later, but almost no policy when it's really easy to capture. Turns out it's really easy to capture when it's one part in one. It's way harder once one part in 2500. You know, in a coal fire power plant, it's one part in four or a steel plant's one part in five. Once again, way easier capture, way less energy, way less money to go do it. But we've written all the policy for the direct air capture part of it and not for 20 seconds prior. That's crazy. Okay, I'm done. If you want to watch a big talk about it, you can watch that and Eric's going to do a thing. Hi everybody. Can you hear me? Okay, great. Are we next? No. Wait for the slides. Right. Actually, could you go to the start? Please. Okay. So I'm with Vibrant Data Labs. And I just want to, I've been tracking, we have been tracking the flow of money to climate. And as you all have probably heard, the investments in climate solutions has really grown dramatically. Over the past five years and trillions are going to be invested in the next decade. And my fear is that trillions will be wasted if we don't actually use data to guide those decisions strategically. The question is, you know, how do we maximize the impact of those dollars? And often when we think about impact, we think about the impact metrics of individual companies, you know, are they meeting their metrics? But the climate crisis is an all hands on deck problem. Nobody will solve it alone. And so we really need to think about how do we maximize our collective impact of all the different funding going to it. And I want to present to you a really simple framework for doing that that's rooted in ecological theory and it's evidence based. So our team, our team is mostly comprised of ecologists by training. So Tom was a physics guy here. I'm the ecology guy. And we've done work academically in marine systems, alpine ecosystems, endangered species, and also theoretical work on understanding nature as a complex system. So the good news is that on the other side of complexity, there's actually a really simple framework for thinking about how to collectively have high impact on a multi-causal problem, an ecosystem or problem like the climate crisis. So let's just have a really simple ecological example. Let's imagine we're in a community that's trying to grow a tree. And we know that that tree needs sun and water, nitrogen and phosphorus to grow. They're all essential limiting factors. If we thought about it in terms of individual impact, like impact metrics, we could invest in a really nice water company that has a good theory of change like water is essential for trees to grow. We water trees. We can measure that impact, how many trees have watered. But if all we did was water trees and there was nothing else, the tree would die. If there was everything else, there was sun and phosphorus as well, and sorry, nitrogen as well, but there was no phosphorus, then that tree will die. If any one of these things are missing, it dies. And so the idea, that's an ecological issue of limiting constraints. And so if we want to, if we're in a village and we want to grow a tree, everybody needs to know what it's getting and what it's not getting in order to know how best to contribute. So it's actually a pretty simple framework that the key is to mine the gap. And mining the gaps requires two simple pieces of information. One is identifying the critical needs and then following the money to them to find and fund what's missing. So that's just like the basic framework. Fortunately, in the climate realm, there's a lot of really great efforts out there that are defining the critical needs, rigorous science-based frameworks from one earth project drawdown, speed and scale, systems change lab. They differ in their details of it and what they might emphasize or in how they lump or split different categories, but they boil down to generally three main solution pillars to solve the climate crisis in one generation that it's actually doable if we do this. One is the energy transition, 100% transition to renewable energy and mobility that includes industry in here and efficiency. Protecting and restoring 50% of earth's terrestrial and coastal ecosystems and a global transition to net zero food and fiber production. And in many of these frameworks, this one included those will be broken down into more specific solution pathways. And also here, intersectional themes and levers of change like social justice and biodiversity. So you can think of these as these are the what needs to happen, what we need to address the crisis and then down at the bottom are the how we need to do it, how to get there. And this is essential because what it means is that explicitly in here we're saying that things like social justice are not just a moral thing to do, they're actually essential part of the solution. It's impossible to achieve 100% transition to renewable energy mobility without 100% access to those technologies. It's impossible to protect and restore 50% of earth without having that the livelihoods of those communities on the ground actually benefit and are improved by conserving the land that the forest is more valuable alive and dead. It's impossible to have a global transition to regenerative agriculture without empowering the smaller farmers that feed a third of the earth. So it's central to the solution, which means that if we do all this we win on climate and we solve the crisis of biodiversity and social inequity at the same time. So it's pretty exciting opportunity. So the needs of an identified climate we know what needs to be done. The next step is to follow the money to know who's funding what where and that's what we've been focused on. We've been building an open source framework to do that which we call the climate finance tracker. It's actually like a more framework for climate finance tracking and their public versions of this hosted on impactalpha.com the impact finance news platform. And just to give you a little tour of what it what it is we're tracking right