 Above 2,400 meters, the ground in the Fluella pass area is partially permeated with permafrost. The ice in these ravines has a thickness of 10 meters. In the rocks, it only fills tight gaps. Due to climate change, permafrost reaches critical temperatures. The thawing underground loses its stability. Rockfalls are more likely. There's a rising risk of damage to humans and infrastructure. In higher and cooler Davos, the pollen season occurs later and less intensive than in the lowlands. But since the 80s, grasses and broadleaf trees bloom earlier and they become more significant as allergy activators. Climate change will heighten the pollen effects and together with air pollution will increasingly affect the health of sensitive persons. To stop climate change, we must reduce CO2 emissions. Renovating badly insulated buildings and replacing fuel oil heating with renewables like wood, geothermal and solar energy greatly reduces emissions. We may heat less in the future, but we tend to compensate with additional energy consumption, to heat always bigger apartments and also to cool them in the future. In Davos, climate change is palpable. Davos must act sustainably now so that the economy, society and nature can successfully adapt to the new conditions. Ladies and gentlemen, we're keeping the lights down because I'm going to go straight into the slideshow, but I would like to say in the dark welcome to all of you. It is a great honor to address the community of Davos. I've been here many times for the World Economic Forum, but this is a special occasion for me because so many community members are here. I want to compliment the municipality of Davos on this very effective film on the impact of climate change on Davos itself. I want to say in preface to this slideshow, it's very brief, about 15 minutes, but it is designed to connect climate change to the economic discussion underway at the World Economic Forum and then to segue into the essence of the climate crisis and even more importantly the solutions to the climate crisis. So I'll begin as I always do with the blue marble, the most famous picture of the earth taken by Apollo 17 just to set the context. And in talking about the solutions that come in our economic system, I've come to believe that the world is now in the early stages of a sustainability revolution that represents the largest investment opportunity in history. And to put it in context, we've had these great revolutions, the agricultural revolution which produced cities and began the stunning population growth, which is a factor underlying all of this discussion. And then of course the industrial revolution which transformed a business around the world and continued in different phases. The first industrial revolution was based on water and steam power and then the second was based on electricity and mass production. The third industrial revolution is also known as the digital revolution which has taken on a significance all its own and has been very rapid. The fourth industrial revolution, a phrase that has been made current by Professor Klaus Schwab, the innovator of the World Economic Forum, the originator of stakeholder theory. Part of the fourth industrial revolution is the sustainability revolution which has the magnitude of the industrial revolution but the speed of the digital revolution. And it's based on the internet of things and artificial intelligence and it gives businesses the ability to manage electrons and atoms and molecules with the same precision that the IT companies have demonstrated in managing bits of information. And it is leading to extraordinary levels of high efficiency, reductions in energy consumption, use of materials and waste, and it's a very exciting prospect. But it poses the question of how we can navigate this incredibly fast-folding, unfolding sustainability revolution. To start with, for 150 years we have been operating on the assumption that the Earth's natural systems have a limitless capacity for self-renewal. But we now see that's not true because the way we define growth and pursue growth, we now see that assumption as false. And as a result we have been making decisions on a basis that has us partially blind to the full consequences of the economic and societal decisions we're making. Now if you think about what it means to have limited vision, forgive me if I use a metaphor, the electromagnetic spectrum, which runs from the long radio waves to the short gamma rays. The portion of that spectrum we can see with our eyes is only 0.1% of the spectrum. For eight years in the White House I started every morning with a long briefing from the intelligence community, which collects information, as you may have read, from the entire spectrum. And the picture presented was much more complete. So what about the value spectrum that businesses confront? Right now the value spectrum is limited to short term incentive structures and compensation systems and numbers that businesses focus on, but it's only a portion of the value spectrum. What's left out? What's left out are negative externalities, the most famous of which is pollution, and that's one of the big problems here. We don't measure it, it doesn't count, it doesn't register as having value. Positive externalities, if a city invests in education or mental health care, it's counted as an expense, but the benefits that come rolling back in the years following are not registered as income. Also the depletion of natural resources like groundwater and topsoil, and significantly the distribution of incomes and wealth, which as we have seen in this technological age, is driving levels of inequality that have fueled this populist authoritarianism wave that is manifested not only in someone who is over in the Congress Center, but also in several other countries around the world because people are unhappy that middle income wages have not really increased in much of the world. Switzerland is doing very well, but some countries like the United States say we're doing great even though 90% of the extra income is going to the top 1%. So how can we look at the other parts of the value spectrum? We need to take into account the effect of our decisions on the environment, the effect on employees and their families, the effect on communities, the effect on supply chains and distant communities and employees, the ethics and culture of businesses, and how we can measure the emergence of inequality. If we do not do these things, businesses may lose their so-called license to operate. The CEO of BlackRock, the largest investor in the world, $5 trillion under management, said this past week and repeated this week in Davos that he feels businesses are in danger of losing their license to operate. And even capitalism itself is being questioned by some, particularly left of a center, and I'm a believer in capitalism, but I think it needs to be reformed. So if we ignore the full spectrum of value, we create problems. And now it has reached a stage where we have created a collision between our civilization as it's presently organized and the ecological system of the earth upon which the flourishing of human civilization depends. In order to secure our future, we now have to ask three questions. Must we change? Can we change? And will we change? First of all, must we change? To start with, the most vulnerable part of the earth's ecological system is the climate. And the reason is demonstrated by this picture from the space station that shows that the sky is different from the impression we get when we stand outside on a sunny day and look up and see a vast and limitless sky. It's actually a very narrow, thin shell around the planet. The volume of air is astonishingly small compared to what we think. And we are now filling it up by spewing 110 million tons of man-made global warming pollution into that shell of atmosphere every 24 hours, as if it is an open sewer. This is what we're using as an open sewer today. And the accumulated amount of man-made global warming pollution now traps as much extra heat as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours. It's a big planet, but that is an enormous amount of energy. And it comes, the CO2 and other greenhouse gas pollution comes from transportation, it comes from agriculture, which is an important source, the melting of, the thawing of the permafrost, the forest burning, etc. But the biggest source by far is our reliance on fossil fuels. And after World War II, you can see that the amounts began to accumulate rapidly and quite dramatically. So, that's increased global temperatures. And the pattern is pretty unmistakable. It's hard to argue with this. In fact, 17 of the 18 hottest years ever measured with instruments since the 1880s have been, since 2001, the four hottest years ever measured have been the last four years. So, this has health consequences for people, animals, plants, and ecosystems. But when you look at a global picture, the ocean covers 71% of the Earth's surface and 93% of all that extra heat energy is going into the oceans. And as a result, ocean temperatures have been rising dramatically. And as you can see, the extra heat is now going down below 2,000 meters. And we are heating up the ocean so much, and half of this increase has come in the last 20 years. And this has dramatic consequences