 So many people have been speaking about the climate crisis. So many things have been put on paper, but the real question is why is it that we're still not acting at the scale and speed that is necessary? What we want to see at COP 27 is moving pledges into implementation. Every stakeholder needs to step up and push forward. The extreme weather events that the scientists have long connected to the climate crisis are becoming far more frequent and far more destructive. The climate crisis is a threat multiplier, which means it exacerbates existing inequities in our society. The impacts are felt most deeply by black, indigenous, and communities of color. We're living through an explosion of inequality. We need to remember we're on the same planet, and this is the planet that we need to make sustainable for the whole of humanity. Climate change is impacting food security as well as political stability in many nations around the world. Five years ago, there were 80 million people marching towards starvation. That number had jumped to 135 million. What caused the jump? It was man-made conflict, like in Ukraine, compounded with climate shocks. No one is as vulnerable to climate change as farmers are. If you talk transformation, the first thing they want to know is, what must I do on my farm? This Chalmache Cop is the moment to set up monitoring and accountability mechanisms and put money on the table to help developing countries to accelerate towards decarbonizing. We know that this transition will require a fast adoption of a lot of new technologies. And the question today is how to find the appropriate way to find this technology. To put a number around it, it's an extra two and a half to three trillion dollars a year of additional finance that we have to find in order to get those emissions down. Financial institutions have a lot of roles to play to bring the advice and provide the financing to make these transitions happen. Younger generations are demanding a sense of purpose. They want to look at companies and say, I am investing with you all for this reason. With two cops taking place in Africa and the Middle East, we have this tremendous opportunity to put emerging markets at the forefront of our collective response to climate change. International trade has to be part of the solution. How do we all get together to talk about a global carbon price that can guide us and help us to decarbonize the world? The solutions are there. What we need is governments to regulate, to invest and we need business to act with values. History will look at us, people, politicians, corporate leaders. These times requires not only solutions but speed. There is nowhere else to look than the mirror. We are the ones that need to do this. Welcome all. I'm Helen Mountford, President and CEO of Climate Works Foundation. On behalf of the World Economic Forum, I'm delighted to welcome you to this discussion on decarbonizing road transport. This discussion is absolutely critical now as delegates and climate experts gather in Egypt to discuss how we can step up the speed and scale of action to tackle the climate crisis. Decarbonizing road transport will be critical to this. It's responsible for about a third of greenhouse gas emissions in cities and the transportation sector is also a significant and growing source of outdoor air pollution, which kills over 4 million people annually. According to the World Health Organization, 99% of the global population breathes in air that exceeds their guidelines for air pollution. To meet our bold climate action, climate goals, to meet our bold climate goals and to tackle air pollution, we need to electrify transport powered by clean electricity and to build compact mixed-use cities that can prioritize walking, biking and public transport solutions. We need both of these to happen. Both of these strategies are gonna be needed around the world in developed and developing nations alike. So this means that we need bus lanes in Los Angeles and we need electric cars in Nairobi and much more around the world. We need rapid progress on both starting today. Fortunately, Momentum is building rapidly to decarbonize road transport from both governments and the private sector. The Global New Mobility Coalition, which brings together civic, public and private stakeholders has helped to accelerate the shift by engaging ride hailing and shared mobility, bike and scooter companies to support policies like the Clean Mile Standard, a first-of-its-kind regulation adopted by California to transition ride hailing cleats to zero-emission vehicles by 2030. What other recent actions and signs of progress will help the world achieve 100% zero-emission mobility? We'll discuss this today and also how we can all work together better to actually accelerate this transition. The private sector has a critical role to play in doing so and accelerating e-mobility. So today we've brought together two industry leaders to hear how they see decarbonization efforts moving and the policies they need to help drive even more ambitious action more rapidly. It's with great pleasure that I introduced our two panelists. First we have Dara Kaus Roshauhi, CEO of Uber, the largest ride-sharing business on the planet and who has also emerged as a key player in supporting the shift to electrification of transport. We also have with us Francesco Starracci, CEO and General Manager of NL. NL started as an Italian National Energy Distributor, but today the organization has a presence in 29 countries across five continents where it's helping to lead the transformation of the energy sector by stepping up its investment in digitization, e-mobility and decarbonization. Welcome, Dara, welcome, Francesco. It's wonderful to have you here. Let me launch- Thanks for having us. Welcome. Let me quickly launch into a couple of questions for each of you if I