ALICE SCHMIDT
ROB BILOTT

ROB BILOTT

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Environmental Lawyer · Partner Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP
Author of Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer’s Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont

It's kind of a scary thought. We've got these PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), you hear them now referred to as forever chemicals because these chemicals–none of these existed on the planet prior to World War II–they're fairly recent invention and they have this unique chemical structure that makes them incredibly useful in a lot of different products, manufacturing operations, but also that same chemical structure makes them incredibly persistent and incredibly difficult to break down once they get out into the environment, into the natural world, into our soil, into our water. They simply, many of them, particularly the ones with eight or more carbons in their structure, don't break down under natural conditions. Or it may take thousands or millions of years for those chemicals to start breaking down. But not only that. Once they get into us, they get into people, they tend to accumulate in our blood and build up over time. They not only persist, they bioaccumulate. Unfortunately, as the science has slowly been revealed to the world about what these chemicals can do, we are seeing that they can have all kinds of toxic effects And unfortunately, we’re finding that those things can happen at lower and lower dose levels.

BILL HARE

BILL HARE

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Founder & CEO of Climate Analytics · Physicist · Climate Scientist

Net-zero is a big idea. It’s a big theme. And, unfortunately, what's going up are many ways to look like you're doing net-zero when you're not. So in the ideal world, getting to net-zero means essentially reducing your emissions, and then, where you have residual emissions left, that means you might need to have negative emissions. For example, it's relatively easy to decarbonize the power sector completely, and you can do it quickly and cheaply in most places, but you’re always going to be left with some levels of emissions from agriculture.

(Highlights) AZBY BROWN

(Highlights) AZBY BROWN

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Author of Just Enough · Small Spaces · Lead Researcher for Safecast
Authority on Japanese Architecture, Design & Environmentalism

In Edo Japan, basically life was pretty good, and they recycled everything. Everything was reused, upcycled. Waste was considered taboo. A person who was wasting was considered an ugly person. So there’s a lot that we could talk about design, the layout, scale. Buildings were rarely taller than two storeys. Very good use of environmental features, microclimates, use of wind for cooling, passive solar heating. Good use of planting, gardens, etc. But regarding cities of the future, I think the main thing is it needs to be a place where people feel like they belong and want to take responsibility.


PAULA PINHO

PAULA PINHO

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Director of Just Transition at the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy

She is responsible for Just Transition, Consumers, Energy Efficiency, Innovation and Energy security. She has been previously Head of Unit at the Directorate-General Energy in the European Commission. She was responsible for Energy Strategy and Policy coordination and then for Renewables and Energy System Integration Policy and Decarbonisation and Sustainability of Energy Sources. She was Acting Director for Energy Policy where she has overseen notably the work of international energy relations, financial instruments and inter-institutional relations.

ASHLEY DAWSON

ASHLEY DAWSON

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Author of People’s Power, Extreme Cities, Extinction
Professor of Postcolonial Studies at City University of New York

The political struggle is really hard today and I feel like we haven't been winning, but I think it's important not to think of this as either we win it, or there's catastrophe and that's the end. We win or lose, and there’s this big tidal wave that kills us all. That's not the way the climate crisis is going to play out. It’s going to be a long, slow, attritional crisis punctuated by forms of natural disaster that will decimate populations, but it's also going to be something that people will be impacted by for generations and that people will continue to mobilize around, so I think it's important to keep that in mind.

JEFFREY D. SACHS

JEFFREY D. SACHS

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President of UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network
Director of Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University

If we’re badly educated, we’re not going to make it on this planet. If I had to put my finger on one Sustainable Development Goal above all else, it is let’s empower young people so that they know the future. They know the world that they’re going to be leading soon. They can do something about it…If you’re in elementary school up to university, you should be learning–What is climate change? What is biodiversity? What can we do about it? And this kind of learning is not only book learning, but is also experiential learning.

DR. LINDA BIRNBAUM

DR. LINDA BIRNBAUM

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There are thousands of chemicals in our water, just like there are in air, just like there are in food. We sometimes compartmentalize too much. We forget, but what is food? Food is made up of chemicals. And I think we need to be broader in our understanding because, for example, we all have on us and within us our Microbiomes and we think about the GI bacteria and we now know that if people are obese they have very different microbial content in their gut compared to people who are not obese. And we know that a baby born by C-section section has a different position than a baby born vaginally. And we know that these things have impacts. We know that many of the bacteria have the ability for example to metabolize the contaminants as well as things in our food. And we know that you can have a different response depending upon what people are eating.

BRUCE PIASECKI, PhD

BRUCE PIASECKI, PhD

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NYT Bestselling Author of A New Way to Wealth · Doing More with Teams
Founder of AHC Group

Each day you wake up you make decisions that shape your own fate, your ascent, position, your own creativity. I like to think of it as fate is a personal construct. When I was at Cornell they had me teach an Emerson essay called “Freedom and Fate” where he said that fate was so overwhelming in some traditions that it’s as though we were each involved in a shipwreck and we were each thrown off the ship and all we had a chance to do was look at each other. I’ve come to believe is that not only is the future near you can design your own life.

