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At Davos’ “Snow Factor” open forum, scientists, entrepreneurs and Indigenous leaders framed glacier loss as both a water-security emergency and a systems-risk story. Meena Wadhwa underscored the scale: roughly 300 billion tons of snow and ice lost annually, threatening “water towers” that supply about 60% of global freshwater and support more than 2 billion people.
Dana Shukirbayeva argued Central Asia faces a “data paradox”: critical glacier basins are among the least monitored. AI can “integrate satellite data, climate models and hydrology data” to close gaps, but “AI is nothing without proper data,” and youth must push governments to act. Johan Rockström linked melting ice to a “darkening planet” as albedo declines, warning planetary stability depends on protecting cryosphere tipping elements as “planetary commons” with legal standing and compensation mechanisms. He stressed the world is “in danger, but… we haven’t lost the game yet,” though the window is closing.
Zoe Balmforth described how degraded ecosystems turn variability into “volatility” that now hits profits—citing cocoa’s price spike after yield collapse—making business a fast lever for resilience investment. Belen Paez advocated Indigenous governance and Rights of Nature, shifting biodiversity and water from “externality” to asset, and prioritizing connectivity over fragmentation. The panel converged on urgency, transparency, and actionable incentives spanning policy, markets, and communities.
All right. Well, I wanted to first of all, welcome everybody here to this open forum session on the snow Factor. My name is Mina Wadhwa, and I am a planetary scientist and also director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. So the United Nations designated 2025 the International Year of Glaciers. Preservation. And the timing couldn't be more urgent. You know, five of the six years that we've had, we've had record retreat in glaciers during this time, and annually we're losing something like 300 billion tons of snow and ice. This is basically the equivalent of fresh water consumed by the whole global population. Over a course of 30 years. We're losing that in a single year, every single year. That is huge. And it's going to have an impact in our lifetimes. Mountains and glaciers have been rightly called the water towers for the Earth, meaning that they really provide the fresh water for something like 60% of the world. More than 2 billion people are dependent directly for drinking water on glaciers, and not just for drinking water, actually, also for agriculture, also for hydropower. Those all of these types of things that are really essential for us and our well-being. And so glaciers actually, you know, they really not just provide fresh water, but there's other aspects to them that are also important. They regulate our climate systems. They buffer against drought, and they harbor extraordinary biodiversity. Something like 85% of the world's mammals and birds are actually represented in mountain ecosystems. And so when glaciers disappear, the cascading effect that we feel is felt not just by the communities that live nearby, but it touches all of us. So this is actually a story that's not just about the climate crisis that's happening right now. It's also about innovation, and it's about resilience. Communities and scientists working together are coming up with solutions. And we're going to talk about some of that here today, from monitoring technologies to indigenous led conservation to policy frameworks. And today's panel actually brings together voices from every corner of this challenge. We've got cutting edge cryosphere science from the Alps. We have youth led climate entrepreneurship from Central Asia, indigenous leadership from the Amazon, planetary boundaries, science from Potsdam and Nature tech innovation from the UK. So the simple the question that we're going to try to answer today is, is a simple yet profound one, which is that how do we scale fast enough to protect these vital ecosystems and the billions that depend on them? And so let's begin this panel, and I'm going to introduce each one of our panelists. And as I say your name and your affiliation, I hope that you will maybe take two minutes or so to say something about yourself and about what you do that's relevant to this panel. So I'm going to start out with, our panelists here, Donna. Eva. Donna is a climate tech entrepreneur, and she's a global shaper from Kazakhstan. Go ahead. Donna.
Hi, everyone. I'm Donna, and I'm founder of a startup climate tech startup, Forest Hero. We have created an AI based platform for forest management and carbon credit sales. So we do, involve small landowners and farmers in Kazakhstan and Central Asia to unlock the access to climate finance in terms of involving them in forestry projects that are, creating carbon credits. And we sell them overseas for corporates. So, yeah. That's it.
