 Welcome to this fourth session of the Young Leader presentation. As a reminder for the ones who have not got the story, we have started this activity when Thierry de Montréal challenged Song Nim, my partner in crime and myself, about in the middle of all the experience and expertise that is gathered for the World Policy Conference agenda, how can we bring the perspective of the new generation? And we are gathering young leaders that we identified throughout the years, belonging both to the public sector and to the private sector so that we can present different perspectives to the audience that will add to the agenda of the World Policy Conference. And I'm very pleased this year. I think it's the first time where we managed to have a theme. And the theme is about climate change. And I think it's good because what we heard since we arrived here in Marrakech is that first it's a very important topic, top of the agenda and more and more. And I see it in my interaction with enterprise leaders that it is going up the risk ranking in the enterprise as an absolute risk. So it is really crucial and critical for the enterprise. We heard the debate between Laurent Fabius and Patrick Pouyanet and the discussion that was quite pragmatic. There was yesterday a whole work session on energy and environment with a report back this morning. So I think it's a good theme and we could gather young leaders that are all involved in climate action. What I heard a lot is that there were criticism in the audience about, yeah, the young generation is in the streets. They made their voice heard, but actually what do they do? And there were two types of reactions saying, well, it is our generation belonging to this one that has to fix the problem we have created and others say yes, but the young generation has to contribute as well. And that's what we are aiming at showing today during the time allocated for this session. And we will start with James Tew, who is manager of the Treasury Board of Canada that is first participation to the World Policy Conference that will give his personal perspective on why is it difficult to change. So James, go ahead. You'll see Patrick. Thank you everyone here today. My name is James Tew and I'm from Ottawa, Canada. I'm a dad of three kids ages five, three, and one. I will reinforce the fact that I'm speaking on my personal opinions today not speaking on behalf of the Government of Canada. I'll do the presentation in English today. I'm very good at taking questions in French later, if you want. Again, I'm here talking about my opinions about the Government of Canada. So I'm going to very quickly take a look at two things. One is to look at the climate change and climate adaptation in Canada to set the scene but also then to really look at the problem at TEC. Why is it that we feel so unable to address this issue? So in Canada we have roughly 10 million square kilometres. We have a fair bit of climate. So we are seeing a fair bit of that climate change. It's a fact. We know that the north of Canada is changing at twice the rate. It's warming up at twice the rate as the south of Canada. We see more extreme heat, less extreme cold. We see more drought, fine permafrost. There's been a marked shift away from snowfall, pardon me, to rainfall. I grew up on the east coast of Canada. A tough, rugged, beautiful part of the country tucked in next to the North Atlantic. When I was young we had snow. We had snow on the ground for months and months. This past year friends and family who are still there told me that it snowed a handful of times. A good buddy of mine said he shoveled three times. The city now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is experimenting and adapting by planting palm trees. Palm trees in Canada. So in fact we've moved beyond the conversation of climate change to that of climate adaptation. It's not that the climate is changing. It's not a question. It is that it is and what are we going to do about it? And what I think has been really very positive from this dialogue over the last few days as Patrick just mentioned. It feels collectively like we have come to a consensus. We've moved past this idea, you know, doubting climate change, that in fact we need to do something. Policy makers, governments, businesses are all seeing these impacts. Businesses are seeing that ultimately their costs are increasing due to regulatory costs or, you know, perhaps they're seeing that their built infrastructure is now at climate risk. And this is the problematic. So we have come to this place. We have seen governments try to do things and we're going to have a discussion about the situation in France in a few moments. But there's resistance. And we ask ourselves in this room and in other rooms similar to this, you know, what's wrong? Can't people see? Climate change is a fact. What's wrong? And why is there that resistance? It reminds me about our 2015-2016 conversations about Trump. In rooms like this, all over the world, we had come to a consensus. The man can't win. He's a reality TV show star. Just wait and see. If they think he can win, well, they just don't get it. The fact of the matter is I think today is just another case where we don't get it. We don't understand the lived realities of 99% of the population most of the time. We forget that 99% of the population are not in this room today. They're not actively thinking about climate change or how it's going to impact them, impact the food chains, about security. The single mom who works two jobs doesn't come home at the end of the day and think about rising sea temperatures. She comes home and she thinks about having made it through another day and that she's okay and her kids are okay. She works her butt off, but she feels like she's not getting ahead. And arguably, she isn't. And she never has been. She worries about her safety and the safety of her children. And beyond that, not much else matters. And so it comes down to this. The people being asked or being told to adjust their behaviors because of climate change or climate adaptation are the same people who have felt as though the rules of the game have been dictated to them for their whole lives. Most people know that climate change is real. You may find some people who still don't believe it. But ultimately, if you're worried about making it through the day, you're less worried about tomorrow. Never mind what your country's greenhouse gas emissions will be in 2030 or 2050. So I actually don't think it's reasonable that we sit and think or assume that people will just submit to changes in taxes, higher prices, submit to their behaviors being changed because of climate change. And this is the challenge. These policy approaches are not working as we'd like them to. And so with all this self-reflection and again in this room and like many others similar to it, we have come to this place where we have accepted this. But I do think our self-reflection actually harkens back to the 2015-2016 conversations about Trump. Well, can't they see? It's an emergency. Why won't they change? I think people can see. They can see that someone who thinks perhaps they're smarter than them is trying to tell them how to live their lives. Therein lies the resistance. And this is tough. It's a tough message personally for me to deliver because I know climate change is real and I know it's going to impact my life, but it's going to impact the lives of my children. I just think we need to find another way to go about the conversation and most importantly to bring more people into it. Thank you very much. Thank you. So