for the water cycle and for the ecological system of the Earth. For example, warmer oceans make the ocean-based storms much stronger. Hurricane Harvey a few months ago passed over ocean waters that were four degrees Celsius higher than normal. And in the past, the hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, as they got closer to shore, they would churn up cold water from the bottom, which would short-circuit the energy of the storms. But in this case, it went all the way down to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. So it was the first storm that got stronger as it approached the shore of Texas. Parts of Texas got one-and-a-half meters of rain in only five days, by far the biggest rain downpour in the history of the United States. And by the way, the same week, one-third of Bangladesh was underwater. That wasn't covered in the news media because they got a huge extra increment of downpour from the monsoons. I mentioned the hydrological cycle. It starts with the evaporation of water vapor off the oceans. It falls as rain and snow when it comes over land, and then it rushes back to the sea. And now we get these atmospheric rivers, or flying rivers, as some scientists call them. Here's one. It starts in Hawaii on the lower left. 2,300 kilometers away is Silicon Valley in California. The day this satellite picture was taken, this is what was going on in Silicon Valley. These atmospheric rivers are very much more common now and much larger, and they're producing what are called rain bombs with huge downpours in a very short period of time. This phenomena is now happening all over the world with great frequency. Just a few weeks ago, a couple of months ago in Argentina, they got one-and-a-half meters of hail in 15 minutes. And these people were trapped in their cars, and some of them had to receive urgent medical care when they got to them to rescue them. Floods, I could show you literally thousands of these pictures. Last summer in Guanzu, 524 millimeters in 24 hours, this is the kind of thing that is happening. Just two weeks ago in California, a huge mudslide. In Sierra Leone, Africa, earlier this year, 500 people were killed in a mudslide. This too is becoming much more common. But the same extra heat that is disrupting the water cycle by increasing the evaporation off the oceans is also pulling the moisture out of the first several centimeters of the topsoil and making the droughts much deeper and longer and more commonplace. As a result, we see extraordinary drought tragedies around the world. The western Cape of Africa is an example right now. And incidentally, the city of Cape Town unfortunately is predicted to become the first major city in the world to completely run out of water 77 days from today. There are many places where the consumption of water, the evaporation of water, and the overuse of groundwater is now leading to a water scarcity crisis in many parts of the world. Hotter years also dry out the vegetation and lead to much bigger wildfires. This was one last fall in the state of Washington. And as you can see, these guys don't necessarily believe in the climate crisis. This is business as usual. There was this cartoon series where I don't know if you've seen the character around fires and he says, this is fine. But this cannot be allowed to become the new normal. This was the largest fire in the history of California just last month. This year was by far the worst fire year in the history of California and many other states. Portugal in both in July and then again in October had massive fires. The Iberian Peninsula is one of those areas that is in the ground zero of the drought making atmospheric currents that are now being created by the climate crisis. The reinsurance companies have told us they measure these events very regularly and actually this past year we had $320 billion US in losses. I think that's been tweaked up to $330 billion dollars now. These climate related extreme weather events are really causing tremendous damage. And of course Connie Steffen will be part of this panel, the great Swiss glaciologist. I went to Greenland with him. This is a glacier in Greenland and what it looks like now. NASA has measured the persistent loss of ice mass in Greenland. The same thing is happening in the much larger ice mass of Antarctica and these two together are now combining to vastly accelerate sea level rise in many parts of the world. The top 10 cities at risk are Calcutta, Mumbai, Dhaka, Guangzhou. The top 10 cities at risk by assets. Number one is Miami, then Guangzhou, New York. I was in Miami during a high tide. There was no rain. This was just a high tide and it came up through the storm sewers. And this now regularly happens in many cities around the world. So many security agencies around the world including the US Department of Defense have long been warning that this is a national security crisis and that it can cause food shortages, water shortages, pandemic disease, refugees. Where food is concerned, the impact of heat stress on crops is now much more significant than scientists thought just a decade ago. Crop yields are declining because of heat stress and then you layer drought on top of that. It is a serious issue. Right now in the Horn of Africa, one of the worst droughts in years, the United Nations has warned us again this month that we are facing potentially the worst humanitarian crisis since 1945, 23 million people at risk of starvation. This is also contributing to refugees, climate refugees. In Syria where these people originated, there was a drought from 2006 to 2010 that was the worst in the 900 years of record keeping in the eastern Mediterranean. 60% of the farms were destroyed, 80% of the livestock killed. It drove one and a half million refugees into the cities of Syria. This was long before the Civil War started. They collided with other refugees from the Iraq war and WikiLeaks released the internal dialogue where the ministers were saying, all hell is going to break loose. We can't deal with this and the Civil War broke out soon thereafter. This has political consequences, not only in the region where the refugees are distressed, but in the places where they arrive. Brexit had many causes, but the most powerful advertisement of the pro-Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom was this big billboard saying, breaking point, the EU has failed us all, and it shows an endless line of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Scientists are now predicting as many as 1 billion climate refugees in the balance of this century. Some areas of the Middle East and North Africa are predicted by the Max Planck Institute to become uninhabitable because of the rising heat conditions. So it's also a medical emergency and I can talk about heat stress and you heard about the pollen counts. There are many aspects of it, including the spread of tropical diseases to areas that have not experienced them in the past. Air travel has a lot to do with this, but the conditions where these diseases take root and become endemic are changing. It's causing an extinction crisis. And the destruction of forests, which is a big part of this whole issue and the conversion of land for agriculture, is contributing along with climate to the sixth grade extinction. We could lose half of all land-based species on our watch, and biologists say that's the worst of this. But when you add up all these costs, I haven't even talked about ocean acidification or some of these others, but the cost includes, according to the World Economic Forum for the fourth year in a row, it has said the climate crisis is the number one threat to the global economy. So in response, some investors are changing. I was on a panel this morning with a large European insurance company that announced they're divesting from all coal stocks and they're no longer insuring fossil fuel plants. The largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, the Norwegian fund, which was fully funded by oil and gas from the North Sea, just announced that it is going to fully divest from all oil and gas. We are facing the prospect of a subprime carbon bubble with stranded assets worth $22 trillion. And yet still governments around the world are forcing their taxpayers to subsidize fossil fuels at a rate 38 times larger than the meager subsidies for renewable energy. So must we change? Yeah, we really have to change. But equally important, can we change? If we have to change and we can't, that's a formula for depression and anxiety. But luckily we have the solutions at hand. Just look at the predictions 18 years ago for wind by 2010 30 gigawatts. The reality is we beat that prediction by 18 times over. There is an exponential curve in the deployment of wind energy. It could supply 40 times all the energy we need just from wind. Solar is even more dramatic. 16 years ago the best projections were by 2010 the world would be able to add 1 gigawatt per year. When 2010 came around we beat that goal 17 times over. Last year we beat that goal 98 times over. This exponential curve is even faster and steeper. It is really a dramatic transformation and very exciting. And it's driven in part by the fact that the cost is coming down so rapidly. It's like computer chips and mobile phones and flat screen TVs. It's incredibly exciting. So now we're getting solar panels on the roofs of grass huts in areas that never had any kind of electricity in the past. Look at the nation of Chile. 