Infrastructure, food systems and natural resources are all affected by climate change. While nature loss poses significant economic and environmental risks, nature-positive models could unlock trillions for the world’s economy.
How can we sustain, and even augment, growth while also remaining within the planet’s boundaries?
At Davos 2026, the panel argued that prosperity now depends on operating “within planetary boundaries,” not treating sustainability as optional. Johan Rockström set the stakes: human pressures are pushing Earth beyond a stable Holocene-like “corridor of life,” with 2025 evidence showing rising emissions and accelerating warming. Scientists now judge “seven of the nine boundaries” breached, while tipping points—from Greenland ice to the Amazon—could lock in irreversible change, with projected “5% on average loss of income” at 1.5–2°C.
Mexico’s environment secretary Alicia Bárcena framed a national strategy around restoration: protect 30% of territory by 2030, mobilize nature-based solutions through ecosystem “taxonomy” (e.g., mangrove carbon uptake), and scale circular economy—“no more linear economy, no more extractivism.”
Business leaders emphasized economics and execution. PepsiCo CEO Ramon Laguarta reframed trade-offs: “This is not about sustainability or profitability. This is about short term or long term,” calling for board-owned strategy, measurable operating plans, and system-level partnerships, especially in agriculture and circularity. Fortescue’s Andrew Forrest argued decarbonization can beat fossil fuels on cost, targeting elimination of “1,000,000,000 litres of diesel” annually. ReNew’s Sumant Sinha highlighted grid investment and electrification, predicting technology will make clean energy irresistibly cheaper, leaving fossil assets stranded. The moderator’s closing warning: despite evidence, “we are not moving the needle,” demanding faster, cooperative scaling.
English.
With the three sources of scientific evidence that proves that we now have overwhelming evidence of the need to transition the global economy within prosperity, within planetary boundaries. The first one is that the human pressures on the planet has now reached a crisis point. The era where we can continue with economic growth without putting the stability of the planet at risk, has come to an end. Welcome to the Anthropocene. The second is that these pressures on the planet are now at risk of causing irreversible, potentially catastrophic tipping points that would irreversibly drift away from the life support we depend on. And the third is that we are now understanding for the first time, with scientific evidence, that our world economy depends on the extraordinary stability of the Holocene. We leave the last ice age 18,000 years ago and enter what you see here, this extraordinarily stable 12,000 year, which is a 14°C global mean surface temperature with a maximum variability. Can you imagine a plus -0.5°C, which gives us the corridor of life that is the basis for all our life support. And then we come to the start of the Industrial Revolution and look at that kickoff point. We push ourselves outside of the corridor of life we have in the next 3 to 5 years, a trajectory of breaching 1.5°C of global surface temperature rise. And we're heading towards a disastrous, unmanageable in terms of scientific evidence, three degrees Celsius world in the next 75 years. This exponential rise originates from multiple exponential hockey sticks. To the left you see the socio economic pressures from GDP growth to material use on the right hand side, the impacts on the Earth's system. These are the hockey sticks of carbon dioxide. Biodiversity loss, degradation. I won't count them. You can pick any parameter that matters for human well-being and the global economy. They look the same up until the mid 1950s. We have incremental linear impacts, unsustainable pressures indeed, but on an infinitely large Earth system. And then off we go in the moment of the great acceleration in the mid of the 1950s. And we're now at the ceiling of these hockey sticks, hitting the ceiling of biophysical hardwired processes that regulates the very functioning and stability of the system. And unfortunately, dear friends, we're still following a dangerous path 2025 data, which you see here. Carbon dioxide, methane emissions, nitrogen oxide continue rising. Ice mass, sea level rise continue rising. Actually, temperatures are increasing faster than we had expected. We see an acceleration even of warming. The Earth's energy imbalance, which should be stable, is rising. That is the heat that is in the pipeline. Even if we turned off the economy today, this pushes us closer to tipping points. Tipping points are biophysical large systems that, in a healthy state, can cool the planet by being dominated by dampening feedbacks, push them across thresholds and they will change feedbacks and amplify warming and undermine the basis for stable economies. We've mapped those big climate tipping point systems. Here you have them 16 systems across the entire planet that regulates the stability of the climate system. Six of them are in the Arctic. The Greenland ice sheet with seven meter sea level rise stored in the ice mass, the Amoc, the overturning of heat in the North Atlantic, the Amazon rainforest, the richest biome on terrestrial ecosystems on land, three of them down in Antarctica, and of course, also the tropical coral reef systems