now about $350 billion of private investments and philanthropic grants to about 9000 US based climate relevant companies and nonprofits. So this first version is US focused the green dots or companies for profit that the red dots nonprofit and to go from a pile of grants and investments to a map of who is funding what for every one of these entities. We compiled descriptions of their work from online sources and then use their own language to let them self organize into climate themes. So for example, renewable energy plant based diets or climate risk intelligence. So remember every dot here is a grantee or an investing recipient of funding and they get they self organize into groups based on similarities in their descriptions. So the key thing is we're tracking where the money is going not based on what the funders say they're doing but based on how the recipients of money on the ground describe their own work and then and so the topics come from from that language. And then the synthesis has some interesting unique features. So one is that it's the only data set that I know of this public that that includes the full spectrum of climate mitigation and climate adaptation solutions we cast a really broad net. It also synthesizes multiple types of capital here. We're now focusing on philanthropy as well as venture capital and then some debt non equity in there as well with a flexibility add a lot more. And so already everything can provide context for everything else. So we could see for example here's all the venture back companies that are that are non randomly concentrated on the left side which is mostly focused on tech and mostly mitigation tech. And then even within that because we have their full history of funding we can see there is about 20% of those venture back companies that have had at least one government grant in their funding history. So we can start to see what is the role of government subsidies in in this whole climate tech ecosystem even before the inflation reduction act. And it's actually a fair amount. I think you'd see 20% subsidy like that in an ad tech or something. So it's pretty remarkable. So again these topics the bubbles come from the language of the grantees and besties but they roughly self organize into those solution pillars I mentioned earlier the energy transition nature and fixing the food system. And so we could actually because we have the raw language of everybody describes their work we could explicitly map all the data to those pillars and summarize for example the total amount of venture and philanthropy going to the energy transition nature conservation and the food system. And and already we see right away that the really large growth in funding for climate has been driven largely by growth and renewable energy and mobility funding about 75% of the total funding in the map is that which is amazing. And also it's a problem because we will fail the ecosystem risk is like we will fail if we don't also solve for nature and food. So so there's a huge nature gap on less than 3% of the venture funding goes to nature 10% of the total funding. There is some interesting momentum in the agriculture space we know regenerative agriculture technology plant based food technology efficiencies for food waste that kind of thing. And and then if you look at what's interesting the philanthropy sector is more evenly spread across those different solution pathways that ventures like really concentrated energy. But the problem is that is the philanthropy is tiny it's it's just a order of magnitude less than than the venture and so we really love that are off if we can also stimulate private investment in those other solution areas. So what about those other intersectional themes like social equity which you mentioned earlier which is essential part another central need to meet these solutions. Well because we have the raw language of how everybody describes their work we can also highlight the fraction of each of these bars that goes to any entities any companies are nonprofits that explicitly mentioned in their own descriptions anything about social equity or justice like whether they address energy poverty or energy access or inclusion or low income communities. And right away we can see that there is a strong social equity gap across the the all of the climate tech areas where this gap I think is really conservative estimate because just because somebody mentions that doesn't mean they're successfully doing it but we see that throughout the climate tech space. And that gap has we have an opportunity to fill that gap with philanthropy. You can see that even for example in the energy space where if you look at the philanthropy for energy about 60% of that is going to entities that mentioned social equity terms like expanding access of energy independence to low income communities. So it's helping but again the absolute amounts are tiny and we really need to it'd be better if in the tech world we actually designed for everybody at the start rather than just designing for building products for the rich and hopefully that it gets to everybody later. So those are just some examples of how we're using the data to the simple examples to identify hampa gaps and opportunities. Minding the gaps requires two main things it just identifying the critical needs and we know what we need to do in climate and then following the money to them so that we can maximize collective impact by finding and funding that's missing. Thank you. Can you all hear me. Yes. Thank you. Great. Can I also request the AV team to reset the clock just to make sure I'm not overshooting or undershooting. Thank you. So I'm a partner of us that I'm the Deputy Chief Climate Officer at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. How many of you have heard of us. Wow. That's unexpected and very exciting. So I'll flip through then some of those summary slides more quickly. But for those of you that aren't aware we are the U.S. Governments Development Finance