11 megawatts, 402, 1600. Look at what they have under construction and plan for construction to begin now. This is a dramatic success story and it's being repeated in many other regions around the world. This is taking off 15.3 gigawatts. I could show you Algeria, Ethiopia, India. This is a revolution in progress. And every hour we get more energy from the sun than the entire global economy uses for a full year. It is quite dramatic. Battery prices are coming down. When we can store the sun's energy and use it at night and store the wind's energy when the wind's not blowing, it's a game changer. And that is now happening. Look at all this increase in battery storage capacity up through 2016. But look at the projections forward. This is a revolution in energy. It is going to displace fossil fuels, but we have to do it faster. Can we do it? You bet. The world's largest lithium ion battery has just been installed in South Australia. It's working magnificently. They're building 10 more. This is a technical term, but this is basically the cost to produce energy. Already, solar and wind is much cheaper than coal or gas, much less nuclear. Now, Kentucky is one of the big coal-producing states in the United States. And they have a famous Kentucky coal mining museum. They just recently made a decision to put solar panels on their roof, and they're planning to save $8,000 to $10,000 a year. Solar electricity is cheaper if the coal mining museum is demonstrating it along with the history of coal. Pretty good indication. In the U.S., solar jobs are growing 17 times faster than all other jobs in the economy. These single fastest growing employment opportunities are in renewable energy. This is number one. Wind turbine technician is number two. Auto manufacturers are moving quickly to electric vehicles, virtually every company in the entire world. The biggest in the U.S. has just said the future is all electric. Many countries are requiring by law the complete phase out of diesel and petrol gasoline engines. India, within only 12 years, is requiring that all new cars and trucks be electric. I wish the United States was moving that quickly, and this is a movement that is spreading around the world. So, can we change? Yes, we can change. So, most importantly, will we change? Well, thanks to Christiana Figueras, the Paris Agreement signed up every nation in the entire world to go to net zero by mid-century. And I know what you're thinking, but remember, the U.S. cannot legally withdraw from Paris until the first day after the next presidential election. By the way, if we have a new, yes, thank you very much, and if we have a new president, excuse me for a moment, then a new president could simply give 30 days notice and the U.S. is back in. So, and by the way, all the investment bankers and economic projections show the U.S. is going to exceed its Paris commitment regardless of what Trump tweets or says or does. So, this is our home. We must change. We can change. Will we change? The indications are yes. But for those who doubt that we will change, remember, this poet in the U.S. Wallace Stevens wrote these lines after the final no, there comes a yes. And on that yes, the future world depends. Every major social revolution has followed this pattern. And for anyone who thinks that we do not have the will to change, remember that political will is itself a renewable resource. Thank you very much. Thank you. Oh, I'm over there. I'm sorry. Let me, let me move this away. I'm sorry. Who was that, right? Absolutely amazing. Let's have another round of applause. After that, it's a little bit hard to know what we can say that hasn't already been said. You know what the problem is. You know what the solution is. And you know that it's now up to all of you to take action and actually make the change that we need to see in the world, to be the change we need to see in the world. But I know you're expecting more tonight and that's great because we have an amazing panel of speakers here to talk more about these incredibly pressing important issues that affect us all. So first of all, let me say I'm Naomi Rezcus. I'm a professor of the history of science and technology at Harvard University. And I've been working for about 15 years on the issue of climate change and the history of climate science and the history of disinformation about climate change. And that makes me a baby compared to some of the people on this panel who have been working on this issue a whole lot longer. And sometimes when I start to feel tired or demoralized or depressed, I think about this man. I think I don't have the right to be tired because look what this man does. So once more. Naomi, quick question. So has your graph of disinformation on climate change shot up recently? Well, you know, it's very volatile. I'd like to stop and mark it, but yes, absolutely, there's no question about it. So on behalf of the World Economic Forum, let me welcome you all here tonight. This is the open forum, a chance for people from the community to come and talk and listen and ask questions. So we have an absolutely remarkable panel here tonight. So I want to take a minute now just to introduce them. Then we'll have about an hour of 45 minutes. 45 minutes of panel discussion, and then we'll have about 20 minutes for questions from you at the end of the evening. As most of you also know, after the panel discussion, we'll be showing Vice President Gore's new film, The Inconvenient Sequel. So if you're not able to stay for the film, then after the panel discussion, please leave quietly or leave with lots of vigor. Those of you who are staying for the film, I hope that most of you will. Please just stay in your seats and as soon as we're ready, we'll start the film. So with that, let me introduce today's remarkable panel. So I'll start at the far end. So on my far left, we have Faiki Svesma, who is the CEO and Chairman of the Board of Royal DSM, which apparently used to stand for Dutch State Mines, but now stands for Sorry, tell me again. Doing something meaningful. Doing something meaningful. So this man is living proof. He and his company are living proof that the private sector can change, that corporations can change. DSM began 150 years ago as a coal mining company. Then some visionary people realized that maybe that wasn't the best thing to be doing. And they switched to a chemical company. And then they switched again. And they are now the world's largest nutritional food ingredient company committed to sustainability and sustainable materials. Faiki Svesma is also one of the world's leading business leaders fighting the climate crisis. And so I just want to say welcome and thank you for joining us tonight. Thank you. Thank you. Next to him, we have Karuna Rana, who is from Mauritius and is a leading leader of our nonprofit that's been mobilizing young people from small Pacific Island, small Pacific Island developing nations in Asia and in Africa, and really helping to lead grassroots activism among young people who of course have the most stake in this game at all. So please help me welcome Karuna. Next to Karuna, doctor and professor Conrad Steffen, who's the director and professor in the climate and cryosphere unit at Eitecha in Zurich. He's one of the world's leading glaciologists. He's been working for more than 40 years studying snow and ice in the Arctic and Antarctica and understanding how climate change is changing the cryosphere, melting ice and leading to sea level rise. He's also the director of the Avalanche service here in Davos. So all of you who have been safe for the last couple of 48 hours, you owe it to this man. Then we also have next to Conrad Steffen, Christiana Figueres, who I think is probably known to many people in this room. She is the longtime executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, but less formerly she is known as the hero of Paris. Sometimes I remind my students that the United States is a signatory to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and I remind them that it was first introduced in 1992 before most of them were born. They can't believe that. They can't believe actually how long we have been working on this issue. And probably no one except maybe Al Gore has been working on this issue longer, harder and more tirelessly and with more passion, conviction and dedication than this amazing woman. So thank you for being here with us tonight. Next to Christiana, we have Hilary O'Neill. Hilary is my compatriot and a non-profit called Protect Our Winters, which was organized some years ago by Jeremy Jones, a world-class snowboarder. If you don't believe me, if you go down towards Jacob's Horn, right next to the ticket office, there's a place you can rent skis, and there is a big picture of Jeremy Jones in the window there. So if you don't know who Jeremy is, go take a look at that next time you're down by Jacob's Horn. But Hilary is a world-class mountaineer, athlete and philanthropist and leader in the world of people who care about winter sports, care about snow and has really witnessed through her own personal experience what's happening to snow and ice around the globe. Among her many