 What kind of world do I want to live in? I think about this question a lot. For our generation and for specifically my group of people, which is refugees, the circumstances might dismantle any vision of the future that we have. You're trying to rebuild, you're trying to make a future for yourself, and then the climate-related disaster can only start again. It's not about how it's affecting you now, it's about how it's affecting you your entire life. The first step to understand is that we're all a part of it. None of us are going to be left out by the crisis. We're at a stage where if we don't act now, really there won't be very much left. There are generations that will never see certain things that we grew up seeing in real life. We have to start treating this like the emergency it is. To achieve the 17 sustainable development goals, we have to go from an intention to a serious commitment. Business leaders really need to rethink how they conduct their business and invest in creating systems that are climate friendly. The action I would like to see is accountability. Structures being put in place where countries aren't just asked to do something, but they're kept accountable to the decisions that they make. There has to be that strong collaboration between government, between corporations, between youth activists to drive change forward. The world I would want to live in is a world where imagining the future is not a privilege. I want to live in a world where people do not give up on hope. Hope that a positive change is possible. The fact that you're listening today means that you are willing to make a change. Welcome to the Uplink Daily. I'm your host, Emanuela Orsini, joining you from the Sustainable Development Impact Summit here at the World Economic Forum headquarters in Geneva. In this session, we'll introduce you to some of the top innovations set to transform one of the most undervalued food systems in the world, blue food. Blue foods, fish, invertebrates, algae, and aquatic plants are incredible sources of nutrition for billions of people all around the world. And if they were to be sustainably managed, they could feed many, many more. To aid in this effort, Uplink and Friends of Ocean Action earlier this year launched the Blue Food Challenge, a search for innovations which can support global food systems to produce nutritional, sustainable, and economically viable aquatic food. Today, we're going to announce the top blue food innovations that were submitted to the challenge and talk to some of the people involved to find out how the impact of these innovations can be scaled. But before we do that, let's watch this short video to find out more about the Blue Food Challenge. Blue foods are captured or cultured in rivers and lakes in the ocean, and they include fish and invertebrates, algae, and aquatic plants. They're a wonderful source of locally produced nutrition for millions of people, and if sustainably managed have huge potential to feed so many more. Good opportunities is the call for innovation to maximize the nutritional benefits these foods provide for the communities which rely on them. The call is for innovation to focus on supporting local economies, taking gender transformative approaches with environmental sustainability as the ruling principle. The number about this challenge is World Economic Forum Global Shaper Barkha Mose, who is also a member of the Expert Panel, which selected the winners of the Blue Food Challenge. Thank you for joining us on the Uplink Daily Barkha. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Barkha, you have a passion for innovation and have long been a supporter of the Blue Economy. Can you tell us why the Blue Food Challenge is so important? So the term Blue Foods for me encapsulates a new concept that would actually allow people to access these important sources of protein in a dignified manner, while also considering the environmental impacts of harvesting such foods and also the different considerations that go with it, social justice element, the human rights aspect, because seafood industry is right with gray areas when it comes to human rights, when it comes to fair pay, when it comes to dignified work. So when we talk of Blue Foods, it's very, very important to think that this concept would actually interlink different principles of sustainability, food security, food sovereignty, exploration of different species, exploration of different ways of farming those species in order to feed the African continent. So for me, the reason why I'm so excited about Blue Foods and this particular challenge on Uplink is because it truly allows us to unlock the potential of fisheries, freshwater aquatic foods, seafood and all other different types of exciting sources of protein for the continent. And what I've been very excited to note is many of the submissions for this challenge actually have an Africa focus. What particularly excited you about the innovation submitted to the challenge? What's truly excited me about the innovations that were submitted to this challenge are the fact that they come from a very broad range of geographical scopes. There were innovations ranging from Scotland to different parts of Africa and many of these projects also looked at covering a range of countries, not just focus on specific countries, but also looked at exchanging best practices and expanding, scaling up into neighboring communities. The projects that were bearing in mind, the scalability, the interchangeability of Blue Foods across different communities in different countries, taking into consideration transpounding resources, that to me showed that the innovators who submitted proposals were thinking very hard and knew the resources they were working with, knew the geographical area that they were working with and also knew that communities would benefit best. Some of the submissions even consider women and as we know women have been largely absent from conversations on the Blue Economy. A lot of women are engaged in the indirect food processing side rather than actually the harvesting side or even the design of strategies on Blue Foods, on Blue Economy, on seafood and fisheries. So seeing that some of the submissions actually included them actively was very, very interesting to me. What do you hope these innovations will go on to achieve? So my personal hope is that these innovators will be able to address in a very nexus approach the issue of job creation and the issue of food insecurity on the continent and be able to tap into the different regional value chains, the continental value chain that is now being offered by the African continental free trade area to be able to address the different bottlenecks like cold chain storage or reaching the people who need these proteins the most or even ensuring a fair price for these products. So my hope is really that this innovation challenge will address that. My second hope is that this will shed light on how crucial Blue Foods are to the whole planet and how we need to give a big focus on the people who are producing on the people involved at different stages of the value chain and to provide support to them to be able to expand, scale up and truly contribute globally through their solutions. Thank you Barkha for that insight. To tell us more about these innovations, we're now joined by uplink ocean community success lead Emily Kelly. Now Emily, what did the response to this challenge tell you about the current and future state of the Blue Food industry? We had a really amazing response to this challenge. We had over 70 contributions