thank you, James, for highlighting in a very practical term what the challenges we have to face. And there is in France a very good book recently published on the climate après la fin du mois that highlighted this question about the conflicting priorities we are facing. And our next speaker will develop on this. Xavier was former advisor for energy industry innovation, the French ministry for the ecological and inclusive transition. So thank you for developing your point of view and element of answers. Well, hi everybody. Just like James, I will talk on my personal behalf and expressing my opinion on the French government. But today I will present the way France's fight against climate change, the difficulties it rose and the innovative democratic solution that we have tried to find. First, I'll just slide this little bit. I have to remind everyone that France is among the best in class when it comes to CO2 emission. The French economy can produce one dollar with 200 grams of CO2 when the US uses 400 grams and the Chinese 600 grams. So it's a good result. But when you add up things and you look at another graph, if it appears, you can see on the right side that the national emission are going down. The French people, they emit like six and a half ton of CO2 per year, which is more than the world average, which is between four and five. But if you look at the left and look at the carbon footprint of the French people, you see that it has always raised. It at best stabilizes. It means that, what does it mean? It means that the French people are rich. They consummate a lot of things, a lot of imported goods that emit carbon somewhere else. And it means thus that probably the French people didn't even notice the effort to reduce the emissions during the last 20 years. And it means that they will have to take into account the changes in the future much more strongly because it will imply changes in behaviors. France had a plan, President Macron had a climate plan in his political program that was adopted in 2017. There are many things in this plan that I would just say that this plan leads to the adoption of carbon neutrality in 2050, which is a huge step. And for instance, that it ends up exploration and production of oil and gas on the French ground. It's mainly symbolic. But it means that we have to leave the carbon underground if we want to stop the climate to heat. It's detailed. It's several plans, the multi-annual energy plan and the national low carbon strategy that defines the pathway towards the carbon neutrality. This is not like a countryside, a peaceful path actually. It's more like a jump of a cliff. I have a bar chart here that emphasized this point. On the left side, there is the emission in the 1990s of France. In the middle, it's 2015. And on the right, it's what we're supposed to emit in 2015. Basically, it means that we have no carbon for power production, zero carbon for transportation, zero carbon for housing and heating, zero carbon for the industrial processes. And that we have to feed more people with health, the carbon that we use today to feed 60 million people. So this is a radical change and people will notice that. And this is the difficulty. The plan also had a lot of levers, power transportation building. I will not enumerate them. But there was a cornerstone. It was the carbon tax. The agreement voted a carbon rise of 10 euros per ton per year, starting in 2017, with a target of 100 euros. It means roughly that a gasoline would increase in price of 3 euro cents per liter every year. You can think that it's small. It was supposed to be a long-term signal towards the decarbonization of our economy. It happened to be a short-term signal to massive protests. You may have seen these photos. It's why we call the yellow vest crisis. It started in October 2018, around the time when the parliament adopts the finance law. People starting to put on their yellow vest that they had to buy a decade ago for safety reasons. And to occupy the roundabout through the countryside to protest against a lot of things, but mainly targeted at car drivers. Mainly the carbon tax, but also speed limits and other restrictions. It was a peaceful movement that had a high rate of approval, around 70%. It gets tougher in November with strikes every weekend. Every Saturday, since this time, there is a strike in various cities in France with sometimes thousands or dozens of thousands of people. Some were not peaceful. Sometimes there were black blocks inside the strikes. But it led to a major backlash. After three months of protests on December 4th, the prime minister stopped the carbon tax trade. Less than a week after that, the president announced approximately 10 billion euros, new measures in favor of the purchasing power. So we started with a little raise in carbon tax, and we ended up with no raise in carbon tax, and more purchasing power, which could raise the carbon footprint. So what are the solutions? Because on the same time, we also saw strikes on the streets for climate change, mainly from youngsters. We saw the polls saying that the subject is rising and is one of the main preoccupations. And we saw that during the EU vote, the Green Party ranked third, way before the traditional left and right parties. So there is something that says that people want to fight climate change, especially the young, but they don't want to accept any form of taxation. So that led the government to create three new structures that were a kind of innovation in the way we use the democratic process in France. Those three structures are the eye council for climate. This is a council of 12 scientists that are independent from the government, and they criticize the policy and the budget publicly. They bring trust in the system because we realized that people were not trusting the government anymore on those subjects, and we had to externalize this. It's an equivalent to the British CCC, actually, Council for Climate Change Committee. We created another governance structure, which is the Ecological Defence Council. This is the equivalent to the Defence Council, a gathering of the ministers every two months around the president, in order to shorten the decision process on the ecological subjects. I think it's the same in every country. It's impossible to make an ecological and an agricultural minister agreeing on something. Now they have to agree every two months they have decisions, and some tough decisions were taken in the Ecological Defence Council. And the last and probably more innovative solution is the Citizen Convention. We selected 150 citizens randomly, representative of the French society in terms of age, in terms of diplomacy, geography. And they get six months to work to learn about climate change one weekend every month. And after those six months, they will deliberate about measures that President Macron's promise will be directly applied, either directly, either submitted to the parliament, or if it's something really important to a referendum. Will it work? I don't know. What I know is that it is inspired of the Irish Convention that led to the abortion rights and that led also to the end of the blasphemy crime, for instance. So we put a lot of hope in this new way of making a democratic decision. And I sincerely hope today that next year we'll be able to discuss the good solutions that will be not only applied, but also accepted by the population in order to fight climate change because it will have been tailor-made for something that is representative of the real people in France. So, see you next year. Thank you Xavier. One