 We are in a race against time to adapt to a rapidly changing climate. To put it simply, the state of the planet is broken. How can we engage the entrepreneurial force, not only of large enterprises, but of new startups, of young people? We need all hands on deck to build back after the COVID-19 pandemic. And the greatest untapped resource that we have is what's in every person's head. The only way to reach the UN SDGs by 2030 is to approach these persistent societal challenges in new ways. Uplink is a perfect platform for this because it brings together from one place, social entrepreneurs, businesses and the public who can combine their efforts. We need business and government. We need civil society. We need all citizens working together. And when we do, we can all be platforms for change. And that's why I'm so excited about Uplink. Young people in particular are very much disadvantaged when it comes to accessing a network. Uplink actually gives them a space to present their ideas and link up with mentors and networks that they might otherwise not have achieved. We're exploring how we can unite art, science and local communities to accelerate marine restoration. My identity is a non-profit organization based in Carolong with the aim to tackle the marine plastic waste. I started SUGI to bring the wisdom of the ancient forest back in the midst of urban life. Portolio Health researchers find cures and treatments that they wouldn't otherwise been able to find. We've developed a technology that can take seawater, convert it into drinking water through the photons of the sun. We all could be tremendous platforms for change. We all could imagine a better, safer, healthier, more equitable, more sustainable world. We can do it together. We can find each other. We can connect. We can create. We can invest. We can grow and we can achieve with Uplink. Uplink is a unique tool to improve the state of the world. The door is open. The solutions are there. Now is the time to transform humankind's relationship with the natural world and with each other. And we must do so together. Hello and welcome to the Davos Agenda Week. My name is John Dutton. I'm the head of Uplink here at the World Economic Forum. And we're thrilled to have you with us for this session entitled Accelerating Grassroots Innovation. This is a session which is done in collaboration with the Uplink platform. And we're thrilled to have you with us. This year marks one year since we launched Uplink in Davos a year ago in January. And we've been live since April. We've had and run more than 15 innovation challenges. As you saw in the film, there are over 900 entrepreneurs who have submitted their solutions to the platform. And today, in fact, we've passed 10,000 users on the platform. Most importantly, however, we've been able to identify nearly 100 Uplink innovators who have come from across the world representing that anyone anywhere who has a high impact solution can get the support through Uplink. Now, none of that would be possible without the support of our founding partners. And you saw them on the video that started this session, Professor Klaus Schwab in the World Economic Forum, Mark Benioff in Salesforce, as well as Punit Rengen and Deloitte. It has been tremendous to collaborate across these three organizations with dozens of colleagues who have been working tirelessly to build the Uplink platform and create this space where innovation ecosystems for SDG-oriented entrepreneurs can thrive. Today, the session that we have here is about inspiring more people to join us on Uplink, but it's also about sharing a few examples of some of the Uplink entrepreneurs who have made a difference through the platform, who are building their own initiatives, and that we're looking to help scale across the conversation. So with that, I want to really make sure I emphasize the fact that we have thousands of people joining us through the live stream. There are people dialing in from across the world, and we're really excited to have you on with us. Please do engage throughout the session. Join us at uplink.weform.org. We also have the Davos audience that's with us on Zoom. Fantastic to have everybody with us. We would encourage this to be a very interactive session. Please do chip in with any questions through the live chat. My colleague Natalie will be viewing all those questions and looking to direct that towards our panelists. But without any further ado, let me introduce them. We're thrilled to have three Uplink innovators as well as a SDG advocate with us as well. First, Moitri Sinha is the CEO and founder of Cities Rise. This is an organization that is driving mental health policies and practices in urban environments. And you can imagine in the COVID-19 pandemic, this has been especially important to see how they've been able to support various cities. Aaron Bolly is the founder and CEO of Carbon Health, a primary care provider delivering a premium experience through its modern clinics and virtual care. It's been great to see the pop-up clinics that have really thrived during the pandemic to support people in need. Diego Seizjil is the founder and CEO of Pachama, a company developing a modern market for forest carbon credits using remote sensing and machine learning to validate and monitor reforestation projects. And we have with us Hakan of Norway. Hakan is the Crown Prince of Norway. He's a longtime SDG advocate, been working with the UN development program since 2001. He's also a member of our Young Global Leaders Alumni Community. He's a founder of the Global Dignity Movement and we're thrilled to have you with us, Hakan. With that, maybe I can actually start with you, Hakan. I'd love for you to come in and we saw in the film just to start the urgency that our UN Secretary General emphasized and how we were facing a pandemic, but we can't forget that we have the global goals coming in 2030. We need to keep an eye on that to make sure we're making some serious progress. Maybe you could mention why this has been so important for you and the endeavors that you've been a part of. First of all, John, thank you for having me on this amazing panel. I'm so much looking forward to hearing the other panelists and a little bit more in detail about what they do. For me, this all started in 2001. As you mentioned, I've been working, I've been fortunate enough to be collaborating with the United