amazing accomplishments, she was the first woman to climb two 8,000-kilometer, sorry, 8,000-kilometer, sorry. Yeah, she's so amazing. The first woman to climb two 8,000-meter peaks in 24 hours of ritz and lazzi. So don't mess with her. She is one tough lady. And I'm just thrilled to have her on board. This man, of course, needs no introduction, but I just want to say one thing. You know who he is, you know he's the former next president of the United States. Many important things, but most of all I think he's a man who has been a personal inspiration to all of us. And I think all of us on the stage just want to take a moment to recognize that. Okay, stop it, but it's not just political, it's personal too. And it matters because we can read as many charts and graphs, we can read reports, we can read the IPCC. But what mobilizes most of us to act is meeting someone, knowing somebody who's passionate about an issue and explains why it matters. And Al Gore's not the only one on this panel who's done that. Everyone here has. So we're going to hear now a bit from some of our other panelists. So I thought I'd turn to Karuna now. As the youngest member of this panel, you have the most at stake. So why don't you take a few minutes to talk to us about your work and what you're thinking about right now. Thank you. And good evening, everyone. I see a lot of young faces. So I said, yeah, it's really great to see young faces. And I just want to start saying this at the very outset. We talked about two degree Celsius, but two degree Celsius is not enough for small island nations. I come from Mauritius, which is an island nation in the southeast of Madagascar for those who don't know. And we had ox for 1.5 degree Celsius. Now, half a degree can make a whole lot of difference to us and not just us, but to how different parts of the world are affected by the effects of climate change. The Paris Agreement is a huge achievement, but we need to do more. And if we are moving to two degrees Celsius, this is what it's going to look like. Global sea level rise could increase by 10 centimeters more. Tropical heat waves would be longer. And the worst of all, and this is especially close to my heart, we risk losing almost all our coral reefs. Now the second point, which is adaptation. Well, there are things that we can't adapt to. We've seen a lot of pictures from Mr. Gore's presentation. I will give you a few more examples. Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu in 2015 saw 24 people dead and 3,500 people displaced. There was another cyclone in one of the islands in Fiji in 2016 that flattened the entire island. We're talking of lives lost and habitats destroyed. This is not something we can adapt to. Now, the urgency for radical and collective action is very real and it has to happen now. Now, we've heard about what we can do and I think that is very comprehensive, but I want to bring, I want to highlight a few more points for us to think about. Firstly, what does climate action mean? Firstly, it would mean removing those inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, $5.3 trillion per year. This is the number we're looking at. And recently, I'm sure you must have heard about it, US is imposing a 30% tax on solar panels imports. Now, this is not acceptable. Secondly, aiming for 100% renewable energy future. Now, this might seem crazy to a lot of us. Well, it's not. Studies from Sanford University and other universities have laid out roadmaps for 139 countries to move towards 100% renewable energy by 2050. In fact, 43 countries have already committed to it at the Climate Vulnerability Forum and a lot of them are small island nations. Thirdly, what does it mean for our oceans? I think we've seen the ocean is not only one of the largest carbon sinks. I think it is the largest carbon sink for us, but also it caters for livelihoods for millions of people worldwide. What does this mean? It means that we need to protect our oceans. We need concrete policies and technology that is inclusive and accessible to all of us. And I talked about loss and damage earlier, and I want to talk about this again. We need a loss and damage mechanism for finance and accountability to be taken very seriously at the UN. It also means that we need to have infrastructure prepared for all these extreme weather events that is awaiting us. And for this, I'd like to give a personal example. I flew in from Zurich to Davos in a cyclone, and this is one of the biggest cyclones that Mauritius has seen in the past 16 years. And just today, I heard that there were flash floods warning in Mauritius. Since the beginning of this year, Mauritius has hardly seen one day of sunlight. And this is not how Mauritius is. And finally, what does it mean? It means that we need to mobilize everyone. And I'll give you an example of what I do. Well, I may come from a small island nation, but through my organization, we are mobilizing the young population to mitigate, adapt, but also hold governments accountable to the Paris Agreement. One example is in Seychelles, young people campaign for a whole year cleaning up oceans and rivers to ban plastic bags. They even partnered with prison inmates to stitch reusable bags. And guess what? Plastic bags got banned in Seychelles. For adaptation, what are we doing? We are giving a platform for young people to come up with innovative solutions to protect the ocean. And finally, in terms of accountability, we are teaching young people from climate-vulnerable countries on tracking and understanding climate change negotiations so that they can confidently and effectively hold a government's accountable to it. To end, I would just say two things. We're talking about the shared future. Well, if there's one thing we'll share in the future, it's our climate. And the second thing is, if small island nations survive, I promise you that we all will. Thank you. If I could turn to you next. So, you're an alpinist, and so in a very different way than Caruna, you also have an incredibly personal stake in this. As a person who's seen changes in the cross sphere, avalanches have killed many sherpas in the Everest region recently. So, can you talk to us a little bit about your experience, what brought you to this issue, and what you'd like people to know about the climate issue from your perspective as an alpinist and an outdoors woman? Yes, I mean, I've been traveling the world often to fairly remote corners of the globe to climb, which is in and of itself a fairly selfish endeavor and career. And having been doing that so long, I don't think I even realized the knowledge I was accumulating over that amount of time just based on what I was seeing. So, for example, I was on an expedition in Baffin Island in 2005. So, this is quite a while ago. And our expedition coincided with the hunting season for the local Inuits for bold caribou and polar bear. And we had one of the elderlies from the village out on the sea ice with us. And we would go and we'd, you know, strap our rifles on and ski tour over to these different areas that we were climbing. And he would go hunting during the day while we were off. So, when we would come back, we'd have these kind of long discussions about, frankly, what he was doing I found was a lot more interesting than what we were doing. But he would talk about the caribou and he would come back and, of course, he'd have. We were living off essentially what he was hunting as well. And he would explain how the changes in the snowpack and the warming temperatures were making it so that the caribou couldn't move and they couldn't migrate. And because of that, you know, his sporting, his hunting was becoming very unsportsmanlike, to say the least. And it was also just affecting the livelihood of the migrating caribou. And then again, the same with the polar bears because the ice sheets weren't going out quite as far. The polar bears were staying closer to shore. And that was affecting the count of polar bears. And I know polar bears right now are supposed to get rid of polar bears as like the image for climate change. That's changing, but they're still pretty cool. So basically the count of polar bears was going up, therefore raising the number of polar bears that they were allowed to kill during the hunting season. And his take on that was that the numbers aren't going up. They're just coming closer because the ice is melting and they can't get as far out as they used to be able to. Their roaming area is quite different. So another thing I have experienced is the Kumbu Ice Fall. I'm sure most of you are familiar with all the Sherpa that were killed in the Kumbu Ice Fall just a few years ago. So take that on a national scale. The Nepal government, essentially their biggest income is from the influx of climbers going to Mount Everest to climb the south side of the tallest mountain in the world. But because of climate change and warming temperatures and all of that receding, it's becoming prohibitively dangerous. And so right now the entire Nepali government, the Sherpa who are sort of revolting in some sense on making that climb are going to have to figure out how to adapt to this change because otherwise their whole economy falls apart. So that's a national scale. And to speak personally to where I live, Telluride, Colorado, small town in the United