 Hello and welcome to the Uplink Daily. I'm your host, Emanuela Orsini, joining you from the Sustainable Development Impact Summit here at the World Economic Forum in Geneva. In this session, we'll be announcing the top innovators from Uplink's recent Generation Restoration Youth Challenge, and we'll learn more about the young people who are leading ecosystem restoration around the world. A recent report found that investing less than 1% of the world's GDP into nature-based solutions can tackle the climate crisis and bring biodiversity loss to a halt. We now have a unique opportunity to invest in ecosystem restoration by supporting a new generation of ecopreneurs. Sparked by a strong sense of purpose, urgency, and need for action, these young people, known as Generation Restoration, are putting the planet's health at the heart of their business. To support this effort, Uplink, in partnership with 1T.org, Salesforce, and Supporting Partner UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, launched the Generation Restoration Youth Challenge to support these exciting young ecopreneurs. The aim of the challenge was to identify, help scale, and celebrate youth-led solutions to restore nature. Before announcing the winners, let's take a look at this video about inspiration behind the challenge. I see ecopreneurship having a great role when it comes to tackling the climate crisis, and especially when it comes to improving the quality of our environment because we are looking at eco solutions, solutions that are not harming the planet. Right now we are the stakeholders of the future, so if there's going to be urgency, there's going to be action happening. It has to come from the generation that is seeing that it's going to be the most affected and whose children are going to be the most affected. Joining me now to talk more about the importance of youth-led solutions to restore nature is Bianca Williams, Marketing Manager, Global Impact from Salesforce. Welcome Bianca. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Tell us more about the big issues that this challenge is trying to solve. We really realize that we need to create a space for youth to have a much more active voice and helping to solve the climate crisis. We need youth-led voices and initiatives that are helping us conserve and restore ecosystems, and to really be the driving force of the UN decade on ecosystem restoration. We really wanted to focus on initiative examples that modeled successful ecopreneurship, inspired and advocated for other young ecopreneurs who might not even know that they're ecopreneurs yet, and also just demonstrate a long-term capacity for sustainability of these awesome ideas. So we don't want just a one and done solution. We really want to focus on solutions that are scalable and sustainable. Why does Salesforce support this challenge? Well, at Salesforce, environment is a key stakeholder. We take that very seriously. We are using every tool in our toolbox to tackle climate change. We are a founding member of 1T.org. We've made a commitment to support 100 million trees by 2030, and we really understand the social and economic benefits of nature-based solutions on the planet. And so it's only natural that we would get behind this challenge and really understand, because ecopreneurship and innovation is just at the heart of so much that we do. We understand that youth are a driving factor of that, and where we can lend our support from our network, from funding, from our thought leadership to be able to give a platform to youth in this way, we're absolutely behind it. Can you talk a bit about how Salesforce will be working with the selected innovators? I was just so honored to be able to be on the review panel. I saw so many great ideas. I am so excited about what the future holds for this winning cohort. And Salesforce is just so excited to be a network and a platform to be able to support. We were able to be a funding partner, so really excited about seeing that grant money go to excellent use and really excited about being able to be a network for folks to tap into and be able to make their ideas even bigger and broader. How can young ecopreneurs' innovations truly make an impact? Using your voice and using your platform, there's no idea too big or too small. We understand that very small ideas can create a ripple effect and really drive a larger global impact. So if that means starting in your own backyard and your own community and identifying a need, and then thinking about how you can help solve it, getting folks involved in your network to think about how you can help solve it and submitting to challenges like this that provide a network and a platform and funding to really help get those ideas off the ground. I think that that is such a big focus. You can never ever undermine the ideation process and the fact that small ideas can turn into really long-term global impact. Thanks for joining us Bianca. Now it's time to announce the solutions that have been selected by our expert panel to become top uplink innovators and to receive the support that Bianca just spoke about. Congratulations to our Generation Restoration Youth Challenge winners. Let's learn more about these exciting innovations. Joining me here in the studio to tell us more is my uplink colleague, Celia Dittlesen-Zanny. Thanks for being here today Celia. Thank you so much for having me. Now this challenge received over 170 submissions from more than 55 countries. That's a great response. What does this tell you about the critical need for nature-based solutions from all over the