important component we heard yesterday about not only talking about sustainable investing, new ways of investing when we're discussing about Latin America where ecology is a very important component, not only for Latin America but for the rest of the world. We have here on the panel Peter Bruce Clark. He's an operating partner at Social Impact Capital that is a venture capital fund that invests in socially environmentally responsible start-ups. He has quite different views on the role of the private sector versus the public sector so open the debate. Thank you for the introduction Patrick. I also wanted to say thank you to the World Policy Conference for having me this year. It's actually my first time at this conference and my first time in Marrakech and I've just been so astounded by the programming. It's wonderful, so thank you. Since I'm here today as a representative of a venture capital firm, predictably I will be speaking from a market perspective. After all, I do investment every day and it is our belief that early stage venture capital is a key tool in generating social and environmental impact. But I also want to say that it brings me immense joy to be amongst all of you here today in an informed international community. I love that we more or less agree that climate change exists and that is indeed a crisis in the United States we're unfortunately experiencing a bit of a gap in leadership there and so many of us as a consequence in business and finance have had to step up. So on the topic of climate solutions I wanted to say three things. Firstly, the climate crisis Secondly, I'm going to provide real world examples of businesses both in the United States and abroad who are targeting what I think is a humongous market opportunity and I call that the climate industry. Finally, I wanted to touch on how we're talking about the climate crisis. I believe that there are two ways that we need to narrate it and that there are two ways that we should not. So the climate crisis, it's a complex, non-linear multi-industry systems challenge. It requires various different solutions that leverage the best of all worlds and the market. International and national tax on carbon subsidies to underwrite clean energy was simply saying that we should use nuclear. A bandaid cannot cover a gaping wound that also fights back. It's like trying to harpoon a giant with what you actually really need is a couple of people with different kinds of darts and ropes to tie it down. What I'm more interested in is how we identify and encourage market solutions which make sense relative to the specific circumstances of countries, the drivers of their GDPs and the extent to which those drivers contribute to climate change. My other basic message is that circular economic ways of thinking will actually be the foundation upon which countries will prosper going into this century. I believe countries who aggressively drive this way of thinking, financially supporting, underwriting and generating huge industries that tackled the climate crisis will be richer than the ones that don't. Outside on a poster I have a McKinsey quote that says, the net benefit of adopting circular economic principles could be worth 1.8 trillion euros to Europeans. I actually wanted to go further than this and say that globally the climate crisis is worth 26 trillion dollars. To put that in perspective the global economy is roughly worth 100 trillion dollars, so ultimately that's a fourth of the global economy. Now you might laugh and you might say, but you can't make money out of climate change, can you? Well, unfortunately for you, you're wrong. You can and we are. I wanted to give you two examples of businesses tapping into the multi-trillion dollar industry that is climate solutions. The first example is a company which is one of our portfolio companies. It's called Prometheus. Prometheus is a San Francisco based startup that sucks carbon out of the atmosphere to create gasoline and other fuels. It is the first quote-unquote carbon net zero fuel. The core technology Prometheus uses as a carbon nanotube membrane which has many applications across climate and indeed water desalination too. They will soon produce fuel on price parity with traditional market players and within the next few years the company believes it will be able to produce at a significantly lower price. Prometheus is just but one company is transforming transportation energy markets in a fundamental way. A couple of months ago they actually sold their first jet fuel to a company called Boom Supersonic. Boom will only use carbon net zero fuel from now on. And we're excited because this is a multi-billion dollar investment opportunity. For my second example I wanted to let you guys into a little secret. This is a plastic recycling company based between Johannesburg and South Africa and in Colorado in the United States. This stealth company can take 90% of plastic waste plastic and recycle it and turn it into fuel, energy and gas. Plastic just so you know has a higher density than coal and it represents a resource valued at $2.3 trillion globally. Their clients include municipalities, large corporate parks as well as traditional recycling plants. And the cool thing about their solution is that it's very low capex, it's cheap to make, it's modular. One unit can basically process you just need to add a level and another one, a little bit like Lego. To put this in perspective if the company had 200 clients globally it would be generating somewhere between $100 million and $200 million annually. So it sounds like a terrible business, right? So you might have been thinking so what do these amazing companies have in common? Well to me these companies are reframing the externality problem. Instead of saying oh no we're doomed climate change is a problem, nationalities are terrible. They say I love carbon, atmospheric CO2 is worth a trillion annually. I love waste plastic nobody wants it and it's worth $2.3 trillion. The climate crisis is a challenge and it's an emerging set of industries and sectors. So finally I wanted to tackle something head on. We cannot and we should not share some of the participants view here that it is too late to do anything and why should we care? I find that cynicism frankly breathtaking. All is not lost, business as usual is not fine and we challenge the stance by financing companies every year that will ultimately disrupt legacy players who choose not to take advantage of the crisis. Players who disregard a multi-trillion dollar market opportunity. And you know what we will try to make millions of dollars doing this. As we like to say at social impact capital the only thing that stops a bad guy with a business is a good guy with a better business. And I think I wanted to end on just saying that a challenge by definition is both a risk as it is an opportunity the climate crisis is a market challenge. Thanks. Before we move on because I was expecting a little bit more and your investment sees this because how much capital do you want to raise? How much capital do you want to allocate? What type of return are you seeing? Do you take any sustainable criteria on your investment sees this? We say well maybe we do a little bit less which will not excite a lot of people so what is your investment sees this? So our thesis is that we invest globally and regionally we think that innovation is emerging outside of Silicon Valley and we're frankly very happy about that because valuations are a lot better we look for companies where the driver of the business model is a social environmental impact it