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Minimizing Climate Risks with AI: How Can Climate Tech Revolutionize Agriculture?
252 Plays1 year ago
Step into the world of Climate AI with Nathan Shuler, an expert who has spent years working in the climate space. Discover how organizations and companies are leveraging AI-driven forecasts to optimize their practices, mitigate risks, and seize new opportunities. From seasonal predictions to long-term forecasts, explore the tangible business value that Climate AI brings to the table.
🕑 💡 KEY MOMENTS
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➜ 00:06 The transformative potential of climate technology
➜ 01:39 The backstory of Climate's co-founders and their motivation
➜ 04:36 The application of Climate AI's technology in agriculture
➜ 10:20 Predicting impacts on agriculture
➜ 12:34 Leveraging weather stations for localized data
➜ 14:53 Challenges in technological adoption for farmers
➜ 20:41 The importance of visualizing climate risk information
➜ 21:45 Collaboration with customers in developing agronomic models
➜ 22:56 Making climate data accessible and sharing case studies
➜ 30:45 The horizon of regulation, increased demand, and storytelling
➜ 31:26 Feelings about the future of sustainability
➜ 33:20 Balancing technological innovation and cultural change
🌍 SUSTAINABILITY PODCAST CREATED BY NEW PERSPECTIVE
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This podcast is proudly sponsored by New Perspective Marketing, a dynamic growth marketing agency in Boston, MA, celebrating 20 years in business. We help sustainably focused B2B organizations grow their brands and scale up revenue. If you or your organization is looking to grow, visit npws.com for more info.
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Transcript
Intro to Podcast and ClimateAI
00:00:06
Speaker
Hello, you're watching another episode of Green New Perspective, a podcast dedicated to sustainability. My guest today is Nathan Schuler, Director of Product Innovation at ClimateAI. Nathan is an expert who has spent years working in the climate space, so in this interview, he will provide a glimpse into the transformative potential of climate AI technology and its impact on sustainability.
00:00:30
Speaker
So if you continue to watch or listen to this podcast, you will discover how organizations and companies are leveraging AI-driven forecasts to optimize their practices, mitigate risks, and seize new opportunities. So from seasonal predictions to long-term forecasts, explore the tangible business value that climate AI brings to the table. Enjoy.
Role of ClimateAI in Supply Chain Forecasting
00:00:57
Speaker
Hello, Nathan and Ting. Thank you for joining us on Green New Perspective Podcast. Absolutely. Yeah, thanks for having me so much. Well, let's talk about climate AI. So can you tell us what you guys are doing and why is that work important in the realm of sustainability?
00:01:16
Speaker
Yeah, so ClimateAI, we are a weather forecasting and climate projection company. What that means is we provide companies and really any type of organization with a glimpse into the future of what climate change is going to do to impact their supply chains, their operations.
00:01:33
Speaker
from a couple of days out into the future, several weeks, several months, and several years out into the future. And why this really matters is a couple of different things. So I might roll back the clock really quickly just to share a little bit about our two co-founders and a little bit of their story, because I do think it sort of highlights some of the challenges that we're sort of observed in the market.
Origins of ClimateAI
00:01:57
Speaker
We have two different co-founders, Max Evans and Himansha Gupta. Max, he's Ecuadorian, grew up in Quito, had a pineapple farm that his father ran. I think he had a first-hand experience in seeing the impacts that climate change might have on something like agriculture, which is a pretty important thing for climate AI.
00:02:17
Speaker
Um, but he eventually went on to get a PhD or to, to pursue not necessarily a PhD. I think he doesn't have one. So I might've just accidentally given him a doctorate. Um, but, uh, he ended up pursuing artificial intelligence and while, uh, working at, or while studying at Stanford's business school, met a gentleman by the name of Machu Gupta. Um, Himanshu is our CEO, our other co-founder. Um, and he, um,
00:02:42
Speaker
This pretty often tells a story about growing up in India, a small village, and really seeing firsthand the impacts of monsoons and climate change, as we're all unfortunately aware. India is one of the most susceptible communities and susceptible countries in the world to the rapid changes that climate change will bring.