world? You know whether it is climate change, it is human health or economic development, nature can help us and I think that sometimes we forget that by using the tools that nature is already providing us, we can create solutions to the challenges set forward to us by the SDGs. But in order to do that we actually need to triple our annual investment in nature-based solutions by 2030 and we need to increase fourfold by 2050 in order to tackle both the climate and the biodiversity crisis that is upon us. But in order to do that we need everyone to step up and do their part. You know what's so exciting is that through our uplink challenges both this one but also the others is that we see youth stepping up all over the world. They are stepping up pioneering innovative solutions, they are empowering their peers and they are advocating for the urgent change that we so necessarily need right now. And you said it so well earlier is that right now we have a unique opportunity to really invest in ecosystem restoration by supporting this new generation of ecopreneurs and change makers and that is what this challenge is all about. So tell us more about these top innovators, these young ecopreneurs that have been selected as the winners of this challenge. So after our rigorous review and selection process we went from 170 submissions and we have selected 14 solutions from 12 different countries operating all over the world and we're so excited to share with you here today who they actually are. They include one organization that is establishing 120 pollinator gardens in Zimbabwe by working with farmers in farming intensive communities. We have another organization called Millennium Kids Inc that are creating green labs in Australia where schools and local governments are adapting green patches and using it for outdoor classroom to teach kids about nature and at the same time they are protecting and monitoring and growing that piece of land. We also have Tree Economy which is two students who are on a mission to revolutionizing forestry carbon offsetting and they are hoping to create more transparency and trust in the carbon market which is so much needed through their technology. And these are just a few, we have 14 of them and they are all equally inspiring, impactful and I'm so, I hope you have a chance to check them out. We're so lucky to also have Janne Knieberg from Sea Water Solutions to join us here later today to share more about his solution. Yeah so we'll hear more about him so stay tuned. What kind of benefits will these 14 top innovators get from the program and what do you hope they'll achieve through their engagement with Uplink Salesforce and 1T.org our partners? All 14 will be invited to our top innovator engagement program and this is really targeted to their needs and the challenges that they are experiencing and it is all about providing them with the expertise, the support, the network, the learnings and exposure opportunities to help them accelerate their impact and scale. And we're doing this by leveraging the World Economic Forum and our partners 1T.org and Salesforce broad range of activities and networks but also funds. And with this we're not only hoping to support these 14 innovators but also contribute to the need within investing and helping out with restoring nature. And at the same time supporting the awesome new generation of entrepreneurs and change makers out there. Thanks so much for joining us here today Celia. Thank you so much for having me. And congrats again to all the winners of this challenge. Now our last guest today is one of the winners of the Generation Restoration Youth Challenge. Welcome Yannick Nyberg, founder of Seawater Solutions, who joins us from the field in Scotland. Congrats on becoming a top uplink innovator Yannick. Thank you. Thank you. How does it feel to be a winner of this challenge? Just really excited to be a part of the program. It's been a kind of a long time coming. It's something that we've been, it's been on our radar for so long and we're really excited to be chosen as part of this year's cohort. We're excited to work with you. Now tell us about Seawater Solutions. Seawater Solutions is an agri-environmental company that restores wetlands and turns underutilized or degraded lands like deserts into productive ecologies where food can be grown with seawater and wetland ecosystems can be restored. Why did you decide to apply to this challenge? We're hoping to get out of the program really just to be a part of the network, to be able to collaborate with people like ourselves and see kind of where those collaborations can take us, really kind of bounce back ideas with people in the cohort and also really have access to a network of mentors, of potential future partners and use it as kind of a platform to talk about the work that we're doing here in the UK and Europe and further field in Africa and Asia. What do you hope to get out of this program? We're really focused on scaling our operations globally and to do that we need a whole host of supporters from environmental finance to engineering and to really champions within these specific target regions in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia that can help us really target these areas and introduce our systems and our approaches to places that we've been tying up for a very long time. Well thanks for joining us today and best of luck with your Uplink journey. That's it for this edition of the Uplink Daily. Thanks for tuning in. We hope you enjoy the rest of the Sustainable Development Impact Summit. We'll see you again soon.