is internal to the mode of production it's not something that you just strap on at the end and so we look for companies across an array of different sectors where actually sector agnostic we do care about certain causes we do prioritize certain causes I personally prioritize by the extent to which a problem represents an existential risk so typically from climate healthcare all the way down but in terms of stages we're basically de-risking impact deals that the traditional market will not take. So how much? How much? So how much? You want to invest? So initially 100 million and then we'll go up from there to 250 up to a billion. We want to deploy hopefully trillions of dollars. Not at one firm but at least set a market standard of what people should be investing in. Thank you. Transition now to the enterprise. We will review later on what two startups are proposing as practical solutions but also here it is my pleasure to welcome Jihan sorry for the pronunciation again and who is working at OCP and OCP is a well-known company in Morocco as we all know notably working in the fertilizer industry and you will show us how a large corporation can contribute as well how much you are committed to this as well as you know now my question and so thank you. Go ahead. Good afternoon. My name is Jihan Ajisti I'm 35 years old born and raised in Marrakesh so I hope you're enjoying your stay while here in this beautiful city. I'm head of business development at OCP Africa so OCP is a world-leading phosphate fertilizer company based in Morocco but operating weather but operating throughout the world. So personally my background is very far from agriculture or fertilizer sector. I'm a business background I used to work in a strategy consultancy firm for several years working for different clients across the world but at some point I really wanted to reconnect to my continent so I took a long leave and I went traveling in East Africa when I did some volunteer work and this is where I really first saw the effects of climate change on real people in the orphanage they had a farm and every day at the end of the school the kids we gathered and we went to fetch water I used to do that so well when I was kid at my grandparents house but the river was generous there was plenty of water I was shocked when I went the first day to go and fetch water to realize that actually the river I thought was a river was only one meter wide not even a meter deep the water was brown and it was because the dry season was too long and it's getting more and more frequent the rain season is short and the dry season is getting too long so this is when I really decided to make a shift in my career and this is what also pushed me to join OCP in Morocco it was mostly for the vision what the company had for Africa so let me share a bit more on that so let's start first with the setting this year and the situation let's imagine ourselves in Africa in 2030 if nothing is done to really change dramatically the way we consume and the way we actually address the climate situation we will be facing almost 100 million hectares of land which will be unused for agriculture and this is because of urbanization desertification and also the water scarcity sorry for certain reason also we will have almost 200 million people living in really extreme poverty suffering from water scarcity as well which will lead obviously to important movements of population almost 3.5 million year of Africans will be moving displaced from the home countries or the home cities because of the climate change or because of unrest in the different countries and also we will be considering that Africa is struggling to feed itself today already we import almost 35 billion dollars of food mostly from the US and Europe and it's estimated with the growing population and the changing in the diets to increase to almost 100 billion dollars this money can be used for infrastructure so it can be used to build ports for example that are really lacking in the continent but we can also try not to see this catastrophe kind of scenario and we hope that we can see also a different Africa an Africa that is green an Africa that is self-sufficient an Africa that has water natural resources management policies that is connected and attractive for investments and that has a growing economy and this will be possible if we change a bit the way we view Africa and let me here share an example with you especially in the context of the climate change we have a growing population we will be hitting almost 9 billion people in 2050 to feed those growing population we will need to increase our productivity in agriculture by almost 77% that cannot be used only by using extensive arable land we also need to increase the way it yields and Africa in particular has one of the among the lowest yields in the world let's give you an example for the fertilizer the use we talk in kilogram per hectare the quantities that we are using the word average is 130 kilograms a hectare in Africa on average we are below 15 kilograms per hectare leading at a very low yield that are barely sufficient to self-sustaining family in Africa at OCP we try to change a bit the narrative about Africa not seen only as the cause of the problems but also as the source of the solution and let me also invite you and look at the map to review just the continents and the land that we have Africa is as big as the United States China, India and Europe combined we don't usually have that sense of how big is the continents we do have a lot of fertile land we have abundant water resources that are not well distributed where we do have them and we have more specifically a labor force a young and attractive agriculture labor forces can help Africa get into to feed itself but we have a problem again one of the major sources of CO2 emissions is the forestations it said that the forestation around the globe accounts for almost 20% of the CO2 emissions around the world but what is causing mostly the forestation it's partly and especially here I'll give you the case of Côte d'Ivoire and just I'll invite you to see the map in the 1990s the forests were almost covering all the land all the country this is the image in 2000 this is today today we have almost 11% only of the land discovered by forest and this is mostly due to the lack of modernization of agriculture in Côte d'Ivoire a sector for example the farmers because they don't have the means necessary to buy fertilizer or to have a proper and modernized way of agricultural practices when the soil is depleted and poor they go and cut trees to benefit from the fertility of those really rich nutrient soils and this is actually what's really leading the forestation here in Côte d'Ivoire so let me before go into that share then the perspective of also LCP as a fertilizer producer we are promoting a balanced fertilization Africa needs to increase its yields to be able to increase the growing population in the context of the climate change and to be able to do that we need to support the agriculture value chain throughout the continent to be able to invest and modernize the agriculture and this can be done in so many different ways myself and my role as LCP is in the business development but the business development the way we see it is really oriented towards the farmer in Africa and we have launched the really first farmer's initiatives where we started doing awareness campaigns and a recommendation and providing farmers with decision tools that could help them know and assess how to invest and where to invest and how much fertilizer do