00:03:01
Speaker
And so he often said, I think the two of them really sort of had that connection around the lived experiences of folks experiencing climate change in the short run. And so they kind of merged their respective skill sets. Himashu has a background in working with Al Gore and other folks on decarbonizing India and thinking about the long run.
00:03:35
Speaker
And along the way, what they kind of discovered, which is why we built that, that one to, to multiple decade. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and,
00:03:42
Speaker
technology is that in the short run, a lot of folks are still using weather forecasting that's pretty outdated. It either doesn't go that far into the future or it only looks at historical averages, but climate change is causing some weirdness. So how can we sort of fill that gap? That's the first thing we ended up building. And then the second side of things is there's all these long-term projections about climate change, but really hard to get a sense for what I actually do with it as a
ClimateAI Applications Beyond Agriculture
00:04:07
Speaker
normal everyday sort of business person, how to access information, how to parse it, how to visualize it, how do I make it have context, and that's really the other major focus for us. That's why we have this sort of bigger long-term tooling around forecasting and projection. So a little bit complicated, but we want to give you a little bit of the backstory for sort of how we landed on those two different things. But is it used in agriculture only or it has like broader application?
00:04:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great question. So it does have broader applications. I think, you know, for better or for worse, climate change is going to be something that's going to impact every single part of the economy. But I think for our purposes, agriculture sort of suits a couple of different needs. One, we do well, I should say first that we do service a lot of folks within agriculture.
00:04:57
Speaker
but increasingly outside of agriculture, too. Got some folks in building materials, in more traditional private equity, in the financial space. Really, a lot of different sectors represented as well. But agriculture and agriculture and food, really, it's sort of the adjacent food and beverage companies as well. It does two different things for us that made a really good match. One is that shorter term weather forecasting that we provide that goes out six months into the future.
00:05:28
Speaker
farmers really need something like that. They love having that sort of heads up look about heat waves that might be imminent, about particular drought conditions that are imminent as well. That's going to really be something that's useful for them to plan around to determine, do we move source soil regions? Do we rush harvest in certain locations because we'd rather get something out of the ground rather than nothing if it just
00:05:53
Speaker
completely scorches. There's a nice match between what we can provide and what some of the folks in agriculture need. The other side of it is, candidly, they're probably one of the sectors of the economy outside of reinsurance or energy. It's already experiencing it directly. They're already experiencing climate change right now. It's facing them in
00:06:17
Speaker
yield expectations being worse for agricultural crops. It's showing up in killing heads of cattle in the grain states in America where cows are literally having heat stroke because it's getting too hot. And so there's a lot of these stories of agriculture and agriculture adjacent markets sort of already experiencing it. So they have the urgency to actually solve it.
00:06:40
Speaker
So that's why we find ourselves mostly in agriculture. I mean, built a lot around that, but we find ourselves exploring sort of other places too.
Real Estate to Agriculture Focus Shift
00:06:53
Speaker
Yeah, great question. That might be a little bit predating my time, but I actually know that the... Sorry, how long were you in the climate AI company? Yeah, no worries. I've been here for about a year and a half, so there's only a handful of people who've been around since 2017.
00:07:14
Speaker
Yeah, I know. It's like that with everyone within the climate business. If you're in the business more than five years, you're already about to run. Exactly. What I know about the first successful project is actually interesting, particularly about the story for why we did agriculture. I think in the beginning days of climate AI, they were experimenting with a lot of different potential vertical fits.
00:07:42
Speaker
And one of them was real estate. So I think the first successful project that we'd ever gotten commissioned was actually work with a is either a pension fund or.
00:07:55
Speaker
some kind of Canadian group that was interested in real estate in Toronto. Essentially, what we did is model energy demand expectations for some key buildings. Basically, looking at, you can anticipate extreme temperatures on either the hot side or the cold side year round. How does that influence the right sizing, if you will, of
00:08:18
Speaker
HVAC systems of different sort of electrical systems to support HVAC systems. So looking at essentially capital costs, but also cost to run.