they are across the entire planet. These are the systems we depend on. Six of them are likely to cross their tipping points. If we permanently exceed 1.5°C. So this, dear friends, is what adds up scientifically to the heuristic equation you see on the screen. Welcome to the Anthropocene. We're now in the driving seat, the dominating force of change on planet Earth. We now know that the Holocene is the planet we depend on for our civilizations. We've been around on planet Earth for 250,000 years. We've lived like hunters and gatherers, a few million people in caves during ice ages. But our economy, our world, can only thrive in a Holocene reference point as a planet. And tipping points are hardwired. Push the systems too far and we will irreversibly drift away. That is why we need to define a safe operating space for the world economy on a stable planet, and science can now do it. We've been for the past 20 years, mapping the Earth system processes, which you see to the left here, that regulates the stability of the Earth's system. We've been defining control variables with Earth observation, data and analytics for all of these 13 control variables. Uncertainty ranges and quantified for the first time. Safe boundaries go beyond them and we risk causing these irreversible changes. Now here you have them. It gives us a safe operating space. That's what you have here in green. It's the climate system. It's biodiversity, it's land system change. It's the bloodstream of the whole earth system, the hydrological cycle. It is the nitrogen phosphorus cycles of eutrophication. It's stable ocean, it's aerosol loading, it's chemicals. And of course the stratospheric ozone layer nine systems. If we're stewards of them, we have a good chance of prosperity and equity for humanity on planet Earth. What you see here is the planet of Adam Smith. This is the wealth of nations. This is the basis for economic growth, of the understanding. It was essentially a very forgiving planet. We could go on quite unsustainably without having invoices being sent back to the economy. Here you have the 1950s, the take off point of the great acceleration already. Then we had actually agriculture that was destroying biodiversity and we were loading chemicals. You all remember Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. This is the moment of Robert Solow. This is the neoclassical economic growth model that we still operate under still today. But look at what's happened 1960. We're still operating very largely in a safe operating space, 1970s, 1980. And then we have the big take off point. We breached the climate boundary in 1988. Bang. We have overloading of nutrients and dead zones in the ocean from nitrogen, phosphorus loading, which reaches a point of a critical stage and it just continues. 2020s, 20 tens, 20, 2023. And finally, we are at a point of the scientific most recent update, where we conclude in 2023 that six of the nine boundaries were breached. And that is what you see on this slide. And finally, we have now ramped up and updated the science every year. And this is the 2024 Planetary Health Check. And here you have the 2025 most recent update. So we are ourselves in science also providing you with a state of the art diagnostic at a much higher frequency. What you see here is a dire message to humanity. Seven of the nine boundaries are outside of the safe operating space. It's not only a climate crisis. We're doing a double mistake. We're loading the Earth system with unsustainable levels of heat and at the same time undermining the resilience of the living biosphere, the ocean and the biosphere that can dampen this stress. This is a situation we're in. When we integrate all these nine, we come to the following conclusion. We are outside of the safe operating space. We have a real challenge on our watch, but we are in the yellow danger zone, which is a scientific uncertainty range. We're not yet fully in the red zone, where we are very likely to cause a planetary scale drift away from stability. What does this imply? Well, one is it's urgent, but two, it's not too late. The resilience of the planet biogeochemical is still dominated by dampening feedbacks. Despite all unsustainable pressures. She is still standing. She's wobbling, but she's standing now. This is proven in the following slide. Look at this data. This is the global carbon project on the global carbon cycle, which is an attribute of essentially all the biosphere boundaries. And our fossil fuel burning above the zero line is fossil fuel burning and deforestation. That's the pressure we're putting loading heat into the system under the zero line you see in blue, the carbon uptake in the ocean in green, the carbon uptake on land from intact nature, a phenomenal increase of uptake. When we continue stressing the system. It's only that gray sliver you see there, which is the net amount of carbon which remains in the atmosphere, causing the 1.5°C of warming. So far, the crisis we're talking about. But look at the graph. Despite the stress, a healthy planet has been very forgiving and dampening the stress. The problem is you can actually see it. I think if you look at this graph that the green line is starting to flatten out, we are having very worrying signs that the carbon uptake in the land based biosphere is going down. The resilience of the planet is under jeopardy and this is what we now understand. Secondly, we may be underestimating