KYLE HARPER

KYLE HARPER

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Author of Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History
G.T. & Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty, Professor of Classics & Letters, University of Oklahoma

Human well-being is both a question of social development in a very holistic sense that people have jobs that provide adequate food and clean water as well as the elimination of dangerous microbes, and so the question is how do societies continue to develop in a way that's globally equitable and sustainable and that's really one of wicked hardest problems on the planet is how do we continue to experience growth without having carbon emissions that make growth and impossible, that continue to hold societies in poverty, and that continue to imperil human health.

GAURAV GUPTA

GAURAV GUPTA

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Director of Kotter International · Co-author of Change: How Organizations Achieve Hard to Imagine Results in Uncertain & Volatile Times

How do you get people to have a sense of urgency to actually take action and do something different? What we're finding is the learnings from business very much do apply to other spheres and also more generally do challenges like climate change. We’re facing the question of how do you get more people to actually be willing to take real meaningful action.

CLAUDIA BUENO

CLAUDIA BUENO

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Artist in Light, Sculpture & Sound

Nature is my home because. It doesn't matter where I am. It’s available and it's there and it's always giving me the same sort of nourishment. All of us have had to develop a sense of home elsewhere. With me in particular, I've been traveling and living in different countries for the last 20 years since I was 22, so it's not even that I've had a geographical place that is my new home because I've moved around every four years. I'm in a new place a new community and new friends, so nature is my home.

ROB NIXON

ROB NIXON

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Author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Professor Environmental Humanities at Princeton

There are some recurrent threads in indigenous cultures across the world. One of those is–We don’t own the land. The land owns us. It’s not seen as property first. It’s seen as inalienable in that sense because you don’t own it in the first place. What we’re seeing now is a kind of movement where more and more indigenous people are living kind of amphibious lives. On the one hand, they have their indigenous cosmologies. And the other hand, in order to increase the likelihood that they can keep out big corporations, mining, logging, and so forth, their presence on the land needs to be bureaucratically recognized is to have recognition that “this is your property.” So in one sense many of these communities I find are both inside and outside private property regimes.

ROB PRINGLE

ROB PRINGLE

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Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Professor Princeton University · Pringle Lab

For nature and natural beauty to survive, people have to want it. If they don’t ever experience it, why should they want it? What could see of value in it, something that you not only have never experienced but don’t ever expect to. We intellectually know that the Amazon is an important thing because it stores carbon and it’s home to many species, but I’ve been there. That’s a different thing entirely to be able to appreciate it on that level and care about it for the sheer beauty and magic and joy of being in a place that’s still so big and so wild. So that I think is the most important thing for the next generation.

SETH M. SIEGEL

SETH M. SIEGEL

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Entrepreneur, Public Speaker & NYTimes Bestselling Author
Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World · Troubled Water: What's Wrong with What We Drink

On average in advanced societies, about 70% of freshwater that’s consumed is consumed by agriculture. In less developed countries, sometimes as high as 95% of the freshwater goes to agriculture, which means that you’re depleting the amount of water available for the environment. You’re depleting amount of groundwater to preserve for the future, especially in dry times, and it creates a stress for the future…What are you going to do when you have hundreds of millions of water refugees coming from places where there used to be enough water where there’s now just not enough water? What is the world going to do then?

BRIAN WILCOX

BRIAN WILCOX

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Chief Engineer & Co-founder of Marine BioEnergy
Grows Kelp in the Ocean to Provide Carbon-neutral Fuels

The kelp plant itself can grow to 30 meters easily, and sometimes 40 meters, so it’s a huge plant…When people look around the world today, seeing the news, making the world a better place is getting increasingly important. People have to pay attention to what they can do as individuals to make the world a better place. The world is not going to become a good place on its own. If there weren’t for thousands and millions of people, phenomenal sacrifices that people make. When you see what some people do and the risks they take. I have basically found my job for the remaining years that I have on the earth to try to make the world a better place.

GAIA VINCE

GAIA VINCE

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Science Writer, Broadcaster & Author
Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty & Time · Adventures in the Anthropocene

The good thing about our species is that we create our own environment. What we’ve been doing so far is creating an environment where we’re much more successful. We live a lot longer, we’re much healthier than we have been in the past. There are many, many more of us, so we’re very successful as a species and that’s been at the expense of other ecosystems, but what’s happened is we are now dominating the planet to a dangerous degree, but we are also self-aware. We’re capable of understanding that.

MARY EDNA FRASER & ORRIN H. PILKEY (Copy)
JANE MADGWICK

JANE MADGWICK

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Ecologist & CEO of Wetlands International
Co-author of Water Lands: A vision for the world’s wetlands and their people
Wetlands naturally absorb twice the amount of carbon than all the world’s forests combined.
I think everybody at school learns about the water cycle. That rings a bell with everybody. Maybe this is a good hook to show the place of wetlands in capturing and purifying and the story of water. And then in turn how this links to what we’re seeing every year: droughts, floods, fires, heat waves which are devastating and life-threatening. I think this may be one of the easiest routes in educating people, connecting wetlands with water and the direct impact of that.

DR. JOERI ROGELJ

DR. JOERI ROGELJ

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Director of Research at Grantham Institute, Imperial College
Author on UN Environment Programme & Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

A key part of how I go about doing my research is being involved in policy discussions, policy conversations, and also by following the international climate negotiations very closely. Actually, I started my research career as a part of the Presidency of the International Climate Negotiations in 2009. After that I remained an advisor to country delegations in the international negotiations, particularly small island development states or least developed countries. That really helped me to get a sense of what the real questions are that they are struggling with.