States as anybody heard of Telluride. It's at about 3,000 meters and you sort of talked about the crazy storms that hit the east coast this winter and how our administration said that because of those crazy storms and how cold it was that there is no global warming. Well, I live in a ski town at 3,000 meters and it's been... and I've lived there for 20 years. And it's been 40 to 50 degrees, so close to 10 degrees Celsius the entire winter. And our ski area, which goes from about 3,000 meters to 4,000 meters in elevation has had no snow. So our entire town is based on the economy of tourism and it fell apart this whole winter. And then not to mention, I have two little boys that part of their school is ski PE. And when my eight-year-old comes up, PE is physical education, so like gym class. So instead of going into the gym and doing jump rope and climbing up, they actually put their ski boots on and they walk three blocks down the hill. They have that here in Davos. I would imagine you guys have that here in Davos, right? Yeah. It's awesome. I didn't grow up with that. I think it's great. But when my eight-year-old son is walking upstairs and it's Christmas and he's like, where is winter, mom? When's it gonna come? I realize that it's time for me to start having a voice because I have gained so much from snow and ice and it's inspired me every day and to realize that the next generation, my own kids may not have those opportunities is frankly devastating. So, you know, I see all over the world all the most amazing climbing routes are falling apart. Permafrost melting in the Chamonix Valley is wrecking the alpine routes. Just to take, for example, the Everest. If you don't have that, maybe you can't climb Everest anymore. But I will, I'll just end on a positive note. If there is hope to be correlated with the Trump administration, and this is hopefully not naive on my part, but it is that the amount of people in the United States who have found a voice and who are working locally and through their states, through school education, I mean, it is phenomenal. Through big businesses, everybody is taking it upon themselves to make it happen. And I think that is... I can't even believe I'm saying this, but I think that's a good thing to come from the Trump administration. But I'm saying it, I just... In our household, it's like he's the man who can't be named. Can I add something on that? There's a law of physics we all learned in school. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Sometimes that law of physics operates in politics. I hear you saying that. The reaction to Donald Trump is going to be larger than what Donald Trump is trying to do. I think that's happening. And I think also just that sort of unfortunate mistrust in the politics that is going on in the United States has opened up a platform for something like Protect Our Winners, which is putting all these athletes together and using social influence to create change. And by doing that, if you take Alex Honnold, so you guys know Alex Honnold, or the Jimmy Chins who have millions of followers on social media, I mean, I just learned how to use social media like five years ago. But it's a force, and so we're finding through social engagement the trust we need to understand what's going on and make change. So there's that. Great. Thank you. Well, the theme at Davos this year is empowering women. And the question of finding your voice, politics, engagement of course leads us to Cristiana. So how about if we give you a few minutes to tell us a bit about what are you thinking about now? What would you like to see happen now? I mean, we have this amazing Paris Accord. It's historic. We have every nation, as I'll just say, every nation in the world agrees. But what's next? So just so that you don't feel too badly, I've actually started writing a thank you letter to Trump. Yes. Because I think he is galvanizing so much, exactly as Vice President Gore has said, so much energy in opposition within the United States and outside, which is very exciting. And would we have done that without him? I don't know. I don't know how many of you listened or read Prime Minister Modi's opening speech here in Davos. He said the first threat to the global economy is climate change. Now, I put it to you, would he have said that without knowing who was going to close the conference? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe he knows that climate is a huge threat, but would he have brought it here? So you can all start writing your thank you notes to him. I will collect them and personally deliver them. So what should I share? Actually, I was motivated by your personal story to tell my personal, or one of my personal stories, which has to do with sea turtles. And one of the, in fact, the first year that I took the responsibility and the huge fund, in addition to being a lot of work, of leading the climate conventions, the first negotiation that was right there staring me in the face was Cancun, which was right after Copenhagen, 2010. And I remember this fantastic moment. The co-president, who today is leading the climate secretariat, decided that she would take us to the beach and have all of us release sea turtles. And I don't know if you've ever held a baby sea turtle in your hand, but if you ever have, it is a moment that you will never forget. They're just fantastic animals and they have been here for millions of years, right? Just absolutely fantastic. And so there we are, you know, a long line of us at the beach. Everybody got their little baby turtle, you know, me, the mother and me. It's like, well, what's the name of yours and what's the name? And I wanted everybody to name their turtles. And the minister of India is standing next to me, and he says, Christiana, you know, we're just like these turtles. And I go, what do you mean? And he goes, you know, the work that we're doing, we're doing it so slowly, just like the turtles walk so slowly. And we're facing extinction. And I, it was like, oh, my God, this is so... And he said it sort of seriously, but also in jest. Two days ago or three days ago, I read the terrible news that because nesting beaches of turtles are increasing the temperature, the gender of turtles is switching very, very fast. Because the gender when mother turtle, sea turtle, lays her 300 or 350 eggs, they're gender neutral. And the gender is determined by the temperature of the sound. And because the sound is heating, most of the sea turtles being born today are female. Now, the question that scientists are facing is, does this mean that we're really facing the extinction of sea turtles across all species of sea turtles? Or will sea turtles be able to adapt to the point where they would change their nesting beach? Just so that you know, a baby turtle that is born in the Tortuguero Beach of Costa Rica, where I come from, a green turtle, returns after having trekked, swum around the world a couple of times. 25 years later, that turtle returns as a mother turtle to lay eggs. That is the wisdom inherent in these fantastic creatures. So would they be able, after millions of years of having done this, would they be able to then change the nesting beach that they were born in 25 years prior? To me, it was a story perhaps because I had also taken care of sea turtles many, many years ago, but it really brought home to me, oh my God, we are so, so changing the balance that we have had for such a long time. And how do we do this? Because the balance that we're changing, the effects are going to be very, very long term and the action that we need is immediate. So here we are sandwiched between patients because we know that some of these things take a long time, policy development takes a long time, capital shifts take a long time, and downright impatience because we know that it is urgent. It is absolutely urgent. And where we go, where we go on emissions over the next two to three years, and it is as urgent as that, over the next two to three years, will determine the quality of life on this planet for animals and for human beings, and for human beings for thousands of years. So this is not just a story that we tell, this truly is holding the future of the world in our very hands. Now to the Paris Agreement I wanted to say, I have used many graphs to explain the urgency of what we have to do. And I must say, together with Vice President Gore and Faike and many other people, we were able to adopt a Paris Agreement and we were able to give it a very clear direction and also embed into the Paris Agreement the fact that we have to increase our ambition every five years. Very important because those efforts registered in the Paris Agreement certainly are not going to keep us under two. There in fact will take us maybe two, even three, and that's unacceptable. And we have to go to well below two, hitting for 1.5, as we have heard. And so that's not the result of the efforts that are registered there. That's going to be the cumulative result of efforts over several years. But here's the piece that is not in the Paris Agreement. The urgency is not in the Paris Agreement because what science knows now that we did not know as clearly in 2015 is that, if you will, and I saw my favorite scientists do this a couple of days ago, so now I feel scientifically authorized to exhibit this