Okay. Great. And next we have Johan Rockström. He's the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
Great. Great to be with you. So I'm a professor in earth system science at the University of Potsdam and the director of the Potsdam Climate Impact Research in Germany. I'm also the founding director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, where I chair the Arctic Resilience Assessment, which was one of these efforts and really trying to pinpoint the need to urgently establish stability on these vital systems.
Great. Next we have Zoe Bamforth, and she is the co-founder for pivotal in the United Kingdom.
Hi, I'm Zoe, I'm co-founder of pivotal. I'm an ecological scientist by background, and I've spent more than 20 years working with global companies on environmental risk and action. Pivotal connects. Well, pivotal is there to help global businesses adapt to the new reality of climate disruption that's already here. By connecting the condition of natural ecosystems to their own profitability. And so what I want to talk about today on a panel about ice and glaciers, is that how businesses are both the most exposed in some ways to the climate disruption that's already here and also can be among the fastest movers in the solution, and how we can work with business to find really meaningful levers for for change, for solutions.
Great. Thank you. Zoe. Next we have Belen Paez, and she is the president of Fundacion Pachamama from Ecuador. And go ahead, Belen.
Thank you. Hi, everyone. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to come here. I come from Ecuador. I've been working in Fundacion Pachamama for over 30 years now, and what we do is working in partnership with indigenous peoples in the Amazon region to permanently protect the Amazon sacred Headwaters. And we do like a very vast work connecting with governments, private sector, academic sector, youth from different cities. And what we have learned, especially from indigenous wisdom, is that everything is connected, like we need to, to listen and learn more every time from from nature and from these indigenous wisdom that has been for millennials in the forest. So, I'm also part of the scientific panel of the Amazon, and I'm running several platforms and alliances around the region. But I come here now with this message coming from the heart of the forest. Thank you.
Thank you Berlin. And last but not least, we have Ruchika Dadhich. And she is the head of the Snow and Atmosphere Research Unit of the Institute of Snow and Avalanche Research here in Switzerland.
Thank you. Hi. Welcome, everyone. I'm especially excited to see this many young people in the front who are interested in this topic. I'm here because I'm a snow, expert. I work in the cryosphere, and what we do is especially trying to understand the processes, on a small scale, that so we can contribute, checking out what's going on with the consequences if the climate is changing and we do that in a way that we're that affects the local communities, like people in Davos. I work actually in Davos. I didn't have to travel here, but also, globally, like for example in the Amazon or in Central Asia.
Great. Thank you so much. So what I'm going to do today is basically ask each of our panelists a question to start. And hopefully after that we can, start to get into a more sort of cross-cutting discussion across the different spheres that each of you represent. So I'm going to start here with Donna. So Central Asia is warming faster than the global average. And with the glaciers that basically are feeding rivers that sustain 70 million people across five nations. And you won the Cop 28 Women Climate Entrepreneurs Competition for Forest Hero, which is your AI platform for sustainable forest management. So my question to you is how can digital tools and AI help choose existing monitoring gaps in or actually help close existing monitoring gaps in glaciers and high altitude ecosystems? And more broadly, how can technology and youth entrepreneurship address the unique challenges of landlocked transboundary boundary glacier systems like those in the Tian Shan?
Yeah. Thank you for your question. So, you know, AI is nothing without a proper data. It's just models. So you need the proper data to make some predictions or even to run some specific models. So and Central Asia faces a data paradox. We are a very important glacier system. But at the same time we are among the least, at the least monitored ecosystems in the world. So, I think that, even though AI and machine learning also can help in terms of data, using so for example, machine learning can integrate satellite data, climate models and hydrology data and, fill the gaps sometimes. So and in Kazakhstan, we do have some initiatives where scientists also collaborate with AI institutes, to fill this data gap in terms of, some specific research projects. So and also, you know, when, when it comes to youth involvement, there are quite a lot of initiatives that people, young people they don't know about, right? So I'm really happy to see so many young people here because, I think, there is there is a lack of interest in, researching glaciers in our region also because young people do not request kind of things. We need sometimes to speak more about it, because maybe some of the decision makers are right now in, in a very late stage of their lives, and they don't care that much in terms of what is going to be in 50 years and what is going to be with glaciers. So we as young people and young leaders, we need to run more initiatives that are creating a dialogue with government and with research institutes to accelerate the process of research and to contribute as much as we can, even in the data collection process.