the tipping point risks. And here's just one example. This is the richest biome on land on planet Earth, the Amazon rainforest. Climate science has been communicating for many years that the risk of tipping this system into a degraded savannah, which we know can happen, will not happen until we reach 3 to 5°C of warming, meaning low risk. But when you bring in the breaching of the boundaries of water, biodiversity, deforestation, combining it with climate, the assessment today is that already when we reach 1.5°C, combined with losing over 25% of the canopy cover, we are very likely to cross the tipping point. Professor Carlos Nobre, Brazil's leading Amazon rainforest scientist, is in public statements, very clear. We're very close to a tipping point in the Amazon rainforest. So there we are. And this is the safe operating space that we're trying to define scientifically. We're pushing ourselves to the edge. We are still in a Holocene basin. We are at risk of now sliding away in an irreversible journey towards a hothouse Earth. If we cross tipping points leading to self-amplified warming from permafrost and the thousand petagrams of carbon in the Amazon basin, if we would cross tipping points, our task is to transition towards prosperity and equity within a Holocene like state. That is the scientific charge. That is what we're arguing is needed to be able to be successful into the future, because sitting in the edge is already costing the economy. We have the data now, the latest synthesis on climate change impacts on economy, which you see here, shows that already at 1.5 to 2°C, we are at risk of having a 5% on average loss of income in the global economy. We're talking trillions, not billions. If we continue the journey we're on and just look at the curves, if we continue beyond three degrees Celsius of warming. So in conclusion, before I hand over to the panel, we are at this really, really decisive juncture. Time is running out, but it's not too late. Technology innovation. Getting the economics right on a transition. We know that the solutions are there. We know that solutions across all sectors can give better outcomes for security, for equity, for prosperity. But we need to unload a new paradigm of prosperity within planetary boundaries. In my view, that's what science is clear in messaging to stakeholders around the world. And with that, I thank you so much for this primer from science. And I'd now like to invite my dear colleague and friend, Andre Hoffmann, to take the stage as moderator for the plenary panel following up on this priming. Thank you very much.
So, yeah, thank you very much, Johan, for this. Absolutely. Appropriate setting for our panel. As you can see, the situation is not just something that could be dangerous. It's something that is dangerous. And we need to sort of look at how what sort of remedy we can bring to the situation. The female of our of our panelists. How can we build prosperity within planetary boundaries? And you've seen that out of the nine, planetary boundaries have already crossed seven. So action is required. And it's not just a question of doing no harm, it's also a question of regenerating. And I think that's going to be a theme for the for the outstanding panel we've been able to constitute here. We have really some outstanding individuals whose life revolves around what is happening here, and they represent different sides of the same argument we have. We have a government minister, we have a CEO of a large company, we have a experimenters in energy transitions. So we're going to we're going to have a really fascinating conversation. Let me call them out one after the other. On my left you have Alicia Barcena Ibarra. She's a secretary of environment and Natural Resources of Mexico. Thank you for coming, Alicia. Thank you. Next to you, Alicia, we have Ramon. Ramon LaGuardia, who is the chairman and chief executive of PepsiCo, an international food business. Thank you very much. Well done. Next to Ramon, we have Andrew, Andrew Forrest, who is the executive chairman and founder of Fortescue in Australia. He's. And we have, at the end, Samantha, who is the chairman, who is the chair and chief executive officer of Renew in India. Now, I just wanted to I want to also underline the fact that, sumant and, and Andrew are a member of the alliance of CEO climate leaders here in, in, in the, in the World Economic Forum and that Ramon has taken over the chairmanship of the CEO of nature, which is which is a another community we have created. So anyway, the rules of the game, you can we've been distributing some questions. We've been, assigned some themes we want to discuss. I would suggest that we shouldn't we shouldn't satisfy ourselves with that. Just interrupt. Just barge in whenever you feel like it. Let's try. Let's try to keep this lively. So, I'm going to, to, to to, ask the first question, in a, in a, in a in an attempt at not creating too much chaos. But please, after that do. I'd be very grateful if you could. So the first question will go to to Alicia. And I would like to ask you, in particular, you know, Mexico, developing many activities, strategies have to be inclusive of all sorts of elements. But in particular, how can you sort of look at strategic, sustainable strategic development in a region which is so dependent on natural natural environment? So if I can ask you to tell us what your solution is, we would love to hear about.