Nations Development Program as a goodwill ambassador, first for the Millennium Development Goals and now for the Sustainable Development Goals. And I don't know, maybe some of you who are listening out there are even a little bit tired of hearing about the Sustainable Development Goals. We talk about them a lot. Personally, I don't think that's... I mean, for me, I'm not tired of them at all. I love the Sustainable Development Goals. We, of course, live now in a time with quite a few challenges. We have the COVID pandemic, the climate challenges that we are facing. So it's a world with enough challenges. But we do have the Sustainable Development Goals, this roadmap where we want to go as a global community. And it's a plan on how we can create the future that we all want. And I love that they are concrete and that we can actually move in that direction. And of course, we do need the politicians. We need the international organizations. We do need the companies. But we also need you and hopefully me as well. I mean, we need everyone. And if there's one thing you can take from this session, or I'm hoping that it will take from this session for me, is that you think about these 17 goals and work out for yourself which ones that you think that you can contribute, where you can contribute. Mine are number one, no poverty, and number 14, life below water. So look at them and see where you can contribute. And of course, with these panelists, with Moitri and Diego and Aaron, you have all taken this to the next level. You started organizations, companies that are really pushing the envelope to see how we can reach these goals as quickly as possible. But I find that just amazingly inspirational. So thank you for letting me be on the panel together with these amazing entrepreneurs. Thank you very much, Haken. Well, you said it well. The SDGs are important for Uplink. We've started the year with a focus on three of them. SDG 14 that you mentioned, one of your favorites are on the ocean, but also looking at reforestation and looking at the COVID pandemic. So SDG 3, SDG 15, which is looking at land. And I thought we could actually come to our entrepreneurs now. One of the things that we're really excited about Uplink is that it does provide some opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators. And I'd love to hear from you guys around what is the need, what are some of the challenges you're facing and how a platform like Uplink has been able to support your efforts. Moitri, maybe I could come to you first in the mental health space. What are some of the things that you have seen are really important in terms of the innovation ecosystem? Thank you so much. And thank you for the opportunity to be part of the Uplink platform and community here. I think when we think about mental health and well-being, this remains one of the most pressing needs from a health and humanity and society perspective. And when we think about the kind of issues you really need to be working at speed, at scale. And I think when you think about that, how do you really come behind the innovation that's happening in actual communities in different local contexts and cultures? And how do you bring sort of the grassroots energy and insights of young people and entrepreneurs in communities, but connect them with systems that need to change? That that's where I think a platform like Uplink that provides a different type of capacity is because you're essentially trying to do a few things at the same time. You're trying to kind of see that how do you come behind local contextual solutions, but in a globally networked way? And that requires something that allows you to build these types of communities of practice, which is where I think the partnership with Uplink has been phenomenal. I think the other area is the need for collaborations. I think the scale of these issues require multiple stakeholders to work together. So how do you work locally, collaboratively, but also across cultures, across sectors, across generations? And thirdly, when you look at the scale of knowledge and information out there, how do you harness that? How do you harness the insights of communities and how do you bring that world together to come behind a shared thing? So I think those are a number of different ways. I think the partnership that Uplink and when we think about the challenges that we are looking to solve. Thank you very much for that, Moitri. Diego, if this is the 2020 was the year of COVID, it was also a year in which we saw really dramatic forest fires around the world. The restoration efforts are bigger than ever. How has Uplink been helpful for an entrepreneur like yourself that's focusing on conservation, reforestation, restoration? Absolutely, and thank you so much, John, and everyone for inviting me to participate in this panel. In Pachama, we are working to restore and protect forest as a solution to climate change. We use technology, satellite images, and artificial intelligence to measure and monitor the current sequestration that forests are providing. And with that, hopefully, helping drive more funding for reforestation and forest conservation. And as you said, in this time, it's more essential than ever, forests not only play a super important role in climate change, but also on health. So we need all hands on deck, and Uplink has been a very helpful platform. Entrepreneurs, we start with an idea, we start building a team, but then it's required a community effort. We need a lot of collaboration from around the world. We are trying to help start forest in different geographies around the world. We are looking to partner with organizations that want to achieve net zero or carbon neutrality, and that requires connections in a community. And Uplink has provided that, so I'm super excited about the role that Uplink will have on our success. And hopefully, on the success of many more entrepreneurs and innovators trying to bring the solutions to the world. Thanks, Diego. Erin, let's come to you for Carbon Health. What is the opportunity and how does Uplink provide an important aspect for your growth? First of all, thank you for having me, John, here. We are a technology-enabled healthcare provider, and especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, where we bought technology developers, helping build resources to help with controlling COVID-19. But we also help with