Institution. We were formerly known as OPIC the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and our mandate given by Congress is really to address the most pressing development challenges facing the world. And especially in the last two years three years since becoming the DFC from OPIC we've really had kind of a laser focus on development impact. So we partner with the private sector to address the most pressing challenges as I mentioned you can think of us as kind of a full suite bank in terms of the various products that we offer. And I think some of the most recent authorities that we've received which have been really important in the climate space are equity investments and technical assistance. I'll get into a few details about this in a minute. But just to kind of seen set the place that I'm coming from when I'm when I'm talking about the work that we do also to talk about scale. We have roughly 40 billion dollars in investments globally and our mandate is to focus on low and lower middle income countries around the world. So some of the work that we do can be in upper middle income countries but but generally speaking we're really focused on the high development impact high sustainable development potential in in our investments. So we invest across a wide range of sectors climate is just one of those pillars but being the deputy chief climate officer that is what you'll hear about today. Feel free to check out DFC dot gov if you want to learn about some of the other pillars. We have had some really really fantastic work happening in the health space gender equity ICT infrastructure and the like. But again as I mentioned I'll focus more on climate. So some of my panelists here have talked about sequestration and really mostly on the mitigation side of things and I'm really excited to dive in a little bit more on the adaptation side. In my introduction it was mentioned that I was also working at Mercy Corps and so even before DFC I've had a really strong interest in international development and really figuring out how when we're thinking about climate finance how can we make sure it's actually getting to those mostly. Equest in need because when we think about climate really mitigation is absolutely necessary to get to a low carbon economy and do that in a in a just way. But ultimately as we all know the impacts of the climate crisis are already here whether we're thinking about you know extreme weather events or or otherwise there's there's significant need to address kind of the impacts that are here already. So in terms of where DFC is at FY 22 we're really excited to say was our largest climate year yet and this current year is also actually poised to be even larger so we're really quite excited about that. And we've looked at kind of a pretty wide range of sectors including electric mobility food security and agriculture nature based solutions renewable energy supply chains and really again a really wide range. And when we're moving forward you know given kind of the mandate from the White House and from the interagency generally we're really looking at a few different tracks around scaling our existing portfolio given the track record that we have. 390 million dollars last 390 million dollars last year went towards projects in the adaptation space and we're really eager to make sure that that's a number that only grows moving forward. Diversification is another pillar in our climate portfolio where we're really eager to ensure that the sectors are looking beyond just renewable energy as critical as that is we're excited to continue our investments there but ensure that we're also looking at the other sectors. And then also looking at mobilization because ultimately no public budget no private budget alone is going to be enough and so really looking at how can our capital how can our peer institutions capitals and other DFI's other philanthropies potentially as well. How can our capital really be catalytic to engage the private sector to really mobilize as much financing as possible. So on the climate adaptation specifically this is a this is an area that has just so much need for investment if you look up kind of some of the statistics. The minimum that people are looking at is at least 300 billion dollars a year in terms of the annual investment need to ensure that people actually have resilient livelihoods resilient infrastructure and the like. And when you think about climate there's kind of two broad categories that you can think about it in terms of the climate related shocks which are kind of one off extreme events and then climate related stretches stresses excuse me so more prolonged slow onset events whether that's kind of maybe rising sea levels changes and weather patterns desertification etc. And so what you'll see here is is is is a slide that really kind of talks through some of the key impact areas in various sectors from food security physical infrastructure. I won't read off the slide here but I think you can kind of get a sense of in each of these sectors all of the various risks that we are facing and the particular vulnerabilities that exist for each of them. And so when you think about kind of the opportunities what we're what I've been really interested in doing for DFC is really laying out. Sure we have kind of pretty and pretty much an endless red list of risks but how can we really think about that in terms of opportunity and opportunity for the impacts that we can have with our capital. And so in this slide you'll see kind of by those sectors kind of the various opportunities in terms of access to types of financing various solutions various products and each of these pillars that can really be kind of deployed for greatest impact. And one thing I want to be really clear eyed about is that this is really really difficult adaptation financing is very very very difficult compared to the mitigation side it is not something that is easily monetizable. And so when you're thinking about investment models. You really