That solution. That's something different. But thank you very much for the invitation. I'm very glad to be here. First of all, I guess that what just Johann presented to us is something that planetary boundaries are not negotiable. So one of the first things that we are doing in Mexico, actually, is to make sure that we understand what are the characteristics of our territory and how much we can contribute in the conservation and restoration. I think we are in the age of restoration. You said Holocene, but I would say that we should go into the age of restoration. The earth needs to be restored. So what are we doing in Mexico very quickly? We are very much involved in the conservation of 30% of our territory for year 2030. So that's the first thing. What do we have in place? And we need to conserve and restore. And we have 99 million hectares of protected areas that are either we have jungles and we have, many types of ecosystems that we need to protect the rest. And we are also going to protect marine ecosystems. So we need to reach the 30% of protected areas in our in our country, in our in our, in our territory by 2030. That's number one. Number two, we need to make business with with nature. We need to make sure that everybody understands that nature can be good business. So we are putting forward solutions based in nature that can be compatible with climate change, with compensation, with with carbon initiatives. And we have done a taxonomy of ecosystems. For example, we have mangroves. How much a hectare of a mangrove, a mature hectare of mangrove, how much, how many carbon emissions can absorb. And so these are the type of things that the taxonomy of that sort can give companies that are trying to to compensate their carbon emissions, because at the end of the day, what do we want to do in Mexico to decarbonize? We need to all societies need to decarbonize. And there are many ways of doing it. Of course, one is getting rid of fossil fuels, but a country like mine is probably not ready for that yet. Although we are committed to to do this in the future and become a net zero country, but not yet. So then what we what we need to do is to see how we compensate, solutions based in nature with carbon emissions. And the third thing and I will we are doing many other things, but one that I really want to emphasize is circular economy. We are leaving behind the linear economy altogether, and we are going into circular economy. No waste has to be. I mean, all the waste can be used as resources and this is what we are doing. We are putting together three industrial parks on circular economy. And we are talking about circularity of tires, for example, circularity of construction debris, of course, of solid waste of plastics. And I know that Pepsi-Cola is here. Pepsi-Cola is joining Mexico with a very successful plant that is called Pet Star, which recycles all the plastic bottles. And these are the type of things that we need to recycle. We need to actually at the end of my statement, first statement would like to say that we need to change the paradigm. We need to make a paradigm shift. No more linear economy, no more extractivism, no more deforestation. So these are the nodes that we have to go into a new type of economy.
Well, thank you very much. I'd like to immediately react to this. You know, the science that Johan is talking about and the evidence of the loss of biodiversity, the evidence of the the rise in CO2 and climate change gases, it has been around for a while. It hasn't really changed behaviors. The idea of, well, I mean, let's let's address the the dinosaur in the room. Look at us. We are about 20 people. When when the thing was completely full not long ago for Mr. Harry, for professor Harry. We'll come back to that later. But what I was trying to say is that because we have so many evidence that have not worked, I think the idea of the time in our history, where we think we have to call common sense and to count on the cleverness, or perhaps even the sense of moral duty of some of our leaders has not been enough. We need to have incentives. We need to have business answers to these problems. And if I may, if I may go back to the right, to the end, to could we talk about you've built a business based on nature. You built a business on built on decarbonization, mainly, but not only. I think it's important here that we also settle that. You also say that decarbonization is an important aspect, but it is not enough. We also need to restore system, ecosystem and biodiversity. But again, the floor is yours. Come on, tell us how you do it.