00:08:29
Speaker
sort of air conditioning units, essentially, and how that would have an impact on the portfolio cost of running these buildings. I think was the first project. And while that's interesting, I think that was also pretty progressive for the real estate market. So while it was a cool project and something that we certainly want to do, I think for a lot of folks in that space,
00:08:49
Speaker
Um, it was way too advanced time. So, uh, we got lucky, got a nice, got a nice little bit of revenue from that. But I think that eventually we sort of fell back into the agricultural space, working with groups like Advanta, who's one of our sort of flagship groups. Um, uh, that that's all over Washington journal and other sort of institutions. So, um, uh, we dabbled a lot is all I should say, but then I think found our nation in agriculture.
Case Study: Advanta Seeds Collaboration
00:09:14
Speaker
So can you give me an example of an organization and know maybe farmers that use your technology to better their practices? Yeah, great question. So one of our flagship customers is a group called A Banta Seeds. They are based in Australia. They leverage the two parts of our technology, our seasonal model, which is that zero to six month out forecast as well as our long term forecast.
00:09:42
Speaker
And they're a good customer. There's a webinar with them kind of walking through the tool and some case studies as well online. But they're a good customer example for sort of how to use the application because they really – one, they leverage both sides of the tool, but they also show some pretty concrete business value. So on the seasonal side,
00:10:02
Speaker
As a seed company, they sort of operate in two different ways. They operate as sort of a grower producer, as well as someone who sells into growers and producers. They have to create seeds, so they have to grow crops to actually create seed, and then they sell the seed from those crops to then off to individual growers.
00:10:20
Speaker
So they leverage our technology to be able to do two things on that seasonal side. One is predict any kind of events that are going to impact the way in which they grow. So as an example, they used some of our information for planting and harvesting season to make determinations about when do they plant, when do they harvest based on potential events that are going to happen so that they can get ahead of those or, you know, harvest if it's going to be a particularly wet
00:10:48
Speaker
two week period because they can harvest and get a lot just easier to get machines and it's a lot easier to sort of work the ground work the plants if it's in drier conditions as an example or on the flip side of selling into the grower community knowing that planting certain crops you know you want to have saturated ground in order for it to be
00:11:11
Speaker
more appropriate or less appropriate for certain types of crops, that that information helps them put seed to market more appropriately. So as an example, there was a sort of a critical rain event that was going to help make a decision for for for for grows to actually
00:11:29
Speaker
or not, and it was sort of in a two week period of time, sort of the inverse of that two week period of time example I just gave. But that was critical for them to be able to by getting a stronger indication of whether or not that was going to happen from our technology.
00:11:45
Speaker
help them actually deliver faster to market the seeds, which provided them in Europe, they estimate between five to 10% better market penetration for that year in planting their seeds as well. So it's an actual real business value that they can get on that. So mitigating risk and actually leveraging it to find new opportunities and new revenue potential as well.
Global Customization of ClimateAI
00:12:11
Speaker
I wanted to ask, you said that you're US-based but the tool is global, but do you adjust it to the specific needs of the farmers who are not in the US?
00:12:20
Speaker
Um, so, um, a lot of our modeling by nature is global. There are certain, um, things that we can do to make it more specific to, um, individual geographies, but we feel pretty good about the data that we have that is global coverage. But as an example, um, if somebody was, uh, had onsite weather stations as an example, um, that might have a lot of time series data that we can, uh,
00:12:49
Speaker
absorb into our tool. So our kind of skipped over it, but our tool uses a machine learning or uses a statistical process referred to as a super ensembling. The long story short of it is you can think there's multiple different sort of tools that we have access to or data sources that we have access to. And we select sort of which of these different forecasts have the best explanatory power.
00:13:14
Speaker
So we're kind of agnostic in terms of if you have other data sources that can help feed the engine, we'll still use that. So if a farmer or a group of food companies have weather stations on site that are monitoring weather conditions specifically, we can ingest that data, use that to improve the modeling that we have and make it more downscaled for specific locations, but not a necessity. But we do have folks that actually go that direction.