little piece of paper, which I used to do on a graph, but actually I think the paper is much better. We are emitting 41 gigatons of CO2 per year as a globe. So have this be your 40 gigatons, okay? By the year 2020, we have to do two things. We have to ensure that we are not going beyond making this our bigger paper, okay? That we definitely stay within that boundary, but also that we have put everything in motion such that by 2030, one decade later, we can actually cut this in half. By 2030, we have to be at 20 gigatons. By 2040, we have to be at 10. By 2050, we have to be at five. Five is the maximum that we could possibly, possibly under some circumstances, absorb. If not, we have to go, and this is the huge anxiety that is raining over all of us. We have to go into something called negative emissions that we can talk about later. But do you see the drastic nature of the emission reductions that we have to take? That's not linear, that is exponential. Now, fortunately, as Vice President Gore has explained, we are dealing with exponential capacity because we can direct all our technology now and all our ingenuity to doing this. But if we don't, if we don't, the human pain, the human cost to say nothing about nature is frankly unacceptable, intolerable, irresponsible. And we will never forgive ourselves as a human society that we let that happen. Okay, Fike, I'm looking at you. We heard from the Vice President that the business community has a huge role to play. The technology is there. We know it exists. It's already coming on board, but not fast enough. Talk to us about what the business community is doing because we know there's a lot of good things going on. But also, how can we accelerate it because we also know it's not happening fast enough? Thanks. Yes, I'm from business. Who of you work for a company? Oh, yeah. Okay. Good. I'm wondering now where the rest is working for. I come here now 12 years to Davos, and I did this kind of sessions a couple of times, and maybe some of you have seen me earlier. And don't tell it to the people in the Congress Center, but this is the best session of all the sessions, really. Don't tell it to the others, and especially not the one in the Congress Center now. And why? Because the world community takes position of your city during this week, which most likely creates a burden for you, the cars, the roads, the hotels. Everything is blocked, et cetera. You cannot walk in your own streets anymore. And why? What are those people doing here in Davos? And I think it's our obligation to share that with you. What are we doing? Is it meaningful that we all come together in the Congress Center and meet there, and what are we discussing? Well, what are we discussing is amongst others climate change. And what I'm doing at the Congress Center is discussing with people like Elgort, like Christiana Figueres, but especially also with other business leaders, and say, hey guys, unfortunately I have to start many meetings like that. Hey girls and guys, hopefully. What are we doing? What is our responsibility? Most of us watch the movies and the presentations of Vice President Khor. Most of us know that we cannot continue to burden our planet as we're doing. Some say, yeah, but we are from business. We have to make money also, and our shareholders wanted, our owners wanted. But if you travel, and I did a lot with the United Nations, with the World Food Program, you can go, you can take a plane to the south of Bangladesh, take a plane to Somalia. And some people do. And you can see that the people in the Horn of Africa and the Vice President were saying that under 20 million people live there and say basically we cannot live here anymore. We want to move, because we cannot grow our food here anymore. Due to climate change, and they add to that, by the way, you cannot blame us that we caused the climate change with hardly any factories here. And if you've seen those people, desperately, and like the Vice President said, a part of them become refugees, and if we continue like that, we get more and more refugees. Is this a responsibility for governments to solve that? I don't think so. It's also a responsibility for companies for you work for what I work for. I saw 20 years ago, maybe even earlier, but stronger 20 years ago when my oldest boy was born. What kind of discussion will I have with him later on when I die or retire? No, in the reverse order, I hope. You'll see. But yeah, they will say, hey, Daddy, you were CEO of a big multinational company. What did you do with your life? And I will say, well, the share price when I became was this, and then it became that, and the EBITDA, that is kind of profit with business people used as a terminology, was this and then this, et cetera. If that is the only story I have, most likely my boys will repeat the question. Our question was, Daddy, what the hell did you do with your life for these EBITDA and profit and share price? Who cares? And I said to myself, I will fulfill my life with contributing, of course to our shareholders, of course I take care that the company exists and runs, but contributing to a better society. And I know. I feel sometimes I need to defend myself because people say, yeah, that's nice talk, but you're from business. You must have a double agenda to say that. You must say, you still go only for the profit. I said, why? I'm a good guy. Those people working for companies maybe also. It's not true that after high school, the good people went to government, and for one, that's sure not the case, and that the bad people went to business. That is not true. Now life is much more complicated than that. There are good and bad people everywhere in the world. So I think it's a responsibility of business to address this. Business increased their impact. They are here in Switzerland. You have companies which have a bigger sales turnover every year than the gross national product of small countries. Now, if you're that big as business, and if you have so much impact, then I hope, bloody hell, I hope that you have a lot of responsibility too. Because nothing is more dangerous in my view, and there's a lot of impact and a low level feeling of responsibility. That is a dangerous combination, and history showed that. So as a company, and that's what I'm doing here in Davos, trying to align with other big, big companies, and say, hey, we have a responsibility here. We need to address climate change. Because this is a burden for my boys, for all kids in the world. For the next generation. And we cannot say, yeah, we lived happily. Good luck with your life. To the young generation. We cannot say that. So we need to do something, and that is what I'm committed to. So how do we do that? I say in our company, and I say to others also, we reduce, enable, and advocate. Reduce. We reduce our own emissions. We cannot put all this CO2 into the air. You've seen the pictures. So we need to reduce in absolute targets. We need to set it. We need to monitor. We need to measure. We need to tell it. And we need to be open to society. We need to enable. We need to make products. And we changed our company, as was just told. We need to change your company and to innovate and develop products which makes cars lighter. So less fuel, less CO2, which makes solar panels stronger that we do not send a part of the light back to the sun. I mean, the coming five billion years, the sun doesn't need any light back. Later on, the sun would appreciate to get something back. But the coming five billion years, not so we can keep all that light if we have the technology and put it through our solar panels. So developing new technologies or to make new ingredients for our cows to take care that our cows do not evaporate so much meeting. We call them clean cows. And they love it. So develop and enable new products. And the last thing, to advocate. To be here and to be there at the Congress center, to be here and to tell to you, yeah, we are from business. Yeah, we take care of a big part of the emissions. Yeah, we are responsible for that. Yeah, we create a burden for society for the next generation. And we can't. We can't. We need to align with each other and reduce our emissions and to take care of society and to be a force for good. And not only thinking about your short-term profits or your EBITDA or your share price or whatever. We are a part of society. Sometimes people ask me, why do you interact so much with society? Why do you think this is needed? I found it a weird question. Yeah, you have society there and we interact with society. No, we are part of society. Our employees live in society. I hope me too. That's a strange sentence in this today's frame. But so, yeah, we form a part of society so we need to contribute to society. So that's why I try to reduce, enable and to advocate. And to take care that we can leave a better planet. And I close with a remark I make often and that justifies for me why we are doing what we are doing. Because I think that nobody can be successful or even claim to be successful in a world that fails. And the reason is we live all in a global village. With all the globalization, it is a global village. And if you are doing well but your wife or your kids not, and somebody will meet you and say, how are you doing? And your wife is sick and your sons or daughters