Yeah. Look, I think the the presentation that Johan made was really very worrying. You know, when you see that put out so succinctly and logically and you start wondering why is the world not doing enough, why is the world not doing more? And of course, we're having this panel. So we this is an important topic, for all of us. But the unfortunate part is that as, as a globe or as a population, we're just not doing enough to contribute into this problem to solve the problem. Now, as far as our company is concerned, look, we started off 15 years ago. Our my thesis was that, that climate change in times to come would become a fundamental problem, which it now has. And, we decided to basically start adding more and more clean energy capacity. And over the last 15 years, we've got to a point now where we're generating almost 18GW of clean energy capacity, and feeding that into the grid. But we've also started doing manufacturing of solar panels as well. The point really is that we have to find a way to essentially decarbonize our electricity grids as fast as possible, and we have to electrify everything, also as fast as possible. And that is something that is happening at a certain pace in some countries, but not enough in many other countries. We also have to electrify other industries, which is also not happening fast enough. And I'm sure Andrew will talk about the hard to abate sectors like his, again, we're not doing enough. So the point is we have spots of good activity happening. But when you put the whole thing together, it's clearly just not enough at this point in time. You know, one of the things we need to do is we need to build grids much more rapidly. And there's just not enough investment happening in the grid, because if you want to electrify things and decarbonize that electrification, you need to be able to carry those electrons around. And for that, you need wires. And nobody really globally is investing enough on the electric system to carry these electrons across the world. The other thing is we need to invest much more also in things like green molecules, so that we can address the hard to abate sectors. Even that is, you know, some countries are moving forward. So what is happening really is that there is now a divide coming up between, in some ways, what you might call the fossil fuel rich countries, the Petro states, as it were, and the those that don't have fossil fuels, the electro states, those are really going after electrification. And that includes countries like India and China, for example. We don't have fossil fuels, so we don't have a choice but to go down the clean energy path and make sure that we electrify as far as possible, and that is therefore leading to decarbonization. So for us, it's a commercial need, as well as a moral imperative to do what we need to do. You know, emerging market countries are going to be the hardest hit by climate change, and therefore, we have an obligation to do as much as we can. Certain countries, as I said, like India, are leading the pathway in the right direction. And I just wish more countries would follow us down that path. Instead, what we're seeing is the largest economies of the world are actually moving away from this path. So that's that's really worrying, especially in light of the presentation that Johan made.
Thank you very much. Maybe we can now turn to to to to Ramon. How can a company justify to its shareholders that you have to pay a green premium? I mean, I know it's slightly disconnected, but if you have the opportunity to have somebody like you on the panel, this is a question we should ask.
I mean, this is at the center of the debate, clearly, for for companies. How do we reframe the problem? This is not about sustainability or profitability. This is about short term or long term. I think this is how we need to reframe the debate. So for for a company like ours, and you probably know us from the beverage business, but we happen to be even a larger food company, a food company that that sources over 50 crops in many countries around the world. So for us, the debate is we clearly are about growth. So growth is our business model. But growth for the long term means that we need to generate this growth without depleting the resources that will give us this future growth. So it's a very simple, framing of the problem, but it has to be owned by the board. It has to be owned by obviously the CEO and the management team. And then the hard work is how do you make it operational? How do we make it operational in the business? So you have to create very clear strategic framework. In our case we call it Pep positive, PepsiCo positive. And it has very clear pillars. And then that is landed into the operating plans. It's measured. We have governance. We make it happen. But we see ourselves not only as taking care of our own company. And thank you for what you said about PepsiCo. We are partners of governments. And please see us as as agents of change because we want to be part of an ecosystem, leaders in an ecosystem that needs to change at scale. So we see ourselves as innovators or first movers in new materials and new technologies, and we can afford, given a larger PNL, some cost of experimentation that we need to then with other, you