That's great. I mean, I think, again, hopefully this is something that's really inspiring to some of the young folks that are listening here today and feeling like their voices really should be heard because that's, you know, that's the world that they're going to live in. Yeah. Johan, my question to you. Well, 2025 health check. Planetary health check, which you are, of course, critically sort of involved in terms of, making making known to the world. It showed seven of the nine planetary boundaries being transgressed, including freshwater. And so you've argued that glaciers and ice sheets and rainforests must be treated as planetary commons, requiring collective governance. What would it take to operationalize this framework for mountain cryosphere specifically? And is there still a window to act?
Yeah. Thanks for coming to to your question of how to govern and operationalize the protection of these vital tipping elements that regulate the stability of the planet. Let me just kind of remind everyone of two entry points here that complements your intro about the fundamental importance of stable ice sheets for human well-being. It's also that we now have all the scientific evidence that stabilize sheets, regulates the various state of the planet, and that we know that the planet over the last 100 million years, can only exist in four, four distinct states, which are all regulated fundamentally by the color composition of the planet, meaning the albedo, meaning the percentage of ice which are white surfaces that reflect 90% of incoming heat from the sun. And one of them we can just throw out of the table immediately, which is Snowball Earth, which is when the system just self-regulates itself to a complete frozen state. The last time we saw that is over 100 million years ago. But the third one is is of course, deep ice age, and we've been oscillating in these cycles for the past 1 million years, between long periods of ice age and short periods of the second state, namely Interglacials and interglacial, is the state that we depend on. The last 12,000 years, the Holocene has been an extraordinarily stable equilibrium state of the planet. With this beautiful composition of color, which is regulated by the cryosphere, the snow cover, the ice sheets and the mountain glaciers. And it's given this perfect roughly 30% albedo, which means the percentage of incoming solar radiation that reflects back to space. And unfortunately, for the first time, we start seeing a darkening planet. The planet is getting darker and it's getting darker because of ice melt. It's getting darker because of warming, which moves ecosystems further to the poles. So you get more and more trees eating into the cryosphere, biomes on planet Earth and pollutants also add to this in addition. So we're now at a state where we are scientifically where we are concerned about the very stability of the planet. And that is why the planetary boundary framework is so fundamental, because it quantifies the safe operating space to keep the planet as close as possible to this Holocene equilibrium state that we all depend on for the world as we know it. I mean, we have existed as modern humans past, actually two ice ages. We've been around for 250,000 years, so we know how it is to live in really, really vastly, dramatically different conditions on planet Earth. But we had a very rough time. We were hunters and gatherers. We lived in caves. We were a few million people. Now we are sedentary, global economy with 8 to 9 billion people. And we depend on a stable planet which has the ice sheets in a stable state. So that is what we bring to the table to answer your question. And then that's why we as Earth system scientists have brought in legal experts, political scientists, concluding in a quite major paper in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that we now need to legally redefine the global commons. The global commons, as you all know, I'm sure, has been defined over the last 50 years as the systems on Earth that are outside of national jurisdictions. They are therefore owned by nobody, therefore they're owned by all of us. This is Antarctica, the deep seas or the high sea ocean, the atmosphere and outer space. We conclude that this is not enough. Now we need to also legally define the cryosphere systems Greenland ice sheet, the West Antarctic ice sheet, the mountain glaciers, permafrost systems, nine of the 16 tipping element systems that regulate the stability of the planet are cryosphere systems. They have to be legally protected as planetary commons. Why? Well, because if you're a citizen in Davos or in Beijing or in Berlin, you're equally dependent that these systems are stable. So national jurisdictions doesn't count anymore. We all depend on their functioning. So I think one strategy forward is to give these legal protection. And I would say perhaps you can come into that in discussion that the International Court of Justice, in its advisory opinion last year that said that, look, every nation has a responsibility to avoid dangerous climate change, irrespective of whether you have signed the UNF triple C, is this in support of moving in that direction? If this would happen, it would mean that any country that has an ice sheet system within its national jurisdiction could have a right of compensation to make that service to humanity, of keeping the system stable. I think it would accelerate the pathway away from danger.