have big issues. You will not say, yeah, I'm doing fine. And most likely you say to your friends, no, I'm not doing fine. Why not? Are you not doing fine? No, I'm doing fine, but my wife not or my kids not if that's the case. And in our global village, that is happening. And I hope that we will not say we will be successful if we aren't. We can only claim to be successful if we can all live happy in this planet. Thanks. Conrad, you have the unenviable task of having to follow all of the amazing things that have been said. Maybe I could just invite you to step back. You've been working on this issue for a long time, 40 years or so. You've watched ice melt literally during this time. You've watched political will melt. What do you want people to know? And what do you think the scientific community needs to be doing going forward? Especially because we have so much scientific information now. Is there a particular role you think that scientists should be playing at this moment? I agree, and I think I will start anyhow. I'm not the business leader, but it's actually very important to see that business comes that way. I'm no longer a young person who can build up a future and a group. Negotiator, I was never a very good negotiator, so I leave that to the good ones. Mountain climbing is my hobby, but not that tight. And I never had political ambitions. So my point is, I'm a researcher who made measurements. Measurements for 40 years. And I started as a grad student in 75 going to the Arctic. And I'm still going every year to the Arctic making these measurements. We have such long-term measurements. We know climate is changing. It's not always getting warmer. We have climate variability. But this is the important part. We have to have these long-term measurements to understand what is variable. And since you have read in the past, after 2005, everybody said, oh, the climate is no longer warming because it was leveling off at a very high level because the energy went into the ocean. It took us two years to understand the ocean is such a big reserve that it can store and then re-admit that now we actually have an enormous increase. And when we look at the current CO2, and I come back to these two degrees, or 1.5, we have surpassed already 400 parts per million. We never had such a high CO2 amount in the atmosphere for maybe one, two, three million years. We don't even know. We are still looking for the old eyes in Antarctica. We know it's more than a million years. What does it mean? We are already on the path to 3.2 degree warming. If we don't go for 2020, reduce it. Actually, we have to reduce faster, and that's my plea. I think we cannot just say we tried to reduce CO2 emission to carbon neutral by 2050. This is not enough, because if you look, this is global mean temperature two degrees. We had 0.85 degree warming already since the middle of the 1900 until today. We had 1.9 degrees in the Alps. We had three degrees warming in the Arctic in that time period. When we say two degree warming, we can simply double. It's almost linear. We will have four degrees warming here in Davos by the end of the century. This definitely will melt all the remaining eyes we have. What does it mean for the Arctic? If you have six degree warming, we actually have an accelerated melt on the Greenland ice sheet already today. If you look at the ice melt we have, which is about 385, I'm quite accurate here, 85 cubic kilometers of ice. That's what we lose every year in Greenland. Just the Greenland ice sheet. This is six times the amount of the entire ice we have in the Alps. So six times all the glaciers disappear every year in Greenland, which makes up one millimeter sea level. If you look at all the glaciers, they are equally important on Antarctica, thermal expansion of the ocean. Every year the ocean increases now about 3.5 to 4 millimeter. Where does it lead us? This is the current climate. What we don't really usually discuss when we reduce CO2, the climate is continuing to warm. Because it takes 100, 200, 300 years to get the CO2 out of the atmosphere. CO2 is a very inert gas that has a very slow reaction time. What we have to be, and that's my plea, we have to go not just carbon neutral, we have to go carbon negative. And here I start talking with our politicians. And I think it is also important as a nation, I'm Swiss as you probably hear from my accent, but otherwise they don't understand what I'm saying. It's important that we can, as Switzerland, go carbon negative by 2040. We can afford it. Our industry can afford it. We can be an example. And it is actually something as a brand. Switzerland has always had a good brand. And I started to talk to our politicians, including the president from last year and the current president. It's important we be an example. If we cannot do it as a small nation, how can we ask the others to do it? And my plea is not only carbon neutral by 2050, carbon neutral by 2030, carbon negative by 2050. Yeah, so this is such a great panel with so many things to say, but we do want to take some questions from the audience. So I have a gentleman right here who is eager. And does someone have a microphone or maybe you can just speak up? Why do you get the microphone very short? Mr. Gore, I missed one special important project. It's a Solar for Peace project. We never make a link between war and disturbing the climate. And even in Paris, no speech, no research, hundreds of thousands of flights disturbing the nature everywhere. But there is no figure between the link. We spoke about between link war and climate change. We spoke about the two degrees of climate change, but not of the 2% supporting the military with the new government. So my question is to you, make these links. The last war all in Iraq was about the oil. You remember, very, very useful. So please try to find this link. You spoke about refugees. And the last sentence is you spoke, yes, we can. But now I see, yes, we can. Martin Luther Green said, I have a dream. The government's now said, I have it wrong. This is the difference. If we don't change the power in the whole politic in thinking, empowerment, the people, we will not save the climate. Please take this subject for you, Solar for Peace. Well, I think that's a great idea. There is a lot of social science research on the linkage between rising temperatures and violence. There are multiple causes of violence. And when you have a phenomena that has multiple causes, it's sometimes hard to pull apart all the different causes and say this much was due to climate. But what the research tends to show is that when climate reduces the, well, I'll give you the example. I mentioned Syria earlier. But I was with a young woman from Chad in Northern Africa in the Sahel region just below the Sahara. And she told the story two days ago. It was actually in my first movie, but she has lived through it or her family has. Lake Chad was the largest lake in Africa. Over a period of 40 years, more than 90% of that lake evaporated with the higher temperatures. And it wasn't because the water was diverted for irrigation. That's what happened to the Aral Sea, Lake Ermia in Iran. It was because the climate conditions changed. So what happened? The people who relied on subsistence farming around the edges of that lake could no longer farm there. And so they moved. Where did they move? Some of them went to an area called South Sudan where when they entered that region, already populated by other peoples that contributed to the outbreak of violence there. As water scarcity and food scarcity continues, then the potential for violence increases. Farther east in Kenya, in Northern Kenya, the same thing is happening with lakes there. And, you know, in the Christian Bible, I know there are people from many faiths here who forgive me for drawing on my own religious tradition. There are some scholars that say the story of Cain and Abel in the book of Genesis is in part a parable about the conflict between farmers and herders. And of course Cain slew Abel. Throughout that region of Africa now, as it dries out, population is increasing, but the population of livestock is increasing much faster. And as the land dries out and the areas where the livestock graze diminish, then they tend more to invade the areas where the farmers have been trying to farm. And so the potential for violence is increasing. There has been a specific study recently that correlates rising temperatures with the recruitment by ISIS in the areas of Northern Africa where ISIS is best known from Iraq, but, you know, they've spread Boko Haram, which means I think it translates into no more knowledge. Their recruitment has increased when the conflict, when the temperatures increase and the effects increase. One final story. The largest and worst drought in the history of Russia was in 2010, and they had the largest fires in the history of Russia. Their records go back 1,000 years. 