know, companies that are also willing companies to make changes, we we have that, you know, small cost of experimentation, but then we put it at the, at the availability of the broader system for scaling up. So we do that with materials. We do that with infrastructure. I think we're making progress in certain areas as a system. I think agriculture in particular, you know, we are we are helping the farmer to change. We need more efforts to help the farmer to change. That's where I think the private sector, but also the public sector can have a big role. Whether you're talking about insurance, loans, early revenue creation for, for, for different kind of outputs, those are areas where we can we can work together. Scaling agriculture will make a big, a big, big impact health of the soil, use of water, fertilizers, everything else. I think we're making good progress on water as well as a community. We're not making so much progress. As you were saying, in circularity. I think that is an area where I would put it at the center of the, of the opportunity because, you know, if we get too much scalable circularity, we can really make an impact on the resources that we use. And that is positive for the for the system. So we see ourselves as, you know, a company that for the long term needs to manage nature and profitability. And that's something we are getting better, but obviously with hiccups and, you know, trade offs internally, we see ourselves as a company that needs to evolve the full ecosystem. And we want to be drivers not only as catalysts on the private sector, but also working with the public sector in really channeling and, and, and having very clear ecosystem, transformation. And, you know, obviously we want to be part of this community, well, economic forum where, you know, we think we can make an impact and scale transformation. This is not about everyone doing the little thing. This is about all of us joining forces and making change at scale. That is very complex. It is a very complex topic, but I think we need leadership and we need, resources. We need accountability. We need discipline. We need everything that takes to to make a change at scale.
So thank you very much for this. But there are two. It appears to me that there are two ways of bringing about the change you're talking about. One would be to say we're going to let the market, in the under the leadership of a couple of visionary leaders, transform the way we do our the way we manage our sustainable prosperity within planetary boundaries. Or we wait for regulation, we wait for people to tell us, well, you know, from now on, you are not allowed to do something that is destructive of the planet. Instinctively, I think the community in Davos in general would prefer to to go for the for the sort of entrepreneurial route, the way which allows you to sort of see that the market fixes that. And I think, Andrew, you have a major contribution to make to that, to that you've been innovating into this sector for quite a long time, and perhaps you can tell us how, what drove you to sort of innovate into that, into that, that approach to bring about a change without waiting for the regulators to do it for us?
Thank you. Can I kick off maybe with, just values. And it's to all my fellow leaders here at the World Economic Forum, values only matter when they're challenged. They don't matter in good times. Everyone can have great values in good times. When times get tough, that's when your values matter. And I just want to remind the leaders here and more broadly, that there is no scientific dispute that we're facing into the limits of our planet. Even the most selfish political leaders know that there's boundaries to everything. The economy and to nature. We risk being those business and political leaders who knew of the planet's limits and elected to cross them anyway. That, ladies and gentlemen, we can't afford. You can fool all the people some of the time, or some of the people all the time. But when it comes to physics and biological life, it isn't listening. We are crossing those planetary boundaries. Johan. Thank you, I have remarked. I thought that was one of the best, most concise books given, but I want to rip the rug, the excuse platform out from my fellow business and even political leaders. You might not have understood Johan's discussion. You. You may never see it. You may not be interested in seeing it. But what you do know is there are boundaries to everything, including your own political terms. We see that at Fortescue and we have to drive everything through raw economics, and that is what I now want to present. You might not believe in climate change. You might not believe in love. You might not believe in your fellow man. You might not believe in empathy, but you believe in economics because you don't believe in economics. You're gone at the next election. You're gone at the next shareholders meeting, you are toasted and it's economics, ladies and gentlemen, which I want to speak with you about. The tide is turning. Our company burns 1,000,000,000l of diesel a year. We power trucks, which would not fit on this stage. We power trains. Which the heaviest, fastest trains on Earth. We're building out a ship right now to replace our trial ship, which