they need not to over consume and not to not to consume in us and also what we say is more with less and the idea is really to be able to only give to the soil what is really needed and since the beginning of the farmer's initiatives program it was three years ago and today we are very proud of that we supported almost 500,000 farmers across the continent trying to provide them with innovation and technology and digital sorry, break the the distance that we can have with them because of the remote areas and the lack of infrastructure but OCP has also tried to start first with its own industrial assets and turn into a new ecological transition we have launched a very ambitious program and actually now it's a dedicated executive direction within the company it's for circular economy direction and the idea is to be able to really lower our footprint carbon footprint by trying to work in a closed system first for example with electricity we're very happy to have almost 70% of our energy is a clean energy within all our industrial assets and let's say for Morocco and especially we have one of the biggest industrial complex in the world but also in terms of sorry, the conception of water we've tried to have a closed system where we only use and recycle the water that we use in our industrial systems and we also try to rehabilitate the mines where we mine phosphate where we plant trees and a lot of other different activities are launched to be able to support this ecological transition of the company and last we also try and know the importance of R&D and the importance of innovation so OCP is really working very hard to build bridges between the research and the academia to transform the agriculture especially with the focus in Africa we've launched University Mohammed VI Polytechnic that is based in Bengal that is also trying to invest resources for the research in areas that are not always covered for example how to do agriculture in a desertic climate how to grow specific seeds that will adapt to the climate changes but also we have a specific master that has been launched also to be able to support new young coming generation on the digital we have launched an incubator to support sorry and to support startups it's based at the university and the idea is to be able to incubate startups that are oriented into the Aztec and Biotech sorry it's better so to finish let me just quote a quote from Nelson Mandena to emphasize how it's important especially in looking at the context of the climate change there are few better ways to show one's law for one's country and the well-being of one's nation than by working on the soil thank you thank you for the presentation of the OCP evolution to address climate change but you told us at the beginning that you left took some sabbatical came back because you wanted to do something with a purpose with impact what have you personally achieved through this because I understand the industrial program I'm not sure I see Gian into this as I said in the farmers initiatives programs OCP is to not work directly with the farmers we are more B2B oriented company and and it's actually what actually drives me to OCP is the launch and the inception of a program that is oriented to smallholder farming where we give them supports we have mobile laboratories that goes to the that goes to the remote areas and provides free soil analysis to the farmers to be able to guide them on the quality and the health of their soils and how to better use fertilizer in good agriculture practices training and also the use of digital tools to be able to help them in the assessments of the PNL of their farm for example just a basic thing and there is another program called Agribuster where we try to connect the farmers with its ecosystem and the idea is to be able to the risk for the farmer his investments so we go and find an off taker or aggregators for the farmer so that when he invests in the fertilizer or in any seeds he is able to sell to secure the sell of his harvest and thanks to that we have a collateral and we go to the banks and with the banks we are able to provide micro credits to the farmers so that he can pay for the most and the idea is to support him to move from self sufficient agriculture to more modernized and commercial agriculture and again from three years since we launched the program we almost supported and helped I hope and had impact in the life of 500,000 farmers and we hope to yes so I am very proud and I think the company is very proud as well I let you recover so talking of young leaders of course we will think entrepreneurs so we will comply with the entrepreneurship side of it our two next presenters are entrepreneurs we will start with Liang Wu who is co-founder and chief information officer of Green City Solutions in Germany and that is focused on air depollution so please take this one I will stand on the left side so can you imagine that 90% of all people are breathing polluted air every day and did you know that this causes more than 7 million premature deaths annually right you didn't know that I bet you didn't know that and for every breath of polluted air that you or your family are taking it means that your life's expectancy is shortened so for my family in China that probably means that their life expectancy was shortened by more than 10 years already and most people talking about air pollution they still have pictures of Asia in mind or of Africa in mind but the annual economic damage due to air pollution in Europe alone amounts to 1.48 billion euros every year and the problem of air pollution is it's invisible to the human eye but it's also directly related to climate change and with this picture which is not perfect I agree I wanted to show you that young people we're not only marching on the streets right we're still young we're multitasking capable so apart from marching on the streets which we did actually 3 weeks ago we're also working on a solution but with this picture I also want to show you that we cannot do it alone it's the diversity that makes it happen so different nationalities different ages different genders that's what makes up my team and what drives innovation in this case when we started four years ago we were four co-founders and four dudes we covered the fields of architecture mechanical engineering horticulture biology and me personally I have an IT background and one of our professors told us that plants are actually capable of cleaning the air so we did some research and we have discovered that there is a technology millions of years old capable of solving the problem partially so we have discovered special moss cultures which we patented in our own system which are literally able to eat up the air pollution and convert it into biomass so those moss cultures have probabilities they have an static charge which attract the opposite charged pollution particles they have an increased leaf surface which means they are capable of capturing more pollution than any other plant and they are also capable of evaporating water on the leaf surface and creating a cooling effect so this is a climate mitigation tool that we are talking about so the solution has to be found moss can clean up pollution more than 80% of it in our system that's it? No so we combine this natural solution with our own IoT technology and this IoT technology consists of sensors which measure the pollution levels which measure the humidity and the plants and also the water conditions and this augments the system to be capable of filtering the 80% I just told you about but our approach is not only