can. Dara, let me start with you to kick off our discussion. Uber has made really bold commitments to go electorate. Given that the majority of vehicles on your platform are owned by the drivers, how does Uber help them to get into electric vehicles? And where are you today in terms of this transition to electrification and in terms of pooling? Well, thank you, Ellen, for the question. And we ask ourselves the question all the time. I think ultimately the way we approach a problem is that we have to get the economic flywheel of incentives moving in a positive direction in order to incent more and more of our driver base to buy an electric vehicle when it's time for them to turn over their vehicle. The good news is our drivers drive a lot. So our fleet is going to turn over a number of times between now and 2030. And we have made a commitment that by 2030 we want to be a zero emissions mobility platform in the US, Canada and Europe, and then by 2040 all over the world. So really your focus is building that economic flywheel. We're putting up about $800 million out of investment from our own pockets to support the transition of our driver. And a couple of examples of what we're doing is for example, we cut our own booking fee for drivers of electric vehicles. So that what you're seeing is essentially drivers who are driving an electric vehicle on Uber are making about 10 to 15% more because of the reduction in booking fees that we take out. And that creates an incentive for them to switch over to an electric vehicle. At the same time, we are going out to industry and working with manufacturers as well as other players in the ecosystem to make available lower cost electric vehicles to our driver base. One partnership that we're very proud of is a partnership with Hertz. Hertz is sourcing 50,000 Teslas to put it on the road, to put them on the road and is making those Teslas available in an affordable way for our drivers so that they can rent a Tesla on a weekly basis. They don't have to make kind of a yearly commitment. And the results that we're seeing there are really encouraging. We've got over 26,000 now monthly active drivers who are driving EVs. In California, for example, about 9% of our kilometers driven are on EVs and London is our shining light in terms of the single city where about 15% of kilometers are now EVs and 90% of drivers who are signing up in London to drive are doing so now with electric vehicles as well. So I think that flywheel is starting to move in the right direction but we need partners, private partners, manufacturers, financing companies, rental companies, et cetera. And we also need partnership from government both local and federal to make this happen. Thank you so much, Dara, for explaining how you're getting that economic flywheel turning in the right way, creating a virtuous circle of incentives for drivers to shift quickly to electric vehicles including investments yourself, including by reducing the booking fee for electric drivers and through those partnerships, which can get moving. Now let me turn to you, Francesco. Of course, electrifying our vehicle fleet will only lead to the emissions reductions that we need if the electricity sector is actually based on clean renewable energy. So NL is one of the companies really leading the charge on this. Renewables we know are now cheaper than fossil fuels for new energy, almost everywhere globally. Are you seeing the shift that we need to clean electricity? And if not, what is holding us back? Yeah, I think the shift is clearly in the way and it is something that is no more driven by policies enacted by government. It's perhaps facilitated if you want to some extent, but it's basically based on economics. So I think this is going to stay looking forward, in particular under the project circumstances we observe in the Ukraine-Russia situation. So commodity prices will stay high for a long time and I don't think this is going to be, it's going to be accelerating this trend. So the question is, how long will it take to really materially impact the carbon footprint of a large country, say the US, of a large economic area as Europe? And if you look at the depths of thermal generation that needs to be displaced by this new renewable additions and the demand growth that electricity will experience because it's not only the transportation that's being electrified, it's also the heating that's being electrified at the meantime. So you combine these two things and say, this is a lot of work in front of us in terms of displacing whatever exists. And it's, we're talking about 100,000 megawatts of thermal capacity that still needs out there and coping with additional demand that's coming in. So the effort is monumental. I think you see basically the world renewable energy demand growing continuously, you see the growth year on year including years of crisis or difficulties as COVID. But the erosion of thermal generation, it is happening but not fast enough. So what needs to be done is funding. Yes, I would argue this is not the limiting factor today worldwide. The limiting factor today is worldwide is another one. It's supply chain constraints on some critical components that have shown during this year and the year before their limits. I mean, there is an unbalanced and tangled value chain in some of the important components of this transformation. And more deeply, the major constraint, the major bottleneck today is the amount of skilled people you can put at work at the unit of time that would move this money into objects, into power plants, into stuff that will trigger this up. Today, the limit of our growth in renewables is mostly skilled people. Secondly, the available hardware at the right time and eventually money, but money is really not the major bottleneck here. So that's where we really need to work and that has to do with training people from one job to another and doing that fast enough, motivating them in the right way. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs that need to be moved from one sector to the other in a very short time if we want to really accelerate this trend. I think that's really what it's all about. And I think in this case, governments are important much more than just giving incentives. I mean, it's not anymore an issue of incentivization. It's an issue of promoting this change in the workforce. The examples, the IRA in the US is positive because it has given a signal that jobs can be destroyed, but more jobs need to be created on the other side. So it's how to transform the skills of people into different skills, giving them a longer job opportunity in general. That's really what the challenge is for the, I would say short, middle term. Thank you, Francesco, it is both a challenge and an opportunity. This is about the sort of growth story of the future. The economics are right and it's something which can actually create the jobs, create jobs, good jobs as we go forward, but we need to get the skills moving quickly enough to be able to meet the demand. Let me ask one more question over to you, Dara, back to you on this. You mentioned both London and California as regions that we're seeing real success in moving forward. And I know Uber has had great success there in terms of electrifying the fleet. Is this driven by relevant policies and regulations in those regions? And what else can we learn from that? You mentioned already partnerships and how critical those are. What do you see as critical to the success that you've seen in both London and California? Well, I think London and California are a great example of public policy and then private entrepreneurship coming together to create momentum in the right direction. From our standpoint, what is clearly needed, first of all, is EV supply. Francesco talked about supply chain. EVs historically have been luxury items. And they have appealed more to higher demographics. And the fact is we've got to take that luxury item and we have to make it a mass market item in order for this transition to happen in a real way. And so some of the EV subsidies that are in the market allow what was a luxury to become more of a commodity and making it affordable for our driver base to make the switchover. The other factor here is charging. And this is a very significant infrastructure investment. And again, it's a commitment that has to be borne by both public and private as well. But we need charging infrastructure in the center of cities obviously where a significant amount of mobility happens. But we also need charging infrastructure in the neighborhoods where, for example, our drivers live, which are not typically in the center of cities. And this is a really important population to target because the average Uber driver, for example, is driving four times the kilometers than the average driver. So I think you have to take a view not necessarily in terms of the number of vehicles but the number of kilometers that you're targeting. And I think in California, you've seen kind of the California Nalanda, you've seen the magic of pretty aggressive EV incentives creating more affordability, the charging infrastructure being built up and it continues to be built up and we need more investment in charging. And then a combination of comprehensive road and emissions pricing. I'd say a great example of that is London's congestion charge that has an EV exemption that again gets that economic flywheel going. I think the funding there is there, the government financing, et cetera, is there for the private sector. But you've got to make that funding make its way to the average person on the ground and for Uber's average driver who is making very important economic decisions about what they're going to make next month and what they're gonna make the next year. And that key investment that they're making in their vehicle, which is a significant earnings platform for them. Thanks so much. And wonderful to hear about those policies that are helping to bring the cost down, make electric vehicles affordable and with charging stations for those who need them rather than really a luxury good, which is really helping to shift the market as well as support your drivers. One final question for you, Dara, before I know you need to leave. Let's talk about what's happening with trucks. Uber Freight is one of the largest logistics and transportation networks in the world. What do you see as the potential to positively disrupt the freight industry and decarbonize it? And what policies and regulations do you need to help do that? I think the most important factor as it relates to Freist, really the focus that we have is the deadhead miles. So about, we estimate about 25 to 30% of miles driven on trucks are empty because taking a load to a destination and then coming back empty home, then they might take another load from that destination. We are very focused on using our pricing technology, routing technology algorithms in creating a liquid marketplace where you have over a million truckers essentially getting real-time access to all of the potential loads out there. It's very difficult for humans to kind of make their way through this data, but it's much easier for computers to do so. So we're using AI algorithms and machine learning essentially to give opportunities to drivers that are essentially two-way opportunities. Take a load out, get paid to come take a load in. Often those kinds of opportunities are separate there for two different companies, et cetera. We're trying to bring those opportunities together so that again, these drivers are ultimately making economic decisions, but it's in their economic interest to essentially commit an outward leg and a leg back that is carrying