have to get creative you have to think about things like guarantees you have to think about potentially looking at, for example political risk insurance that can really crowd in. Private sector capital to mobilize more and more. But when we think about kind of why this is so risky. I'll talk through some of that so one is really around risk. And that can mean a lot of different things but from my perspective I think what we're really thinking about when it comes to adaptation financing is the fact that most of these investments have to be pretty context specific. And therefore are much smaller ticket investments. And so get that inherently makes it riskier and also much more. Much less cost effective let's say good in the amount of kind of diligently that's required for maybe a small ticket investment versus a larger ticket investment for our investment teams to address that though. You know, as as mentioned here you'll see blended finance results based financing potentially to actually look at actually monetizing the adaptation co benefits and benefits and potentially guarantees and first loss positions from actors that are willing to have more subordinated capital. The next bucket of risks of why this really becomes kind of challenging is around lack of data and information. When we're talking about adaptation. In order for it to actually count as an adaptation investment, according to UNFCCC guidelines. There has to be clear justification of what the climate risk was before the investment and how is that risk actually reduced right how is that resilience actually increased and that requires pretty significant data collection and kind of a strong quantitative understanding prior to and post an investment. So again this is where technical assistance grants and other kind of community level data repositories can be really, really quite helpful to leverage. As I mentioned I talked to a little bit already about the scaling of small projects and how context specific things need to be, but that is really where financial intermediaries and funds can really play a very critical role in helping kind of deploy capital, deploying capital at scale. And this last one is really around when we're thinking about infrastructure investments or other investments that you may not immediately think of as adaptation. There's always ways to make sure that a that an investment actually has, you know, the most resilient approach possible. So to address, to really address this head on, we launched a dedicated climate push at COP 27 last year in Charmel shake to accelerate our climate adaptation investments. And actually, in my opinion, it hasn't accelerated enough. And so we are actually going back to the drawing board to really figure out how exactly we can do more and do it faster. We, as I mentioned that the particular sectors that that we're looking at is agriculture water built environment and health as was outlined. But if you know of this is my informal picture but if you know of businesses, especially funds and financial intermediaries in this space that are interested in support, please do talk to us please don't be shy. I'm here there's also other colleagues from DFC here. But with that I see that I am out time. I had lots of different examples but you can find those on dfc.gov slash climate. Thank you. Hello, hello. I'm Sean O'Sullivan and I'm waiting for my slides to come up. Yes, here they are. So SOSV. I don't know. Has anyone ever heard of SOSV out there? Several people hands raised. That's nice. Thank you. My saw some SOSV folks that's in count. All right. Well, actually we're the world's most active climate tech investor. We've been investing in climate tech since 2007. And we have over invested in over 200 companies. We host a climate tech summit. I don't you're all welcome to go to SOSV climate tech dot com to look at last month summit which was attended by 5000 folks. It's sort of split half and half between investors and and founders. And there's dozens of hours of great content on on that site, including Tom Chi who actually was a speaker at it and Bill Gates and I'll be back but the industry leading companies. So, you know, climate tech, you know, and climate, we've got a problem here and where does this problem come from I sometimes you have deniers and it's helpful when they understand that the historical nature of this right so 200 years ago, the fastest man had ever traveled was on the back of a galloping And then that was the industrial age that began with steam engines and powered by petrochemicals and the population of the planet went from 200 years ago a billion people to 2 billion people and just 100 years it had taken. It had taken 400 years or 500 years for it to double from 500 million to a billion and took only 100 years with when the industrial age came in because the abundance of what we could manufacture the and and the farming improvements, etc. But it only took 100 years for it to get from 200 from 2 billion in 1920s to 8 billion. I was born in 1964 that was the year it turned to 3 billion and throughout my life 3 billion 4 billion 5 billion 6 billion 7 billion 8 billion. So the, the, the nature of this is that before, you know, the industry, we didn't even consume all that much. We didn't have a climate problem. We didn't even have a climate problem 100 years ago. It's really the 25,000 pounds of manufactured products that are made per person per per year. It's 100 times or 200 times your body weight that you consume and manufactured and processed products by the 8 billion people. It's a little worse than that because only 1 billion people actually use 75% of the global resources, you know, in that the Western style of life is more consumptive. And that actually gets much, much worse in the next 25 years because the, it'll be not just 1 billion people over using our resources. It'll be 3 billion people, three and a half billion perhaps over using our resources. So we'll need at least three times the trees. If we do the, if we continue