00:13:44
Speaker
And can you tell me about the challenges in the
Tech Adoption Challenges in Agriculture
00:13:48
Speaker
industry? We had, we had agents from bio makers, they're doing soil regeneration projects and also working with farmers and architects. So he told us like, it's not easy for farmers to get to know this kind of concept and ideas. So I want to know how you made it.
00:14:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think while we do certainly work oftentimes more secondarily with farmers, so oftentimes our buyers of the technology are processors or seed companies, and they might pass some of that information through to individual farmers. But I think a challenge that we could say in the market is
00:14:29
Speaker
I think it compliments what you're saying is farmer adoption. I think some of the folks that we actually need to disseminate this information to, which are the growers on the ground, sometime either the pricing model doesn't work for them, it's just really hard to scale getting to that many people individually. Getting access to individual farmers, just the cost of customer acquisition is just really high to go to that level. We fight ourselves going one level higher, which is often
00:14:58
Speaker
They might have the financial with, you know, wherewithal to actually pay for it. They might have more stronger needs than the farming community. And they're also oftentimes more trusted out the gate. So like, not to say that I think we're untrustworthy, but I think, you know, building trust in a market, building a brand in a market takes time. And so working with institutions that are reputable, that are known by the farming community is sort of kind of how we try to approach that.
00:15:25
Speaker
But I think adoption is a big, like technological adoption is definitely a big element to it, to mirror phrase that it's a big challenge to the market is technology adoption. But I don't think that's some, I think sometimes there's sort of a perception that farmers are just resistant to technology. And so the adoption curve is more about just skepticism or, you know, something, something like that.
00:15:55
Speaker
Um, well, I think that can be true. I don't think that's the majority of the problem. I think oftentimes it's just, you know, farmers are incredibly, uh, hardworking, efficient folks. And so they're, you know, getting up at four or 5am in the morning, starting their day, going the whole.
00:16:11
Speaker
And so expecting them to add on top of that an evaluation of new technology or integration of new programs and things like that is you have to make it incredibly simple and easy for it to be plugged in. The value prop needs to be super straightforward. It needs to be complimentary. And so we just, I think oftentimes people who view the adoption
00:16:32
Speaker
as slow are not really thinking about like, how do I make this as easy as possible for someone to say yes and work it into a process? And we're still figuring that out ourselves, right? We're exploring things like SMS messaging down to farmers to make it even easier to get access to the information rather than having to like log into a portal. So how do we really make it so it's much more term key? Those are sort of the some of the things that we're thinking through.
Market Integration and Accessibility Challenges
00:16:56
Speaker
In addition to that too, I would say beyond the sort of technological adoption,
00:17:03
Speaker
Uh, some of the challenges in the market as well, I think are just, um, we're talking about forecasting and, you know, forecasting and climate resilience work is, um, there's sort of two, two sides to that. One is I'll go with the climate resilience side. First. Um, a lot of folks are really, are really hyper focused on, um,
00:17:23
Speaker
especially in agriculture, regenerative agriculture. The whole name of the game is climate mitigation, which I think is incredibly important. We need to do it. It's absolutely important. My own background is in helping companies think through decarbonization more on the renewable energy side. So I really believe in the mitigative work. However, at the same time, we also need to be thinking about how do we improve the adaptability of society and the resilience of society to climate change as it's going.
00:17:53
Speaker
And so I think that unfortunately, resilience and adaptation has sort of been a little bit on the back burner relative to some of the mitigation efforts. And so I think that's a struggle that's not unique to climate AI. I think it's shared across the broader sort of resilience as a service marketplace. But then even that, you get into the more nitty gritty of forecasting and projections. And then that brings us back down to the farmer level, which is if we start sharing
00:18:23
Speaker
information about the climate projections of an individual piece of land, and you might run some resistance because these are people that have farmed lands for potentially generations, potentially multiple generations.
00:18:38
Speaker
And they really know where they're coming from. They know the land better than we do. And so try to tell them something about a plot of land that is novel and interesting and complementary to what they know. And in many ways, not insulting. We don't want to be like, hey, we know more than you. Have you looked at it from this angle? This is an additional piece of information that might help you think about
00:19:02
Speaker
how you operate your farm. That's really important for us to find that balance so that we build trust and make sure that we're respecting sort of the age old wisdom of farmers work in the land too.