frontline people, so we have done over a million tests with a relatively small team. We have done roughly a dozen solutions since last year, all the way from mobile testing solutions and pop-ups, and we have a good, positive program to help people recover fast. I think one of the biggest challenges is that when you are fighting a pandemic, it's not something you can do in an isolated way as a private company. Public health is obviously very involved with the government, so we have been always open to local partnerships, local government partnerships. And as an example, right now, vaccine rollout in the United States has been a huge issue. So we partnered with Los Angeles City to actually help run their vaccine program with tens of thousands of people per day. And these types of things require very sort of technology and government partnership. So I think the uplink has been extremely helpful in highlighting some of the work, especially the public health, but we have been involved in and that actually brought us credibility. So right now we are getting interest from dozens of cities like several larger states who are really wanting to actually partner in their vaccine rollouts and because they realize that sometimes private technology companies who also have a lot of experience in them have full-time work can be really helpful in deploying this large-scale, large-scale, large-scale goal solution when the government can actually always move that fast. Fantastic. I do want to just build on that and maybe remind our audience you talked about visibility, credibility. One of the things we've been excited is being able to provide this for some of the top innovators that have come through the platform. Part of this is by building the brand of uplink. We've partnered this week with TikTok and so far the campaign, which is called hashtag my big idea has already had 13 million views across the campaign. We hope that those of you who are streaming the session live would be up for going to TikTok if you have an account. If you don't, it's a good opportunity if you go and create one or ask your kids how to create one. But to be able to get on there and contribute to this campaign and hopefully it'll get more people that are excited to join us on uplink. Let me do one last rapid-fire round with our panelists before we pull in questions from the audience. That is a reminder. If you do have questions, put them in the chat and we will make sure we get to as many of them as possible. Let me come back to each of our entrepreneurs first. Maybe to you again, Aaron, I was hoping you'd give the audience a sense of what are your next stages of growth? Over the next 12 to 18 months, what are you looking to achieve and what are some of the needs you have to achieve that impact? So we have started a very really rapid growth phase. I think in 2020 it already started going fast, but now things have just accelerated in ways that we were not anticipating before. So I think we went from roughly 100 people in 2020 when we first started working with uplink to now 1200 people and then there might be like 4,000-5,000 people because I think the essential work we provide, which is being able to provide high-quality care and using technology to remove all the fraction so that healthcare access can be just expanded beyond what it was excessive to before. So that will click with the pandemic response where you now need to vaccinate hundreds of millions of people. You now need to test people. You now need to help companies in these efforts. I think for us, we are realizing that majority of the impact we can provide is only accessible to working with local governments and right now the focus is in the United States because healthcare is not a local thing, but eventually I think we'll have an international global ambition. So we would love to work with other companies, maybe not today, but we are still a small company for the task. So I think that those relationships, those connections, and also the know-how about how to work with governments in these initiatives, it will continue to become a core focus for us and we are hoping to get that help like a long-term plan about the subject. Great. Hopefully we can build on that in some of the breakout sessions. Moitri, what about you? Are there a couple ambitions that you have for the coming year and any needs that you would mention? Yeah, sure. Thank you, John. You know, we started this work in five cities, Chennai, Nairobi, Bogota, Seattle, and Sacramento, and over the last couple of years, working with the youth and entrepreneurs on the field, we've created a roadmap called the mental health friendly cities. So it's essentially a way to think about what is the local action that can be taken. And one of the things that I think is really going to be critical for us over the next 12 to 18 months is that as we looked at that innovation space from about 100 of youth-led ideas from how to use, you know, arts to other forms in schools, colleges, settlements, along with social entrepreneurs and some of the city leaders that this framework that we have created for practical action, how do you pivot it towards the SDGs to create a shared framework across cities? So I think for us over the next 12 to 18 months, enlisting more cities to join and work together along with these first five cities to see what are those first 10 steps every city in the world can take to start becoming more mental health friendly that that's sort of our bold and ambitious, you know, aspiration. And I think what's going to be critical is that how do we draw in more, you know, innovative funders and investors as well as people who really want to collaborate whether it's from public, private, data technology sectors. So thank you so much. Diego, what about on your side? Yes, so at Pachama, we are connecting in one side companies that are seeking to achieve net zero or to make important climate action with reforestation and forest conservation projects that are removing carbon from the atmosphere and we validate the claims of these projects using satellite images and AI. This year, we hope to continue partnering with more corporations. We already have partnered with Microsoft Amazon Shopify, but we hope that every company decides to take climate action. So one of the areas for growth is to continue partnering with organizations that want to support effective reforestation