the way we're going, we'll need at least three times the cement, three times the air travel, three times the, the animals, the agricultural land. And as you saw, we're already using more than we can, you know, deal with in terms of the greenhouse gas emissions. We already know it's, it's going to get worse. So what do we have to do? We actually have to change the means of production. We can still live abundant lives. We can still, you know, have the 25,000 pounds of products, whether that's our textiles or the thousands of pounds of food we eat a year or the 7,000 pounds of fuel that we use, petrochemicals to get us around, etc. We can still have all that abundance if we produce that abundance in a efficient way. And that's what we're working on. As Tom Chi mentioned, there is no direct air capture is a farce. It is absolutely this huge facility which you could probably park a thousand cars in. If it was a parking garage actually only takes out the amount of carbon dioxide of 850 cars a year. So that it's, it's not a, there's no easy answer currently for just sucking the carbon out of the atmosphere in a unless you suck it out in a very concentrated way, rather than out of the air itself. So what do we have to do instead? We have to produce less greenhouse gases in how we produce things. And that applies to our food that applies to our cement that applies to our fertilizers, etc. So SOSV has been backing actually hundreds of companies in reinventing our means of production. We are very heavy in the food area, but we also are in the energy area, transport area of building systems and manufacturing sectors. So just to look at this, you know, and take a step back. I love the quote from Buckminster Fuller, you never change things by fighting the existing reality to really change something you have to build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. And I've done this actually a few times in my own life. You know, I created a company map info right out of college, and we put street maps onto computers. And so if you've ever typed an address into a computer and seen a street map like to get here today, that's, that's what we, you know, became a couple hundred million people with a public company back in 1993, even before the internet. So the that was a way of changing things by fighting, not by fighting the existing reality, but creating a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. I also coined in 1996, the term cloud computing that with George Favoloro, that's a new way of creating a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. We have to do that with food. We have to do that with energy. We have to do that with with transportation. And we talk about animals a lot because animals are actually a huge challenge in in that, you know, even 75% of the agricultural land is just going to feed the the animals to produce the products that we consume. So it's not just the methane they produce is also how we how we use our lands. So there are ways around this. We've got companies like NACO hundreds, 100 million plus revenue company growing very rapidly. It's just using plant based proteins to produce milk, which is a replacement milk that actually can be used in baking formulas, etc. It's great company. They also produce meat. You've got companies like Perfect Day, which actually use a completely different technology, taking the genes from a cow, but growing that those genes in bioreactors, so that you can be 30 times more efficient than in terms of greenhouse gas production in terms of water consumption, etc. Then actually using a cow to produce milk or using a cow to produce meat. So this is a crazy idea when we started backing these type of companies. I call to mind a quote from Mahatma Gandhi. At first, they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they attack you, and then you win. Some people may think that that's a reference to my spouse, but it's actually not. And actually, most of the times you don't even win. Most of the times you just get ignored, ridiculed and attacked, but sometimes you do win. And we have companies like Upside Foods, which maybe you've read about in the press, etc. First approved by the FDA is now in restaurants, growing meat, not only meat without animals, but meat without slaughter is their slogan. Finless foods producing fish without fish, every producing without chickens, producing egg whites and proteins. And actually you may not know this, the most carbon consumptive food that you can possibly eat per pound is shrimp. It's not just because of how shrimp is grown, but it's transported around the world, etc., and cold storage and all of that. We also do things in the energy sector. These are also companies that are important for grid level storage. Volt storage just received a 50 million euro contract. Renewal is a way of taking the two and a half million oil wells in the United States and actually using them as gravity wells for the storage of solar energy and wind energy. You can take the size of ships. The biggest expense the ship has is the 10, 5, 10, 15 million, 20 million in annual fuel costs. You can save millions of dollars per ship in cargo transport by scraping off the biomass with these rumbas that go around. And you're probably familiar with the issue of petrochemicals that we strap to our baby's bottoms. These petrochemical-based diapers will last for 400 years in your landfills, but these bio-based microbial process for producing the chemicals will actually degrade in only 90 days. So these are just different examples, making leather without cows, making concrete, which is absorptive of carbon and carbon stores, rather than actually producing carbon, that we help with our programs. We have programs IndieBio, which where we have our labs that we've set up around in different parts of the world, like in San Francisco here and in New York, where we work with the scientists to produce these technologies and hacks, where we have facilities here in New York, New Jersey, our global