00:19:16
Speaker
Do you think that education can help there? Do you do some kind of, you know, like, you mentioned webinars, but are you making some educational videos, maybe some marketing tools that you can use to explain to the farmers how they can, you know, better their work through your platform?
00:19:37
Speaker
It's a good question. So I would say, and that's where I'll maybe bubble it back up too, because in terms of sort of like the grower farmer community, we're maybe less focused on that and education, because again, we more focus on that sort of
00:19:52
Speaker
seed companies, processors, food and beverage companies. So you can think of these as more like companies or corporations that are helping support farmers. So we still find there's an educational gap even in that space too, meaning
00:20:10
Speaker
you know, climate change information. Well, let's actually take a step back. So one of the key motivations for creating the company and creating the longer term climate projection modeling that we do, the observation was a lot of the insights that you might get from the IPCC's acronym, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, the sort of UN body that leads the academic
00:20:34
Speaker
knowledge on climate change, right? So if you just go read through the document, it's going to be incredibly hard to parse that information. If you get a download of the raw data, you've got to have a background in our GIS or something to actually kind of understand what's going on in there. And so just making that visible, making that easy to access was a key motivation for us.
00:20:57
Speaker
There's a second wave that I think really swiftly followed, and I think a lot of the general market followed that trend as well, which is there's a handful of companies that started between 2015 and 2017. We were serving the last half of it. They really focused on just visualizing this risk information.
00:21:15
Speaker
I think there's a second wave that came in 2019, 2020s that we're in right now that's cresting. It's focused on how do I translate climate information into impact or information that actually helps drive business value. That's a key motivation for us and a lot of our competitors as well.
00:21:36
Speaker
And I think that that moment necessitates a lot of collaboration between us and our customers. And so it's a mutual education. It's not like we have all the answers and we're educating them. It's oftentimes a little bit of a more symbiotic relationship.
00:21:55
Speaker
And so to give an example, we've worked a lot with folks in the agricultural community to develop agronomic models, right? So these are basically depictions of different crops across the globe, of the phenological life cycle of an individual crop.
00:22:14
Speaker
You start to break out between planting, blooming, harvesting periods, and the whole life cycle of the crop. There are different risks related to weather that are going to impact yield or impact that crop differently. And while we do have an agronomy team in-house within Climate AI that's helping us go through and make determinations of what are the right risks, a lot of that insight that we get is in collaboration with our customers directly.
00:22:44
Speaker
Um, and so they're telling us like, Oh no, it's actually these risks or, or, you know, you might be missing this kind of a variable to that really drives the, the most important type of impact on yields for this particular crop. And that's the kind of information that we really need to be educated on as well to make sure that we're building a tool that's really valuable. And so we find this sort of, um, um, this need for, um,
00:23:10
Speaker
pulling out information from these proprietary silos in organizations about how businesses operate, how weather impacts their business, and how do we digitize that?
00:23:23
Speaker
put our projections, our forecasting on top of that to help them make smarter decisions. And so there is a much more sympathetic relationship. Now, where I think our education comes into play is making the data really easy and accessible to understand, you know, making it feel like the folks in the other side don't need to go get a PhD in climate science to really understand what we're talking about.
00:23:48
Speaker
We kind of throw our brains at it. So sometimes we look a little bit like a consulting firm where we're trying to help unpack sort of like, how does your organization operate? Are there ways that we can sort of pull this information in creatively? So it's a little bit more on boots on the ground sort of education.