has been operating for years, which is 330m long. Imagine a ship which has seven Olympic sized swimming pools long and one Olympic sized swimming pool wide and carries over a quarter of a million tonnes. That first ship is underway. It's a big commercial ship. It relies on what we know. We can now supply cheaper energy than oil and gas on a 24 seven baseload basis in the elimination of 1,000,000,000l. We are being watched by our competitors. We don't mind that they want to be fast. Second movers, fine, BHP, Rio Tinto, Vale. I mean, there's a huge companies ruthless in their competitive spirit, but they are not the lowest cost. They are not the most efficient. They do not carry the tagline of being the highest performing company in their country in their history. But Fortescue does. Fortescue carries that tagline. We are not woke. We are not senseless greenies. We're hard edged business people with an understanding of the planet and removing 1,000,000,000l of diesel from our supply chains, replacing it with simple renewable energy and batteries. We're going up because we're the world's first prototype large industrial scale prototype, bigger than many medium sized cities and certainly bigger than many small countries in terms of energy consumption, energy production and pollution pollution. But we're pulling our weight. I'm saying that out loud. Presidents, prime ministers, fellow chief executives, pull your weight when we prove. And it's only two years out now when we prove that we can save up to $1 billion per year in operating costs through removing over 1,000,000,000l of diesel from our supply chains, when we not just maintain but grow our competitive position, continue to outperform our peers, then the Bell has told in every thinking cabinet room of government, in every thinking boardroom of business, the fact that in 2026 you turned away from renewable energy because the winds of politics blew your values over. Please be reminded the planet doesn't care. Your voters then won't care. 2030 is around the corner. You will be at 1.5 degrees. You will be crossing planetary boundaries. And like in Australia where we're suffering serious bushfires at the same time as serious floods, at the same time as decimating the reef systems, which you all love. The Great Barrier Reef, the largest in the world, Ningaloo Reef on the other side of the continent or out into the middle of the Indian Ocean. We're decimating those reefs. I've dived on them, and I've seen the millions of hectares of country in Australia just turned brown. It's happening, ladies and gentlemen, but we can resist it.
Thank you very much for that, Andrew. And I completely agree. Thank you. Let me try. Let me try to dial up the heat, you know, to turn the thermostat a little bit. We do we do have a couple of minutes left and we need to to realize one very simple thing. Despite all the evidence we've heard, despite all the initiatives that we are taking individually and collectively, we are not moving the needle. Why? Because the test score at the moment is incredibly profitable for many people. And if you want to to change people's attitude, you want to change the system. You're going to have to invest into the benefits of system change. Easy to do if you are a trading company, because the shareholders will bear the costs. Much more difficult to do if you are nature, because nature or the planet is not quoted. And therefore we need to be able to really go across the edge to be able to really make a difference. So I'm going to give you each one of you two minutes to tell me what is one single thing that you can really do to, to, to move the system?
Well, in my case, I would I would certainly congratulate the initiatives that we just heard. But at the other end, after hearing Johan, I think we have an urgency to work faster and to have more scale. I guess that scale is not enough. And I think the business here in Davos, this is why I'm here. I'm trying to to make sure that I can find companies that can move quicker, fast to two things. One is energy transition, which I think is the most important thing that the planet needs today is to move away from fossil fuels and go into renewable energy and to do it properly and to do it with business cases, to do a business case of of renewable energy. And secondly, I think circular economy. I think these are the two messages I really want to leave here to all the audience. No more linear economy, no more plastics over the of the world. No, I mean, we can do better. We have all the technology to have full circular economy of the plastics of Pepsi-Cola, of the plastics of everybody and and energy transition. These are the two things now for energy transition. I think storage is one of the main problems that we have, at least in the developing world, the storage and the grid. How do we how do we modernize these two to make sure that we take advantage of solar, wind, geothermal mix? But these are the two things I would fully recommend. Energy transition in a full scale, in a big scale and circular economy.
Thank you very much. The forum is publishing some some information on circularity and circular economies. Don't hesitate to pick up the reports and read them. There are some very interesting work being done here.