hub, as well as in Shenzhen and Tokyo and in other parts of the world. So, to wrap it all up, there's a lot of scientists, a lot of, you know, there's over 10,000 workers at all the various companies that SOSB has backed. We have a lot of faith in the depth efforts that they are making to change the means of production. But even though we don't know now how long it's going to take or how far each one of these companies is going to have to travel before they make the multiple gigatron style solutions, we take heart with the Martin Luther King expression of take the first step, face is taking the first step, even when you don't see the whole staircase. So, we hope that all of you are journeying along with us and with all the other venture investors here and making these steps forward. Thank you. Well, thank you, everybody. I hope everybody enjoyed those. There was sort of a nice build there from the what we need to do, the how much we need to do it, the how we work together on scaling and then a lot of the innovations that are coming down the pike. We have a couple of minutes now to have a bit of a live discussion about some of the themes that you all just raised. And then I'll also have an opportunity to take audience questions at some point. So, I want to start a bit on a positive beat. I think, obviously from Eric's discussion, I think we recognize that the gaps are vast, but at the same time, in point of fact, we've seen a lot of positive momentum in the last couple of years of proliferation of new climate funds, so much more investable opportunity, really positive policy tailwinds. And so I think the question I have for for each of you, and maybe I'll call on you Sean to start just given sort of where you landed us is, what is unique about this moment that makes climate more investable than it's ever been before across asset classes and cross sectors I think there's something unique now that we're seeing so much momentum. And what do you think that is, well I think people originally thought about climate tech 1.0, they were really talking about the energy transition, they were really talking about, you know, ethanol based energy projects and things like that, which was not at all what climate tech is today it's a very different market addressing many more reachable targets at a much lower really much lower costs of infrastructure to start to see solutions. I think they're much more practical solutions than the some of the mega projects that people were trying to achieve before which were unfundable by venture and unachievable for entrepreneurs to make a big difference on. Now I think it's more within reach. I also would say that, you know, it's on the nightly news every night you see about, you know, it's not that it's not the environment of 10 years ago or 15 years ago or even five years ago, in terms of the climate situations that we're, we're all dealing with and we are all very familiar with the floods in the subways, etc. You know, so what I think is also hugely different is that has permeated to the actual corporates and, you know, actually wanting to make the change before it was a lot about denial and finger pointing as the other folks. There's an incredible corporate engagement to actually try and a sense of responsibility by more and more large corporate some of the, even the oil producers and things like that, you know, I'm not, I'm not giving them a clean bill of health but, you know, they are actually trying to change their production and trying to create new, new futures and new, new solutions. So I say it's across the board, it's a different, it's a different world out there. And obviously there's much more is 400 climate funds today there was never more than probably four or five, you know, 10, 10 or six years, 10 or 20 years ago. So those are big mega differences I'd say. Absolutely. Anything anyone anything else anyone wants to add to that. Yeah, I could just add I think the, the potential for just economic returns has become so clear, not just to kind of maybe some of the more fringe forward leaning impact minded investors but when you look at kind of the cost of solar and wind compared to other forms of energy to innovation in the food sector. I mean, electric mobility name it pretty much every single sector there is some money to be made. And along with that then there's also potential for job creation. We work a lot with developing country governments around the world and really think about kind of how they're, how they are establishing, you know, more enabling regulatory environments like the the time is ripe now here, but also around the world, which is just incredible. Yeah, just to kind of piggyback on that it seems like we've gone past like the world of people debating whether there's the changes are happening or not it doesn't matter it's just happening and and that they're We're finally debating the how. It's all about the how it's all about the how and the how has this optimism around it that it's actually a better world, you know, like it's not just pure sacrifice behavior change that it's actually better and even if you look at just the conflict between wealthy and, you know, less wealthy nations that that it's about low carbon development that that that if if if if those countries don't develop and improve the economic standards at the same time as they leapfrog into a new economy they'll be left behind so it actually is the better world to go renewable rather than, you know, the old way so I feel like there's a certain optimism around it too, which is really interesting. Yeah, this next 10 years we're deciding whether it's going to cost us 10 trillion to go deal with everything or quadrillion dollars. And I think when it gets up in the quadrillion range we will just give up, like there'll be a point where it's like it's just too expensive. So I think this is a very consequential decade in that there's a range where we just don't act enough and it'll just be too expensive we will just live with the misery of it. There's