building a product it's a holistic approach so with the sensors we collect the data we analyze the conditions in the street canyons, in the cities we analyze where pollution is coming from we do research on biology itself, on the plants itself and only with the help of all this different department, institutions corporates we're able to come up with this and it's called the city tree the name might still change but it's the product that counts so five years of experience have gone into this development and originally I wanted to talk more about this but this isn't supposed to be a product pitch so I just shortened it to the version where we can adapt that moss to any infrastructure we can adapt it to the building facades we can even make it portable we can build a smaller version for indoors to put in people's homes but our originally approach was that we wanted to provide a solution to the people in the city which cannot afford to have an isolated space the elderly and the young people who suffer most from air pollution and we are not profitable yet I have to be honest with you we are not able to grow as a young company in such a fast pace and maybe Peter you can help me out on that later and big support was also coming from the European Union and I wanted to highlight one of their funding programs which is called Horizon 2020 and with their help and their funding we will be able to create the first hyper-local clean air zone in Berlin next year and this is also an invitation to all of you because we at Green City Solutions we do not only grow clean but we also engage global leaders and this is why I'm really happy that I was invited to speak here and for this opportunity and as you can see I'm still missing on these pictures so if anybody of you has time come visit us in Berlin I'm more than willing to show you what young people are willing and capable of doing and maybe a picture of you and me showing the city tree will be replaced thank you very much thank you Jung for covering many aspects and show how almost holistic is the view because it's not only about you want to develop sustainable solution and I think it's a very important part of the young generation not just the climate it has to work and it has to be sustainable and that leads me to our last presentation from Polina Polina is the founder of Eurek she will present you with a lot of passion the fight she's on go ahead hello ladies and gentlemen I'm very happy to be here and talk to you about what I'm thinking about this world what we're going to show you I'm the founder and CEO we are building a floating solar power plant innovative and cost-effective solution of electricity production let me share with you a short video and you can see what I care about about three global problems and our solution how we can mitigate them save the planet, save the future as you understood we want to mitigate three global problems land scarcity, plastic pollution and global warming in frame of this conference we would like to highlight the problem with global warming and some mitigations what has to be in the place so if you do not do anything you see the bottom of Eiffel tower temperature will rise 3.4 degrees higher than pre-industrial level this is what Mr.Patrick from C from Total said it's going to be something like that if we implement so temperature will be around 3 degrees so it's also not so good ocean will rise I heard that everything will be under water and only some part of Siberia will survive so if you have extra money come to Siberia to buy some land and if we will do something like if we will do a lot from all sectors still we have some time to keep temperature up to 1.5 degrees but all sectors, every individual should put effort for this and some steps what we have to do so carbon pricing mechanism I hope without corruption maybe it will happen I really believe that we need to revise and invest more in renewable energy we need to remove or reduce subsidies from the first industry as you know it's subsidies around 5 times more than subsidies in renewable energy so it is really strange we need to reduce consumption on all levels so if you have iPhone don't buy new iPhone because it's latest model and you have car so share with your husband or wife don't buy new car and also negative emission technologies have to be implemented so the easiest way is to grow trees so don't waste your time go to grow trees at least and all these measurements they should be placed all together so this is a graph I just took this morning if temperature we will want to keep temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius so carbon budget what we are using now so we have only 8 years 8 years so not 11 years it's like 8 years now to keep temperature below 1.5 degrees it's quite short you don't believe me if we want to keep temperature up to 2 degrees we still have like at 26 years we don't have more risks don't put more risks and I was invited here as a young leader and I want to talk about my story so all my life more than 14 years I worked in oil and gas industry and at some moment I decided that it's not normal to contribute my effort, my brain to this industry if it is not sustainable and I decided to change my life path and my career path and I moved to renewable energy sector so I went to study in Germany I got my second master degree in renewable energy ocean energy I opened my company because I want to do it in better way it's not about business I want to really contribute my life to something what I really believe and I got a award woman in green tech the previous year and I know maybe it's just one drop in the ocean what I'm doing but what is the ocean ocean is many drops from every of us I did my positive drop what about you so if you don't know how to do it it is difficult it's really difficult you are like politicians you are in the system it is so difficult to be different and behave differently if system is corrupted if many lobbies there okay my personal opinion or my proposal to you if you cannot do your work good as the politicians because we citizens give you give you opportunity to manage our lives if it doesn't work so maybe do something not as a politician do something as a human useless plastic eat less meat useless everything if you have money invested in sustainable businesses my colleague mentioned it can be really profitable if you don't know what to do ask me I have a lot of advice thank you very much and good luck with our lives thank you what we want to do is some and I think you get the message first we have talent on the scene as you've seen in different areas and sectors and this new generation and I see it day to day in my life you witness it as well needs a purpose you can read it, you can experience it yourself and I think they are part of the solution I hope we could show it to you and we have it's part of the solution by the way for us not only to explain all the rational aspect but also to put more emphasis on the purpose so I would like to open the floor to questions on the technical aspect of climate change but also on what this young generation is expecting and how they would like to engage with you as you show in the case of Liang the call for diversity the call for finding a solution all together which is part of the solution open for question yes I wonder if it's not too rude if each of you could tell us how old you are we heard 25 so you don't have to say it again 35 you should not have corrected me I like you 35 I'm 31 so am I so not quite as young as the others I'm 37 I'm 35 and I was not part of your question so yes please