00:24:05
Speaker
And then I think a lot of what we do that's successful is just sharing case studies. So when we actually find a really good example of a customer working with us, getting permission obviously, but writing it up, sharing onto the world. And I think that starts to get the creative juices flowing. I think sometimes the work in this space is not for a lack of interest or a lack of belief that we need to actually make
00:24:31
Speaker
make supply chains or operations more resilient, I think it might just be a lack of imagination or even more directly, a lack of just time to be imaginative because folks have a lot of time on their hands that they're doing a lot of, they don't have a lot of time on their hands rather. They might not be able to kind of pause and think creatively about like, okay, how would this information about hurricane modeling impact the way that I source
00:24:58
Speaker
commodities within my supply chain. I haven't really been able to think super critically about that beyond a really surface level. That's where we can help unlock that by just sharing some really good examples. The next question is, can you share your thoughts whether climate AI technology will be a significant player in the future or will it be the future for agriculture?
Future of Climate AI in Business and Agriculture
00:25:22
Speaker
Like we said, even broader than that,
00:25:25
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think certainly as somebody who's sort of an early stage employee, I'd like to think that we're going to be quite prolific in the marketplace. But look, and I think it comes back to the topic we were just discussing around sort of the changes in the marketplace.
00:25:44
Speaker
I think eventually companies are going to recognize that there's certain other black swans on the horizon that they're not really thinking about. The one that I think a lot of folks are thinking about within the environmental side of things with some
00:26:00
Speaker
vertical specificity, but a lot of it has to do with just decarbonization, right? It's how do we as rapidly as possible decarbonize, which is why I think you really started to see a focus of adoption, a willingness to double down, like I said, in sort of the 2020 time horizon, because they saw this sort of what COVID did, and they're trying to get ahead of that.
00:26:21
Speaker
What that they're trying to get ahead of is carbon taxation or it's imminent government regulations that are going to mandate these disclosures. But if you look at the resilience side, whether it's in the US context, the European context, even the Japanese context, some of these companies that are not companies, these governments rather that are adopting TCFD style regulation.
00:26:45
Speaker
The physical risk side is pretty squishy. And what I mean by that is there's really good articulation if you're disclosing scope one, two, three emissions of what do you have to disclose? How do you align with science based targets? How do you communicate that information? That's all pretty well laid out. But once you jump to the section about physical risk, it's sort of like, yeah, and just talk about, you know, as an example, hurricanes, I don't know, it's sort of this hand wavy, like,
00:27:09
Speaker
You guys figured out like there's something there, but we don't know exactly what it is. We're not going to say exactly what it is. Um, so, you know, that's a little different for like.
00:27:19
Speaker
the banking community that has to do stress testing that's obligated by federal reserves. That's a bit different, but for most public companies, probably correctly, groups like the US SEC aren't mandating you have to do a flood assessment or hurricane assessment, a blanket assessment. It's not going to that level of specificity.
00:27:40
Speaker
And so we kind of need a little bit of that guidance, I think, to have full-scale adoption. But in the absence of that, even just having this vague sort of, hey, climate risk is going to impact you physically. How is this going to actually be a thing? Moments of that kind of regulation adopting, I think, is sort of where we feel like there's going to be a pretty big launch point. So that's, I think, addressing the regulatory side. Even beyond that, though, putting the regulation aside,
00:28:15
Speaker
adaptation and resilience efforts, I think as we get closer and closer and closer to these imminent targets, 2030s as an example, I think we're gonna start seeing people get really anxious about, and as we start to have a huge stack and volume of all these news stories,
00:28:35
Speaker
of the third time that Germany is declaring that the Rang River is drying up again is like, well, okay, we're starting to see some pretty significant impacts on climate change now, so how do we get ahead of these events through any kind of resilience measure that we can?
00:28:58
Speaker
whether that's prediction, whether that's infrastructure, whether that's whole different routes of transportation, an example like that. How do we really drive change? I think that we're going to start seeing that adoption a lot, lot faster as we start seeing a lot more extreme and weird events happening more frequently.