and restoration. In the other hand, we also have a very ambitious goal this year of helping start more reforestation projects. If we are to solve climate change, we need to harness the 1 billion hectares that we have available for reforestation in the planet. And that means that we need to start thousands of new reforestation projects that need to be financed and certified for carbon credits. So we're going to be putting a lot of effort on to building technologies and software to help those foresters on the ground getting started. Those are some of our ambitions for this year. Those are all pretty exciting ones. Listen, Hakan, I wanted to come to you quickly before we open up. I see there's at least one question that's come through, but please do keep them coming. Hakan, one of the Norwegian uplink innovators, Penovo, received a call out from your Prime Minister over the summer. And I wondered if you had any other examples of innovators or entrepreneurs either in Norway or kind of throughout the world and some of the efforts you've been a part of that have struck your eye and that you've been excited to see grow. Well, I've seen many examples of initiatives and entrepreneurs that have really been doing great work in moving the world forward from, you know, in this organization working on collecting plastic from the ocean in Mozambique to Tonga, where this organization was planting mangroves to safeguard coastline from the rising ocean. You know, these interlinkages is also something that strikes me. When I go up to the far north and I see in Svalbard an island way up north of it's a Norwegian island, but it's up north of the mainland. You would think that these are the most pristine areas in the world. There's very few people that go there. But you see that there is plastic at the beaches and we know that it's more effective than other places when it comes to climate change because the temperature rises about twice of that in the average of the world. So this interconnectedness is something that really strikes me. Where we have a crisis right now with the pandemic, I think it sort of brings out the worst in us, but also the best in us. Understandably so maybe we do want to safeguard what's their task, those that are close to us. At the same time we have this potential to unleash a tremendous amount of compassion and care and creativity. And I think that's what we're seeing in these entrepreneurs that really move the envelope on these important topics. And I think uplink is one of the examples of how we can work together because I really believe in bringing people together and I think that we are definitely less vulnerable when we stand together. So that's great Huckin. We do have one question that has come in from Jody Padilla, asking about how kind of people that aren't entrepreneurs, aren't investors, aren't experts could get involved. And I think that for us has been one of the main parts of uplink that's so important. It is about getting anybody involved. You can now get on and actually review the public and review submissions. You can contribute in the various action groups which are digital communities. But I suppose just to honor your question, Jody, I wonder if Diego Aaron or Moitri would like to talk about how they're engaging, let's say, young people or people that aren't necessarily from other parts of the innovation ecosystem. How are you looking to engage let's say our fellow citizens in the world? Sure. Happy to chime in, John. I would say that today in a world in which all the companies are remote, we can seek to form teams distributed around the world. And at Pachama, we already have team members in Australia, in the US, in South America. And I think that the innovators and the entrepreneurs of the near future are going to build distributed teams. And I think in that sense uplink is a great platform to probably meet your next co-founder who fairly hires on your venture. And yes, it's great to see a global community and through comments on the platform, through posting, through private messaging, it's a great way to engage with a diverse group of talented young people from around the world. It's a great reminder. Really uplink is a public platform. It's open to anybody. It's the first forum platform that's allowed anybody to come on board and take action. And in fact, the one that you're a part of the Trillion Trees community has over 500 different members who are contributing on a regular basis and bringing to life some of these issues and intersections. We're running out of time for the first half of our segment and it has been fantastic to hear from each of you. Thank you for those contributions. We're going to finish this first half hour with one more inspirational call to action from some of the key stakeholders of uplink. A bit of a reminder, those of you who are with us on Zoom, please do stay on board after the film that we're about to play. We will continue on with a private conversation. Everybody that's been live streaming the session please do join us on uplink and we're excited to see what types of innovations and solutions will come through thanks to your involvement. So with that, maybe we close with this inspirational film and then we'll carry on. We've achieved impressive success but it is now recognized as a globally inclusive platform for addressing the SDGs. We must use this moment to truly catalyze change. We must identify what is working, the new ways and innovations that are delivering results for students and what we can learn from and scale. We can do it together as entrepreneurs, as visionaries, we can do it to helping each other, supporting each other. We're going to be focusing on helping you. We're all becoming ecopreneurs. We're all focusing on ecopreneurship. How can we not? The night our video got published. In the first 24 hours we generated almost 2000 leads. Our funds were running off the hook. It also brought enormous amount of people downloading the app and actually requesting a forest. Prime Minister of Norway actually gave us a video message congratulating us being part of a platform like Uplink and benefiting from the exposure that this platform has was a real game changer. It's the access that it gets us to important stakeholders that we would not have had access to before. I urge you to get engaged and to use this tool for the benefit of all of us for the benefit of humankind.