come in during the open period and it was exciting to see submissions coming in from six different continents with so many different types of ways of tackling the challenges that face aquatic foods but also really exciting ways in which aquatic foods could be promoted in food systems and that's one of the big things that we were interested in in this challenge is thinking more about how can aquatic foods fit into our food systems globally. How many innovators did you choose and can you tell us about a few of the solutions that you found particularly exciting? We selected 11 wonderful innovators to be top innovators of this cohort and all of whom have really inspiring solutions in aquatic foods. So a couple that I would love to share more details on Fideck Tanzania is working on locally produced dried fish powder to contribute to nutritional programs and this is a really great way to deliver protein and to reduce waste of fish by utilizing fish that might otherwise go bad. Abalobi is a tool for empowering small scale fishers increasing traceability and connecting fishers to markets. They're based in South Africa but now starting to pilot in many other locations around the world to support many different types of fisheries and Asia ice is scaling cold chain access for women led fish retailers and other small and medium-sized enterprises. This innovation is at the intersection of reducing food loss, sustainable energy use and empowering women. We also have innovators on seaweed supply chains using insect larvae for fish feed and working from within communities on marine protected areas that can better support fishers and food security in the long term. Our emphasis for innovations that we selected was finding solutions that contribute to delivering nutrition to communities are ecologically sustainable and engage in communities to contribute to social sustainability. So we're really excited about this cohort of top innovators because they deliver on all these different elements and we're really thrilled to be supporting them moving forward. So now that they've been selected what support will they receive to help them grow and what impact do you hope this will have on them? Now that we have our cohort selected the Friends of Ocean Action with Uplink Ocean and our partners in this challenge who are X, World Fish, Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions and the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Ocean are honored to support them coming up over a six-month period. In particular the programming will increase their visibility for each organization through social media videos produced and promoted by the World Economic Forum, global exposure through forum and partner events, facilitated introductions for partner potential investment and mentoring opportunities, workshops and meetings that support their needs and one-year access to the forum's digital platform and we're really looking forward to providing the support that these innovators need, meeting them where they are right now such that they can scale their solutions moving forward. Thank you Emily for sharing your thoughts with us today. And now it's time to reveal which innovations submitted to the Blue Food Challenge have been chosen to become top Uplink innovators and to receive support from Uplink, Friends of Ocean Action and their partners to help them grow and have an impact in communities all around the world. You can see here now the names of the winners. Congratulations to all of you. Now it's time to hear from one of the brilliant entrepreneurs who has just been announced as one of the winners of the Blue Food Challenge and to receive the support and benefits that Emily just spoke about. Congratulations and thank you for joining us. Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your innovation? Thanks so much. Hi, I'm Sergio Ramacos. I'm the founder and managing director of Abalobi and we're a startup based in Cape Town, South Africa and what we try and do is co-design basic cloud and mobile technologies that help fishers do things differently. Differently in the way they engage with the fisheries authority around conservation, fisheries management and differently in the way they engage around safety at sea and community based safety at sea. And last but not least differently in the way they engage with the market. How do fishers use our platform and our model to reposition themselves in the supply chain in the value chain and raise their voice? So we run a traceability platform but with a bit of a difference in the sense that it really starts from the bottom up. What inspired you to start the company? What inspired me to start this company is that I have a research background. I came to South Africa as a researcher, as an academic and kind of went on that pathway for quite a number of years but along the way realized that there was a shorter turnaround for innovation if we started looking at ICTs, information and communication technologies and by working very closely with small scale fishers in a very much in a co-design fashion. We realized very early on that you know without too much rocket science we could shift things. We could disrupt things. We could kind of reconfigure especially the position of fishers in the way they raise their voice and decision-making the way they unlock their own entrepreneurial opportunities. Our model within Abel Erby is to see how we can support fishers. We firmly believe that if we are to attain sustainable fisheries, if we are to rebuild fisheries, if we are to look at you know healthy oceans, we need to focus on healthy communities, healthy fishing communities and with our platform and the support we provide around that platform, fishers are able to unlock their kind of their community social entrepreneurship and drive fish association, fisher cooperatives that achieve tangible impact, tangible impact from a food security, from a job creation and of course from a resource rebuilding point of view. What support or resources do you need to take your innovation to the next level? So where we're at we you know we are a really strong team. We you know we need determination for sure but at the same time we need to bring closer to our group to our team to the fishers we work with. We bring we need to bring partners that are are interested in interrogating and figuring out you know how do we scale up and how do we scale out but also how do we scale deep? How do we make sure that this program and this kind of idea and this use of this technology by these fisher groups, these fishing communities in these various fisheries has long lasting effects. You know we are trying to drive sustainability but sustainability is a pathway, it's a journey. You know fishers are at a particular position right now where they look at their ecological, their social, their economic you know dimensions and they craft you know a pathway but it takes many years and so how do we really construct that model is something that we as at Lobby are very interested in them in bringing like-minded partners together. Thanks again for speaking to us. We wish you and your team all the very best for the future and we're excited to start working with you. That's it for this edition of the Uplink Daily and this isn't the only SDIS session that will focus on the crucial topic of blue food. Later today you can watch a session called Launching the Blue Food Partnership right here on the forum's website and on our social channels. Thanks for tuning in. We hope you enjoy the rest of the Sustainable Development Impact Summit. We'll see you again soon.