CHARLES D. KOVEN

CHARLES D. KOVEN

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Earth System Scientist, Climate Sciences Department, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Lead Author on the IPCC Report

Looking into the future, as a scientist, what I've learned how to do is hold multiple futures in my head at the same time because we just don't know. We don't know what the future holds. We need to fight for the futures that we want, and against the futures that we don't want. All I can really say is that it's up to us. It's up to us to fight and advocate for the future we want, and what does that look like, and how do we get there?

CLAIRE POTTER

CLAIRE POTTER

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Circular Economy Designer, Lecturer & Researcher, University of Sussex
Author of Welcome to the Circular Economy

That's something that I would want all of the next generations to have in some way or another, to have the ability to access and be amazed by how staggeringly beautiful, complicated - awful in some ways and just brutal - the natural world is, but then really sit and think about how the natural world just gets on and does it. And every species is benefited from everybody else. And you could remove humans from that equation, and nature would just carry on doing its thing. So that's what I would love for people to see and to realize is that nature is so incredibly beautiful and diverse. And so are we. So how can we take the beauty and diversity of the natural world and actually learn a lot more and stop thinking we're separate from nature because we are pretty much, we are all part of that same biosphere on the planet.

NEIL GRIMMER

NEIL GRIMMER

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Brand President of SOURCE Global · Innovator of the SOURCE Hydropanel
Drinking Water Made from Sunlight and Air

Water insecurity and water scarcity is affecting all people in almost every part of the world. At this point, by 2025, we expect 1.8 billion people to suffer from water scarcity, which means they have no access to clean, safe drinking water within a 30-minute walk of their home. You fast forward to 2050, we expect 6 billion people will have water scarcity. So the rate at which this problem is increasing is far greater than the current infrastructure that has supported water for humans. And that's where innovation and rapid deployment of technology at scale is really essential. And that's what we're in the business to do.

JONATHAN NEWMAN

JONATHAN NEWMAN

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Lead Author of Climate Change Biology, and Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics
Vice President of Research, Wilfrid Laurier University

Climate change is certainly going to affect biodiversity. Some species will benefit from climate change, but others will not, and we'll have different ecosystems, different biotic communities as a result of this. I think the impacts that are likely are pretty clear, and I think that's a pretty good reason to do all those things we can do without completely destroying our economies and our communities because those things have moral value as well. It's not just the environment that we think is important. We also think humans are important, then doing the things we can do now, do the less painful things first. We should have done them already, and we should be now thinking about how to do the harder things.

ROY SCRANTON

ROY SCRANTON

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Author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene & We’re Doomed, Now What?
Director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative

It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life.

KC LEGACION

KC LEGACION

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Member of Web Collective degrowth.info
Master of Environmental Studies candidate, University of Pennsylvania

Degrowth as an idea has intellectual roots in the environmental critiques of the sixties and seventies found in landmark works like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth report, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, which was a seminal piece of economic theory that applied the laws of thermodynamics to the economy and was very influential for ecological economics, which is intertwined with degrowth. Degrowth was first formulated in 1972 by French philosopher André Gorz in a public debate where he used the term décroissance to question whether planetary stability was compatible with capitalism.

CHRIS FUNK

CHRIS FUNK

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Director of the Climate Hazards Center at UC Santa Barbara
Author of Drought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastrophes

The work that we're doing here at the Climate Hazards Center is trying to build out the science to cope with a two-degree world. And I think that we can do that. It's not going to be easy, but I think that's definitely within our capabilities, and it is already making human beings be smarter together in very empowering ways. And these are examples of people in Boulder, Colorado getting ready for the next big flood event and having conversations between the National Weather Service and local communities, or me on a zoom call at seven in the morning with my friends in East Africa as they're getting ready to cope with the next extreme. There are great examples of radio clubs in Niger who are working with their meteorological agencies and local farming communities that are pulling data that we're producing here in Santa Barbara, precipitation estimates, but then using them to decide whether they should fertilize their millet crops or not. And so there are ways that we can counter climate hazards and weather hazards by being smarter.

YEE LEE

YEE LEE

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VP, Growth & Special Projects at Terraformation - Silicon Valley Entrepreneur

We're trying to help the world's forestry organizations collectively plant a trillion trees in the next decade and cover 3 billion acres of net new forest. That's a very, very large number. Some of the very largest tree-planting organizations in the world collectively plant something like half a billion to three-quarters of a billion trees per year. And even that number sounds large, too, but then you realize that's actually three full orders of magnitude smaller than the actual number we need to hit in the next decade. So we actually need to take all of the world's largest forestry organizations as a group and multiply by a thousand their efforts. So that's a very large undertaking, and I just can't underscore enough the scale at which we as a human species seeks to operate when we talk about tree-planting and forestry operations.

DERRICK EMSLEY

DERRICK EMSLEY

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Co-founder & CEO of veritree - Data-driven Restorative Platform & tentree Apparel Co.

I think what's powerful about a tree is it's tangible and it's symbolic in a lot of ways. We as humans naturally have this emotional connection, I think, to trees, and so particularly when you think of our ability to take action within the climate crisis conversation, a tree is this really powerful symbol and vehicle because it's a lot easier to understand a tree than it is to understand a pound or two of CO2 that's floating in the air. So for us, tree planting is just the start of the communication, just the start of the impact. Really if all it was was to get a stick in the ground that wouldn't have the long-term impact, whether that be carbon, whether that be socioeconomic impact, and things like that. So really for us, veritree helps us collect all that data and create the operating system to pull in the data on everything from planting forms and field updates that are coming in, survivability analysis, and different updates on things like biodiversity. We're partnering with some groups to test underwater sensors in some of these planting sites. We're collecting socioeconomic surveys and things like that to try to attach the impact to the community and back to the planting that's happening.

FRANK LOY

FRANK LOY

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Fmr. Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs
Fmr. Chief U.S. Climate Negotiator

We have a number of problems, but two of them are war - we see that at the very moment - but the one that is relatively new, that we didn't have a word for it when I grew up, we certainly didn't understand when I grew up, is environmental consequences. And we have gone from not understanding that to understanding it pretty well, but having a difficult time responding appropriately to that threat.

When I decided I would spend some time in the nonprofit sector, it was my wife who said, "Don't diddle around with a whole bunch of things, focus on something that you care about, and spend both time and your money on that." And so I picked the environment because it seemed to me it had a rather unusual and unique combination of social, economic, political, technical, and scientific elements to it that made it a really interesting complex issue.

NOAH WILSON-RICH

NOAH WILSON-RICH

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Co-founder & CEO of The Best Bees Company
Largest Beekeeping service in the US

I was originally drawn to bees because they're social creatures. And as humans, I always wanted to know about ourselves and how we can be our healthiest selves and our healthiest society. Bees and wasps, and all of these organisms have been around for so long. Bees especially have been around for 100 million years.