Yeah, I'll say obviously there's a lot of things we can do, but I was listening to you, Andrew, and we have examples as well. To me, how do we take these examples. And we make them fast at scale, like what's preventing your competitors from doing the same? I don't know, sometimes it's sharing. Sometimes we are too selfish as companies and we keep it to ourselves. We think it's a competitive advantage. I think there are things that we just need to eliminate the competitive nature and put it at the, at the, at the benefit of the whole system. Right. So I think we have enough examples like, I know we have enough examples in agriculture. We have the business case, we know the model, we know how to scale it. It just doesn't happen enough. So how do we cooperate as a group? How do we become less selfish, more kind of team players? And then also with the governments, like we need to trust each other more. We need to, you know, like public, private where. No, I think this is not where, you know, we need to, have tension between each other. This is an areas where we need to be able to share with you what works and then scale it through Mexico. Right. And we know how it works. So I think there is a little bit of selfishness and competitiveness when I think this is not about being competitive. The truth is that we haven't found a way for consumers to prefer our brands because of sustainability. It's not a competitive nature. It's more of let's change the system. Let's think for the long term. Let's make sure that 20 years from now we have resilient companies can still produce great products at the service of consumers, profitable to our shareholders, and great for the communities where we operate, which is which is the big the big value creation.
So if I can make a parallel with international companies, it's risk management with a payout in many, in many in the long term. And that's not in the nature of the way we do business these days. Andrew, I'm sorry we're running out of time. So I'm trying to speak.
I'll only be a minute. Just just to just to endorse what you said. And, Madam Minister, thank you. I do want to bring this to Mexico. I do want to scale this, it is it is perfectly simple. The flat line of technology for fossil fuel means that it's going to get more expensive. Any economist, any business person, knows that the technology growth, particularly in batteries. But solar and wind is near vertical, which means its operating cost is capital cost is falling. We apply that with what we didn't have only last year. And that's incredibly reactive artificial intelligence to manage very complex grids. Humans can't do it. A cloud goes over a solar farm. Everything changes. But instantaneous intellect like AI can manage these systems. Well, this is replicable. This can be taken to Pepsi. It can be taken to Mexico. It's fair enough that they might say, well, prove it. First, my own chief executive of any energy and growth in the audience here wants us to prove it. First, I just say you can see the trend now. It's going to be successful. We'll prove it within two years. But follow us now and we'll make the technology available to you now.
Next stop. Mexico.
Excellent. Thank you very much.
Yeah. Look, I.
Have 45 seconds, just so that, you know.
Yeah. Thank you. Look, I think that the the best solution here is what Andrew alluded to, which is technology. Technology is going to take us in a direction that is going to make eventually clean energy so much cheaper than the alternative that there'll be such a strong commercial reason to implement it that nobody is going to go after fossil fuels any longer. And those people that are investing behind fossil fuels today will essentially have stranded assets and will get left behind. So I think the fundamental factors, and I'm meeting so many exciting companies here that are doing so much interesting and fantastic research and coming up with new technologies, whether it's on green hydrogen, whether it's in storage, whether it's in generating new solar and wind and other fusion, for example. So there's a lot of exciting stuff that is happening. And I'm pretty convinced in my mind that in the next 5 to 7 years, we'll see a totally new technologies coming out in the clean energy space that we cannot anticipate today. And those are the things that I think ultimately, if implemented at scale, which there is no reason for us not to if they're commercially sensible, there'll be a ton of capital coming in behind it. I think that's going to be the solution. We'll essentially end up blowing. And I hate to say this, but the fossil fuel sort of system out of the water. But it's going to take a little bit of time. But it is going to happen.
Yeah. Thank you very much for that. Maybe if I can just, finish this part of the panel by a call to action. I mentioned the dinosaur in the room before. Look at us. We are not enough convinced of the necessity of what's happening. You've heard it from science. You've heard it from our panelists. It is happening. And if you don't do something about it, we are going to be in trouble. Now, why are we so little people in the room? Because they're all somewhere else, listening to people who are saying that the future is fossil fuels. It isn't. And I would really like people to go home knowing that. Number one.
Yes, yes.
Secondly, I really would like to thank most sincerely my panel. You are outstanding and you have done that very well. And, you know, together possible collaboration is better than domination and we will get there. Onwards and thank you to the center for Nature and Climate of the World Economic Forum, who has put together not only this panel, but has done all the work during the year to support this. So thank you very much to everybody. Thank you for coming.