00:29:21
Speaker
And then I think when it comes to agriculture and specifically our technology and getting adopted into other places, I think a lot of that is gonna be the regulation, the sort of imminent impacts, actually encouraging people to look for these kinds of solutions. I think for our side, it's gonna be about how do we continue to chase that impact translation? So how do we make it really simple for people to understand if I have access to this information,
00:29:51
Speaker
How is it going to change the way I do strategic planning? How is it going to change the way that I operate my facilities? How does it change the way that I interact with my agricultural sourcing, you know, suppliers and partners? So I think there's a lot of our obligation is how do we continue to do that? And I think sort of a goal, the thing that's on the horizon for us as well is not just impact, but how do we translate to mitigative actions, right? So, you know, the best we can do in many ways is
00:30:20
Speaker
provide people an indication of, hey, you've got drought conditions imminent within the Great Plains going forward. There's always sort of a so what if you don't have somebody on the other side who really knows, how do I take this information and apply this to a mitigation strategy? So how can we sort of help make recommendations for people, hey, you have a drought condition, you're running this type of crop on this kind of field with an irrigation system or not. Like, what is the actual thing that I should do practically?
00:30:49
Speaker
to avoid the worst outcomes that this drought event might might cause. So those are the kind of things that we sort of see as the horizon. And I think that sort of perfect triangle of regulation, increased demand just from just the events happening and us getting smarter and telling that story a lot better is really where I think we start seeing some pretty catalytic growth.
Future of Sustainability: Tech and Culture Balance
00:31:11
Speaker
And my last question for you as someone who is working within the climate space for a decade and it's often not a fun space to be, it can be really stressful. How do you feel about the future of sustainability? It's a great question.
00:31:34
Speaker
I'm always inspired by the innovation, the thoughtfulness, in many ways, the generosity, I think, of people within the climate space. It's one of my favorite things about working in this space. It is very dismal at times. It is very sad to be grappling with some of this information, but I also find myself on a point of privilege where I'm able to live in the United States where we have lots of
00:32:01
Speaker
resources and capital to respond to climate change rapidly. In many ways, we experience it, but I myself find myself able to not be impacted in the worst ways by it. There's lots of other communities, lots of other countries that are way more impacted than I am. I try to keep that in mind and be humble about my insights, but
00:32:24
Speaker
Um, the sustainability community is really fantastic and I think they're all really caring and creative and lovely people. Um, and well, I think that we're gonna have, we've got a lot of good progress from what I worked in this 10 years ago with more adoption of all these targets and commitments and things like that. There's still some of the age old problems of.
00:32:46
Speaker
2030 is not that far away, or 2025 even is not that far away, and a lot of companies have a lot of progress left to go. Sometimes there's a lot of hard work still left to be done with decarbonizing, with making all these adoptions. That doesn't necessarily make me pessimistic. It just keeps my focus that we've got to be really realistic and not take our eye off the ball.
00:33:09
Speaker
Um, uh, we had a guest here. His name is dr simon shieldbix and he said he's cautiously optimistic I think that's the right way to put it because I I do think that we can
00:33:24
Speaker
I always struggle between the technological innovation versus cultural change. I'm not sure that we're going to ever answer this question on cultural change alone. It's just I don't see it happening, unfortunately. So it seems like our system is primed for technological change. And while I think there's a lot of really great initiatives happening and there's really a lot of great funding going into Breakthrough Institute and other moon shots.
00:33:54
Speaker
I don't know. It makes me a little anxious about having your eggs in that basket versus how do we really change minds? How do we change consumer demand? I think that things are happening. We need alternatives and all those kinds of things, but those are inevitably innovations or technology as much as there are shifts in culture and shifts in consumer demand.
00:34:14
Speaker
That balance is always a thing that makes me a little bit anxious is like, how do we speed up the consumer demand to impact the innovation and or vice versa? It's fascinating, but it's also a little worrying because it's like we got to be fast. We just got to be fast.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:34:37
Speaker
So once again, thank you for tuning in to the latest episode of Green New Perspective, a podcast dedicated to sustainability. We hope you enjoy their deep dive into the fascinating world of climate tech, nature tech, biotech and agri-tech, from innovative solutions to combat climate change to groundbreaking advancements in agriculture and biotechnology,
00:34:57
Speaker
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00:35:14
Speaker
Also, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platforms so you never miss an episode. We have many more exciting topics and expert guests lined up so we can't wait to share them with you. Thank you for being a part of our community and we'll catch you in the next episode. Bye!