freight properly. That effectively takes deadhead miles down and creates a much more efficient network as we continue to make investments in electric flying, trucking, et cetera, which is frankly behind where passenger vehicles are, but there isn't a network efficiency that you can introduce through technology, and that's right now our focus with Uberfrater. Wonderful to hear. Thank you so much. So doing the same now, starting with trucking as we've seen happening with passenger vehicles. Francesco, one final question for you. I know with the NLX way, NL is positioned to support electric mobility in 17 countries. How are you doing so in partnering with cities, the public and other companies to actually accelerate this transition? We have today probably the largest privately owned system of low voltage, medium voltage networks around major metropolitan areas around the world. In Europe, in Latin America, we have all the larger cities, Sao Paulo, Rio, Bogota, Santiago, Buenos Aires. So Lima, so we've seen this booming demand of chargers pretty early, and we have now established a brand that is doing that, you know, putting chargers wherever needed. There are three issues here that I would like to point. Number one, that was right. I mean, the number of cars is important, but not exactly always the only thing that needs to be taken care of. There are two other considerations. The pattern of driving an electric car and charging it is not exactly the same with what that we used to have with antenna combustion engine. So you have to understand that charging happens when the car is not used, and it's not constructive to stop the car and charge while doing something with the car. So that requires a different organization and logistics, where you want to put the chargers. And second, the evolution of technology of cars is still not at steady state. So there is the need to go back, to the chargers you have installed four or five years ago and change them because cars have evolved. And that has to do with the fact that batteries, technologies, and all that stuff is still not completely at peace. So you need to get back into the structure and change it over and over, and you have to, you know, make up your mind that you want to be in this game, you have to understand this is the what happens. Now, clearly, major cities, major cities have their challenges, you know, it's a congested place, you cannot count on chargers to be welcomed everywhere at the same way, but has to do with the fact that this novelty has to happen and it will eventually take place. Today, we have put down almost 23,000 chargers at the end of 22 public chargers and more than 200,000 on a privately owned basis around our network systems. We planned that this, we think this number will reach about two millions by 2025. So it's skyrocketing and it's going very, very fast. We are covering the full value chain, the hardware, the software, the platform, the service of the network, everything. And I think this is going to go on for a while. And we are partnering with some large car manufacturing companies that had initially started considering putting down their networks and then they understood it's way past the capability of car manufacture. And so we have joined venture with Volkswagen Group, for example, on this sense and with others to make sure that they have their own projections of chargers covered by us the way we can. Overall, I think it will take probably an adjustment back and forth between the industry that will have to churn out more cars and trucks and subsequently or us coming a little bit earlier to put down more chargers so that people don't fear their charge experience to be negative. I think it will take about five years more of an effort for this to kind of become normal. I mean, today it's still in some cases considered strange to have an electric vehicle and kind of an adventurous experience. We don't want this to happen anymore and in most places where we are. I would say that if you look at cars, trucks, you have to look also at buses. I mean, the electrification of public transport in the way of buses, it's already in the money now by and large. Today we own the largest privately owned fleet of buses outside of China with more than 4,000 buses being in operation in the cities that I just mentioned and growing very fast. The experience of buses is much better in terms of personal experience. The transportation and electric buses is better. The quality of transportation is better, quieter, softer, much better from many standpoints and the costs for the service are definitely lower. Charging stations are clearly much larger. They require a different technology, but the bus experience I think will be for many people the first experience of electric transportation and then they will push back into their private domain. So I think it's a very important part of the carbonizing transportation, the bus fleets. Thank you, Francesco. And both for what NL is doing, partnering with so many countries to actually get the infrastructure and the charging infrastructure in place and also for raising the importance of electric buses which can help move people in mass transit in a much more affordable way as well. So that's going to be so critical. As always, there's so much more we could discuss than time permits, but I'd like to thank our two wonderful speakers for sharing their insights. We've had Francesco as Darafe, CEO and general manager of NL and Dara Khazrashawhi, CEO of Uber here to really share their insights on how we're making progress on decarbonizing transport and what more is on the horizon as we go forward. So it's been a great pleasure talking to you both and thank you to the World Economic Forum for hosting this conversation and for all of you who joined us here today. Thank you and best wishes for the rest of the day. Bye.