55,000 people died, mostly from smoke inhalation during those fires. Four months later, Russia then took all of its grain off of world markets. Ukraine took most of its grain off world markets, and food prices spiked to the highest level ever. At the very moment when it spiked to that highest level, a food vendor in Tunisia set himself on fire. His last words were not down with the tyrant. His last words were how am I supposed to live? The video taken of that food vendor burning himself alive is what triggered the Arab Spring and the wave of violence that spread throughout much of the Arab world. There are many other stories that tend to support the proposition that there is indeed a link between climate and violence. I will leave it to the experts to give you more detail on that, but the research does tend to support this linkage. Could I pipe in? There is a nice relationship between renewable energy and peace. Because the farther we go into, depending on renewable energy, there is a good possibility that we will have less wars for the very simple reason. When I grew up, geopolitics was all about defending oil sources or gas sources and defending the transportation routes of those sources. When we move to renewable energy, we will stop transporting oil and gas or coal around the world, which anyway will help with emissions. But above all, we will all be using our own endemic energy sources that we have in our own countries, and hence we will no longer have to fight wars to protect sources of energy in other countries. And there is just a huge peace dividend from the move toward renewable energy that is going to substantially change the geopolitics of this world. One additional comment. A former oil minister in Saudi Arabia said, the stone age did not end because of a shortage of stones and the oil age will not end because of a shortage of oil. And that's why they're recognizing this and they're now some of the biggest investors in solar. Yeah, important point. Okay, this woman here in the orange sweater, if you would. Thank you. Good afternoon, esteemed panel, Ms. Figueres. And I have a question. We talked about CO2. We talked about oceans. Our group took it upon ourselves to visit five countries in the United States, Europe, and Asia. We found Thailand to do very well around soil management. And that was because of King Ponypal and his SEP economy, where communities come together and they take care of their soil themselves. They were able to actually reverse the problems they have with their soil. What we discovered is that that could be utilized across every country based on every country's needs, okay? I would like to ask this panel, how do you think that we could implement that in a way that would serve the world? Because he was a man that actually was one of the longest living monarchs but loved by his country. Because everything he learned, he imparted unto the people of his country which allowed them to be self-serving communities. Now, I do know that there is a gap between lower income and, you know, on higher income. But they are self-sufficient and family-oriented and grow all of their own foods. That's why there's so many vendor cards. How do we bring that to bear? And the last question is, how do we make sure that all people are eating healthy food from farm to table? Thank you. Michael, do you want to take that since you're coming? I will kill the food. Because I see we get all kind of signals on the time. But I think you give the answer on your own question. So I agree with you. To make the different countries and the different societies self-serving and self-sufficient. And Christiana just said that, that if we move to renewables, that the same is happening. An example, we started a couple of years ago. We already support for more than a decade World Food Program to provide healthy food to people who have shortness of food. Three years ago, we started in Africa to take care that people can grow their own food, make their own nutritious food for the local population. We asked 10,000 farmers make everything you can make. We buy. We build a big factory in Kigali. We use all the materials. We make healthy food there and for the local people. What's happening? And here you see that we need to have some system change also. Development aid of some countries disturbs that picture from time to time on an irregular basis. There are food excesses in some of our western countries. And together with the source of development aid, shortnesses and discounts, we dumped that into Africa because we're so kind to help those poor people in kind, not with money, with our food excesses. And then we kill all the farmers locally again. This is what I'm fighting for now. And I totally agree with you. We need to go to the local self-sufficient systems. Africa should not, cannot be dependent on importing food, need to grow its own food and it is possible. But we need some system changes including the western world also. Okay. I want to say I have this incredibly painful situation that lots of you have questions. I'm sure they're all great. And I only have time to one more. So I'm going to ask if anyone has a question either for Karuna or Hillary. Okay. It's a very simple question. What will you do personally until the end of this week to convince the organizers of the WEF to start banning cars during the WEF? That's an easy one. So that the WEF actually walks its own talk and not just cars. What about plastic bottles where we have water, etc. So I think how many more years do we have to wait? Or what will you say next week? What you have done. Thank you. I was actually having this conversation with the driver of one of the shuttles when we were coming up and he was like they need to ban cars from town and figure out an alternate system to get people moving around. This is my first time at the forum but it seemed much quicker to walk everywhere. It's always quicker to walk. I mean there was like bull times. I got out of the shuttle and in the middle of a traffic jam and walked to the next shuttle. I should have just walked all the way. Well that's it. If I may add. So she answered cause I'll talk about plastic bottles and it's funny because I actually run a project where we are promoting tap water and getting plastic. We hopefully get plastic bottles banned in Mauritius. Very ambitious. But what can we do? Well the first thing that I've seen starting from the positive side is that I have seen a lot of rooms not having plastic bottles but huge rows of water. So that was very very refreshing to see. I was happy about that. Certainly I've seen plastic bottles as well. But then what I do is I have my own bottle that I carry with me everywhere. It also starts with you. So I go and ask them can you please fill my bottle. And if we have more people go and ask can you please fill my bottle. Then they will be like oh so I don't think that people need plastic bottles. We shouldn't have it. But I will. I also represent the global shapers community was a community of young people and we have a strong presence and voice in the web. At least we think so. So we will definitely we do read. Yeah. So we will we will definitely take this back. And if I may I know time is both both issues. And if I may one last thing you talked about community. I really wanted to respond to that how to get community to take ownership of their problems and resources. And one example I can give you is from the ocean sector. Sorry from a country that has oceans is that we young we are getting young people to scuba dive. And this might seem OK why why should young people scuba dive. Well we come from a small island nation but not many young people know how to swim well many not many people know how to swim from people know how to swim properly. And I have to admit that includes myself. But it took me one whole year to go and scuba dive because I suffer from anxiety disorder. I was so scared to go and scuba dive. But when I went and I saw what's underneath I felt blessed. I'm like I'm so lucky to share the planet with these beautiful creatures. Of course I've also seen the other side of things which is you know plastic bottles. I have seen coral reefs being bleached. It really breaks my heart. And if we get the community to see this then they will feel the ownership. So at first they know they need to know what's there. And then they will feel the ownership to protect it because it's their resource. Imagine Mauritius I mean a lot of you love coming to Mauritius but would you come if you if you snorkel and you see white reefs or like dead reefs and almost no fishes. You wouldn't. So this means a lot to us and to our community. Thank you. Can I just jump back into the. I just want to say one thing about the water bottles and a friend of mine told me about what he was doing with the whole water bottle thing and so I adopted it. And it's basically whenever somebody hands me a water bottle a plastic water bottle I actually say no thank you but I'm trying to save the world. And I get some of the best reactions and it sparks conversation and I think the way to stop having water bottles here would be to stop taking them to stop. And so one last thing on the water bottles. I just want to say my water bottle was taken from me coming in by security. So it's out there on the way out. You can see me picking it up. Okay. It's heartbreaking to have to end this discussion. We could be here till midnight. I will tell the web organizers and we do get asked for feedback. No cars in town. No plastic water bottles. And next time when you get a panel of amazing people like this could we please like have three hours. So thank you all so much for coming. Please save the film if you can. And please thank our panel.