this is just a wonderful moment I'm touched with the lineup of future leaders of the world congratulations on this panel my name is Tatsumasa I'm the M.B. Professor in Japan also Germany London I need your advice please I belong to the energy environment workshop we had a long debate on how to narrow the generational gap on climate change perception and we came to an idea next year in UN climate summit in September 2020 we will respond to greater Tumberg's challenge with something concrete measures but do you think this is a great idea for our generation to do to breach the gap with younger generations or you have second thought to give us advice what to do I'll take maybe another question thank you everyone great presentation very enlightening I just want to add something because you all spoke technical to give the subject a bit of a geopolitical perspective the climate change has a political implication I'm a specialist on Syria and what led to the Syrian crisis of course there was corruption you name it but there was a drought that came to Syria that year and of course the government is inefficient and oppressive and doesn't care that led to one million people in rural area to be driven below poverty line and they went to the cities and this what led to major discontent and this was the spark for the revolution also a lot of inter-tribe intergroups fighting in Iraq is on areas that have water so what I want to say the climate change is not in our health in 50 years it's also leading today to political instability especially area like Syria in Iraq which is the most arid area after the basin of India every 7 years they have one year of drought and we don't have any efficient solution I want to add something but you spoke about water scarcity well there are solutions for example the Mekong river Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia they did a rotation presidency where the government of the three countries discuss among them and source project to better benefit from this water thank you another question yes Hi my name is Manu I'm from India I have a question for Peter so it's a difficult one I don't know how to articulate it really so I study international relations so they trained me to be thinking as a realist so my question is would it be better not to talk about the profit motive you know and seek climate change or the combat as an industry the reason I ask this is coming from maybe a cynical point of view that I draw an analogy with what's happening around the world when you speak of war they say war is a business one of the reasons we have constant endless war is the military industrial complex so I ask this question because we have the risk that somewhere down the line there are interests that rise to almost sabotage the objective behind the scenes because it's business okay so three sets of questions one on the generation and gender one on geopolitics and one on finance so good news that you're sick so to answer the question pick your battle to start with Eugene it's easy it gives time for the others to think about what they want to do I'm completely aligned with you the effects of climate change are always there and we see them in Africa more than anywhere I referred to the deforestation but there is also the desertification that is happening today the soil is growing and it's leading actually the growers to move their herds down south and they move down south to the agricultural lands and actually now there are lots of troubles and tribe conflicts between the growers and the farmers and leading to extreme violence especially in Nigeria for example and also in north of Mali and we also have the problem as you said of drought and we had it in Africa like in the last two years in Austria and East Africa and the effects were dramatic the prices of the crops increased people on extreme poverty couldn't afford to feed themselves but to be able to have innovative solutions like the one we referred to for example in the Mekonga river it will be possible if we had more geopolitical stability to be able to do that we need to talk to each other in the countries and to build alliances and this is actually operationally very complicated today but I hope that because of the urgency and the momentum at some point our heads of states will realize that there is an emergency and that we need to talk to each other and to find solutions because it's a problem that is concerning everyone and everyone will be facing it at the end of the day James maybe a compliment so to the first question in terms of what can be a concrete measure that you could bring forward again I think we're all looking for that I would just encourage you as you think about those concrete measures think ultimately about the issue of inequality and this is what I was trying to touch on mostly is that ultimately you need to think about how can you enable people to actually use those measures there's one thing to have good policy there's one thing to have good tools but if people in the end aren't able to make use of those if people aren't able to internalize those because of other externalities because of the concern for the safety their safety or security in their work those tools won't actually be used as efficiently as you hope they will thank you so Peter on finance and then I will ask Polina because I'm sure she has a different view so I have a rather direct question to me so so I kind of wanted to touch on some of the generational conversation too is because I wanted to use actually a very personal example is that trying to narrate what we do is so fascinating right now particularly with the venture capital particularly with old venture capitalists and convincing them that they should invest, follow on finance in our portfolio companies so there are two different languages that I find myself speaking one which is about my conviction about how we should consume less we should do all of these different multi-prong approaches and focus on the impact slant of things interestingly not all of mainstream venture capital cares about that so to some degree I have to then go from talking to an entrepreneur who is very inspired about what they're doing and have so much conviction around that and then I have to put it on a very different hat and go talk to the endresons of the world the founders of the world these different sorts of investment funds thankfully all of those firms actually are forward looking but you know the other thing that I wanted to touch upon about is what motivates people you know we're all motivated by quite human things desire drives love power all of these conflicting and at the same time you know strangely compatible drives and what I notice is that some people are responding better to the narrative when I start talking about money because it is a better anchor for them psychologically and ideologically and so I want to show people hey you can have both I just try to figure out who my audience might be to give them to understand or to focus on what might motivate them and speak in a language that meets them well thank you rational view Polina so I would like to touch a question about young and old people let's I don't know old is fine to say like this but what I want to say if we are talking about human extinction it's not about old young woman man it doesn't matter so we all should unite and fight it I mean why do we need to plastic bottle to fill up our cups here why we cannot fill up it in advance and bring I mean from the cafeteria why we make a lot of waste so we we are all different it can be different approach from