this big decision point right now because we're going to put a bunch of money in right and if you think about the heat dome like two years ago like melted a bunch of Portland, Oregon's infrastructure in two days. Right, it's going to cost us billions to replace that we can either spend billions to make exactly what was there in the first place, or we can spend billions in order to upgrade everything. And right now, you know, that's the main decision point like we do we want to spend the billions to actually get ahead and create the infrastructure we want. Or do you want to spend the billions just waiting for everything to fall apart and roughly put it back to what it was which will again fall apart in this new kind of destabilized climate regime. Yeah, no, no, no, absolutely. Well, I think one thing that emerged for me as I reflect on your presentations is obviously the diversity of solutions that we must scale and obviously we must take an all of the above approach here but I know we have a mix of folks in the audience allocators managers, there's sort of this challenge with climate between prioritizing things that we can do in this decade versus seeding the innovations we need for the longer term. And there's also this balance obviously about decarbonization mitigation and also investing towards results and adaptation. You all either have taken a macro approach or sort of, you know, approaching it from different angles, how would you can also turn to this side first and how would you counsel folks in the audience whether they be investors allocators to think about how to to prioritize between these different buckets of solutions that ultimately we do, we do all need to scale. I think we should think about it like a relay race, the amount of time it'll take for the ice caps to refreeze or well over a generation. So like minimum bar for the planet to return to the help that we got it when we were born is at least a generation beyond our generation by expected to be two or three. And that's if we act really fast so that's already like an orientation shift that we should expect that we're working on this for 80 to 100 years. And we got to work on some things right now because the cost of it over the next 80 to 100 years could be easily within band or could be wildly out of band right so every decision that we make right now is a high leverage decision on what happens in the future. And we can't waste any of that time. Yeah, no, and I think like Jonathan Foley says it well with about the time value of carbon where we're now is, you know, is is better than new, you know, so like whatever, like we got to do it. Things that are they're easy to work that that's not necessarily new tech but tech that already exists. And I feel like there's also this perspective that there is this revolution happening, you know, like it's like we had the industrial revolution we had the information age all the rest. But this is different because this is actually those are things that just happen like the internet happened you better get on board we're doing it how can I make money on it whatever. But this is like we're intentionally engineering a whole, you know, reinventing a whole new economy and it requires, you know, with multi generational perspective and I think it just requires thinking really systemically about it in some way. But um, but yeah, that's what's hard. It's a revolution but it's there's other ones were evolution that that things just changed and then we got on board with it. And then all of a sudden there was a shift but this is an intentional rewiring of everything. I think to that the opportunity is that everyone can be involved in the solutions because it doesn't matter if you're a farmer there's many many different technologies you could be applying to be less carbon generative in your farming, or even just, you know, creating fertilizer, you know, from the methane emissions of your cows, for example, there's just those of technologies that are coming out. They can actually, whether you're a farmer, whether you're an oil producer or energy producer or whether you are, I mean, even a consumer right. I mean a lot of us think okay, let me buy an electric car, and that'll take care of the problem. Actually, buying an electric car only solves 2% of your footprint. You know, it's, it's, it's, if you if you stop eating animal produced proteins. It actually drops your carbon emissions by 20% 10 times more than buying an electric car. Now if we have clean energy infrastructure, then we actually will be 4% by buying an electric car. So you could wait for that to happen or you can do something today. You know, so so I think there's lots of things that individuals can do, as well as societies can do to to move towards a more plant based and a healthier based diet, as well as all the other things. So I'm concentrating on food here just because everyone relates to food, but it also relates to all industrial processes and that's why corporates are super. I mean, people don't realize that just the distillation process this separation and purification process that is used in whether it's vegetable oils or farmer projects or pharmaceutical or oil and gas companies separating into different types of fuels or plastics or whatever. That's 18% of the United States energies of electricity supply, 18%, nobody thinks about that. But you can actually make changes in that by using different technologies and substituting and dropping the energy is by 90% in all those different industries. So like, there's things everyone can do now and we're, we're seeing that these, the everyone's thinking about it everyone's coming to be involved to try to activate these solutions. Just add one thing from the adaptation and resilience side of things. When, especially when you're thinking about kind of the prioritization and timescale of investments. Disaster risk reduction and investments in, for example, early warning systems or anticipatory financing that can really get people the medical supplies or kind of the information to be able to either take risk reduction or leave certain areas before a storm might be hitting or kind of all sorts. I mean, disastrous reduction really is kind of a really broad term. Those investments, the return on them are depending on who you listen to anywhere from four to 12x in the in the returns, not to mention of course the resilience and livelihoods impacts directly on people. So the investments and kind of urgency of that and kind of ease, given that we know this information, I think is just really makes it a no brainer. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think what I'm hearing is again, we do have to take on all the approach but many of the near term solutions which are scalable today, whether they be nature based adaptation or otherwise are things that also are incredibly commercial with really, you know, a wide stack of benefits. I know you've just a few minutes left I have certainly infinite questions, just want to quickly check if there's someone. All right, I'm getting no audience questions at this time but I'm sure you know our speakers will be around the conference so you can certainly come find them if you have any further follow ups. So with two and a half minutes left on the clock so I'd love to ask each of you obviously the the sort of set of conversations routine up is, how do we you know continue to unlock further capital for climate solutions and so the question I have for each of you is, sort of if you could wave a magic wand, what would you like to see whether that be, I don't know, further deal flow or further innovation is based or more enabling policy or better data and information to to unlock further capital because again, I mean, as we've made progress, we have to recognize we still need to triple or quadruple the overall volumes. Happy to take anyone to start. Well, I will say we're in a super tough time right now in the venture capital industry, funding is down 6080% from just the last couple of years. So this is, you know, a horrible time for the funding to be slower now it's less slow in climate climate is still accelerating. So that's good. But it's, it is not, you know, the the heyday times of a couple of years ago or even five or 10 years ago, like it's, it's really, really, really tough right now for people to raise funds. So, I don't know the answer to that other than weighted out because these things are all cyclical generally it's about a year and a half or two years. We're in that trough right now, which makes it a good time to invest it's a good vintage, you know, to be investing in funds. You know, it's, it's hard because some companies are dying on the vine because there's, there is a lack of capital right today in the VC market this year. I think it's been clearing up in the last couple of months, but still it's slow. Yeah, no, it's very fair. I think, of course, seeing more and more financing to adaptation and resilience would be a great thing but if I had a magic wand actually what I would try to point to that is just the, the fossil fuel industry. It's kind of the, the, not only the emissions that have happened already, but especially when you look at emerging markets right now, the arguments of kind of carbon intensive fuels being quote necessary for kind of a transition or needed for baseload, that is, that is just not true. For example, if you look at Kenya, their national grid is over 93% renewables. We've supported actually one of their geothermal facilities in the great in the Great Rift Valley that provides that baseload. There's all sorts of investments happening in this space including utility scale battery storage. And so I think the rhetoric around fossil fuel really being required for the transition. That's what I would try to point to that and really try to help people recognize that we can actually have a just transition without leaning on, you know, what's really created this problem in the first place. Yeah, yeah, it sounds like sort of resilience from the venture capital community as well as from the underlying companies and then also sort of, you know, expanding the narratives of what we understand. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it also seems to me like it just, we just need better coordination, just like system wide of all how the money's flowing so that it can be more efficient if there's, if we're in hard times, we can use it more efficiently. There's groups like Climate Care Senior or Climate Kick where they're leading a climate collaborative, there's lessons to be shared and learned like we can't waste time doing something that somebody else already figured out and make sure that there's ways to coordinate across the field so that we're more collectively impactful. And that means, you know, one plus one is 11, not two. Right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we're making it way too complicated. Like, we actually got rid of a couple of very big environmental damaging sources like pretty recently so CFCs, lead and gasoline, DDT, we wiped out all those things in less than a decade. Right. And the principle is really straightforward. It's called polluter pace. And then there's like a timeline where it just gets more expensive as the timeline goes on. You could do that same thing with fossil fuels. You know, make it a longer timeline if you need to. Right. Like with CFCs, we did it in eight years. You know, if, if we got to do it with fossil fuels over 30 years, then great, over 30 years, but have something where it's just directly polluter pace, not a bunch of like credits that get exchanged and can be obfuscated and all this complexity. This is way too complicated. We wiped out lead and gasoline DDT and CFCs, you know, that we're destroying the ozone very recently. These are all things that worked in modern, modern policy regimes. And the reason that we're not doing it right now is we're inviting oil and gas companies to write most of the policy. So they're never going to write it that way.