That's great to hear. Is there still a window to act, though? I mean, is it I mean, how critical are things at this point and how fast do we need to get this? Yeah. So our.
Yeah. You're right. You refer to the planetary health check 2025. Seven of the nine planetary boundaries are outside of the safe space. We are in danger. But we do also conclude with, you know, I would say quite solid scientific evidence that, yes, we are in danger, but no, we haven't lost the game yet. We're in the we're in the uncertainty range of science. We can still turn this around even though the window is rapidly closing. It's quite remarkable that the geophysical systems on Earth are still dominated by dampening feedbacks. To put it simple, the planet is still cooling our heat injection into the system. That is quite remarkable, and that gives us a way to rapidly transition. But unfortunately the window is shutting. So it is time wise, very urgent to transition away and transition away from danger. We can come back to that is known what it means. It's an energy transition. It's a food system transition primarily.
Okay, great. Zoe, your background is as a PhD ecologist, and you've worked with big companies and big businesses for a couple of decades, and you're also an ex-diplomat. So you've got quite, quite an eclectic background. Your expertise is at the intersection, of course, of all of these areas, ecological science, business policy. How has the business environment changed from the past to the present as a result of instability of the climate system, especially for businesses that depend on nature based inputs like food?
So I think I'm going to say a lot of similar things to Johan, but from a different angle. So if we go back in time and look at the past operating environment, for as long as post-industrial economies have existed, so has environmental degradation. But for decades, the system absorbed that degradation. Nature had capacity and buffers, it had resilience, and the climate was still stable. So for hundreds of years we could push production hard and still get away with it, because natural systems had enough spare capacity to buffer that impact and stay stable. So that history of natural capacity in natural ecosystems shaped how commodity supply chains were built around assumptions of predictability, stability and abundance. So it didn't matter then what harmful practices we use to achieve things like high yield numbers. For example, deforestation, intensive monocultures, soil depletion because the system was strong enough to absorb that stress, and ecosystems were resilient enough to bounce back from shocks. And that all meant that businesses could operate without really considering or accounting for the downstream consequences. There were no immediate penalties, and so there was no urgency or incentive to do anything differently. The uncomfortable truth, whatever we would like to say, the uncomfortable truth was that reducing their impact did not materially improve their own business outcomes, so there was no incentive to change it. So the model didn't change, and that was the past operating environment. And if we fast forward to today and things have changed, as Johan was already just saying, we've crossed a bunch of tipping points and the loss of ice of glaciers that we're here to talk about today is a cause and effect and a signal of that of the crossing of those tipping points. So natural systems have now become too degraded to absorb stress the way that they once did. And ecosystems are no longer consistently able to absorb shocks like climate shock, bounce back, and even in some cases, stay productive. And when those systems lose resilience, their natural variability turns into volatility. And that volatility is now showing up in the business fundamentals. For companies that depend on nature based inputs, it shows up in things like supply chain stability, price predictability, the availability of the inputs that they need. So those businesses that depend on natural commodities are now faced with a new reality of system disruption of volatility. So as a good example of that is cocoa and chocolate has become much more expensive in the supermarket recently. And that price spike, that recent price spike is driven by this system instability. At its peak in 2024, cocoa prices were $12,000 a tonne. That's three times what they were at the beginning of the same year. Even at their lowest in 2025, they were still double what they had been a couple of years before. And for decades before that, cocoa prices had been stable and much lower for a really long time. So that drastic shift in price stability happened because between 2022 and 2024, cocoa yields collapsed in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, which together supply about 60% of cocoa. Now, the immediate triggers for that collapse were rampant crop disease, pest proliferation, which led to severe yield losses, and the death of cocoa trees that take years a really long time to replace. But underneath those triggers, the deeper issue was system weakness. The ecosystems in the growing regions for cocoa that have been degraded for so many years by practices like