government but if you have some power in government so influence on it if you cannot influence 25 years you are trying to push some low it doesn't work so go to plant trees at least you will put some positive step in our planet and you will do something good or okay maybe political sphere it's not for you go to be engineer and place PV models build wind turbines it doesn't matter what just to find your best way where you can be useful this is what I think so Xavier on this question on how you mobilize across because you present us the governance the national committee and then what about the generation gap or diversity I think this question is very interesting because on the citizen convention I think 25 25% of the people are retired so we have to go over the generation gap because otherwise there won't be no decision in the end I think one of the most important thing that people let's say elderly can testify about is how the life improved over the course of the life because the carbon that we use we have used it to improve our lives to eat better to be better to have better health to have more transportation and the youngsters they probably don't realize that there's also probably the reason why they don't understand why the elderly are more attached to the way they live today because they have realized how they lived yesterday and I think that there has to be a discussion about what we can maybe as you said abandoned like plastic bottles and I don't know the fact that you have a huge car and a big house somewhere far from the city and the things that really matter because unlike my neighbor I'm not completely sure that technology can produce the entire solution and especially technology without regulation that would be able to generate money out of the air so out of the air you make money out of the air we make a lot out of the polluted air I also wanted to tackle the question of the generation gap participating in this conference I realized that I also have a personal generation gap so I'm still a Chinese citizen so in my life I didn't have the opportunity to vote for any political party and for a very long time I wasn't really interested in politics up to the point where I realized that voting is not the only opportunity to create change to create innovation and I think that's also where the younger generation sees their opportunity that without a vote they can also participate in a dialogue create change and from personal experience I can also say that in our company for instance our CTO he has worked for the automobile industry for over 30 years and at a certain point he got the realization that this is not what he wants to do for the rest of his life and what he wants to leave for the next generation it was also his personal experience that drove him to our company and this again makes it possible to learn from the older generation and learn from their experience on how you can create a sustainable future thank you yep with that please first of all I just want to say it was deeply inspiring and thank you all very much for what you contributed let me throw the policy challenge and we do plant trees but let me throw the policy challenge right now there's roughly 5.9 to 6.2 the numbers aren't in for 2019 trillion dollars being paid as fossil fuel subsidies today if you want the figures you can get them on the IMF website the problem is about 75% of those subsidies make energy provided by existing energy utilities affordable for people who can't pay market prices for it about 75% of that 5.9, 6.1 trillion one problem how do we shift that package of subsidies which would make a real difference in terms of creating alternative technology solutions and potentially make some contribution towards changing behaviors your point is very valid how do we shift that into energy transitions that actually focus on deep decarbonization and increasing use of renewables 0.1 0.2 right now we've got about 2,000 gigawatts of coal fired plants that are less than 12 years old the capital cost involved in those particular investments today is gigantic and most of it is still attracting debt service obligations from either the countries or the utilities that put it up in the first place how do we deal with that problem in the context of energy transitions it's not that we don't need to deeply decarbonize and to shift vastly towards more responsible lifestyles and to the extent that we're going to rely on fuel for electricity and mobility increasing use of renewables and to the extent that we can do that we're going to have a bigger challenge you're all making a contribution to it precisely because you're doing that I'm throwing out the bigger challenge not because I expect answers now these are really tough questions but just because that's what we all collectively face if we actually want to get down somewhere close to that 1.5 degree level maybe we'll see there is another question and I'll come back on this because I think it calls for another thing is how do we carry this conversation forward with the talent we have I don't like you I don't think we'll have the answer right especially in 2.47 2 minutes 47 seconds but it's how we carry forward and it's a challenge to Sunim and myself because yes I think part of the team we have here and others young leaders we have brought on this could work on this and come with proposition your last question in particular have been discussed when we have prepared this session and unfortunately we acknowledge that we didn't have a proper answer but it is acknowledged to your point so agreed another question please be kind another young leader that can contribute to the answer well first of all thank you so much for your presentation very exciting very inspiring I'm always I'm less skeptical than Xavier about technology I have high hopes in technology to help us move towards new business models that are more like circular economy style or that help us live with the consequences of the pollution but for now whenever I hear about all these fantastic innovations it's still very localized or regional and my question is what should be or what could be the next steps to move from local fantastic innovation to more widespread all around the world thank you I'll try to share my thoughts for your question sir on the challenge the policy challenge I think that it's almost impossible to solve the equation of one securing that middle class population still can have access to transportation and then to the carbon taxes and we see with the example of science what happened when they took off the carbon tax but at the same time we also need to invest so for me it's not a shift of the budget I think that we have to realize that we need to spend money and more money and more debt to be able to address that problem and I think that if it's more debt today it's going to be less investment tomorrow to try to solve it's going to be too late so better spend the money now and try to push that transition without harming the livelihood of the population it's controversial but I think that is necessary in this case thank you we are at the end of the time so a couple of other questions you still have the opportunity to engage with our young leaders I think on the last point we take the challenge to build something and structure something maybe not before one year but in preparation to be discussed with Thierry how he wants to handle because big challenges are thrown to young leaders and I think we should say yes to taking the challenges always say yes and then get back and surprise you with the answers thank you for your participation