deforestation, simplified shade canopy, soil depletion and biodiversity loss no longer had the resilience to withstand shocks like climate shifts and pest outbreaks in those regions. So the erratic rainfall and the rising temperatures that happened there were destabilizing, not necessarily because they were unprecedented, but because the system couldn't absorb the shock of them anymore, because it is now so degraded. So that's not a theory or a future risk. It's not something that's going to happen in 2050 or 2075. It's the current operating environment for businesses that depend on natural commodities like cocoa as key inputs into their products, into the things that they sell. And it's not just cocoa. There are tons of examples. It's coffee in Brazil, oranges in Brazil, oranges in Florida, hazelnuts in Turkey, sugarcane in India. It goes on. And that is how that is the current operating environment for the companies that depend on those things. So there's growing awareness of that risk exposure among business. But sensing risk isn't the same thing as knowing what to do about it. And solving the problem means adapting to the current reality to the current operating environment, which in some cases will include will require taking action to improve the condition and resilience of the ecosystems that these companies depend on in order to make their products. And but without insight into these ecosystems, it's impossible for them to know how to do that or where to do it and what action is working. So the future, the solution to adapting to the new reality of system disruption that we are now facing requires insight into ecosystems. It requires understanding where ecosystem condition is weakening, where resilience is is low, and doing something about it. And when businesses do that and they invest in the ecosystems that they need that they directly depend on for their current profit, they are also rebuilding the ecosystems that we all depend on. So they are one now, one of the strongest levers that we have for meaningful change in nature.
That's a great point. I think, you know, ultimately we're just going to have to work towards building greater resilience in all of these systems. Yeah. You know, get back to sort of having more buffer there. Belen, you're working to protect 35 million hectares of Amazon headwaters alongside 30 indigenous nationalities. Glaciers sustain half of humanity in the Andean glaciers feed the Amazon. So how do indigenous governance models and the recognition of the rights of nature offer a different paradigm for protecting these interconnected water systems?
Well, I, I'm coming from two backgrounds, actually. I started working as an ecologist. I am a ecologist by formation. And then I started working for an NGO and working with indigenous people. So after 30 decades, I also have been able to work with different other sectors. And and it's very complex. What in Latin America, we see nowadays with authoritarian governments that are putting a lot of efforts to maintain an economic system that puts a lot of pressure on onto this ecosystem, which is the Amazon region. So that's why, if we see in time, the last 40 years, indigenous movements in the Amazon basin, especially indigenous peoples from Ecuador and Peru, they have been on the top of the frontlines, putting a very good examples on how indigenous governance and how to implement correctly collective rights is such an important tool to permanently protect the Amazon basin and the standing forest that are there, that have been habited with foreign with indigenous peoples for millennials. And I would like to add that 12,000 years ago in this region, the most one of the most biodiverse places on Earth and ice, these places were not under the, the, the waters or the glaciers or the, the ice. So the intelligences that came out from these forests is very deep and complex. And indigenous people learn how to be in tune with nature, listening to each bind, each river, each spirit from each bin, from from the forest. And that's the that's the most important part of what they are saying now, not just defending forest because they are indigenous people protecting their territories, but they are saying is also that they are in the frontlines because they can hear better to the spirits from the forest and meaning that they have this relation, that perhaps people from the rest of the world are disconnected now. So governance in, in, in the Amazon region for indigenous movements are very important because they have been able to face out and have conversations with the governments and to stop down and and put a brake on on development of oil activities, mining activities and even a good example to mention now is that in 2008, when Ecuador was rewriting its constitution, we included in our Constitution the rights of nature and the rights of nature means that we gave nature is a subject of rights. And from that place in 2008, from Ecuador, we started a movement, global movement, that is called the Global Alliance of the Rights of Nature that has been creating all over, around the world, helps institutions, academic sector, indigenous peoples, youth hubs, a way to understand how rights of nature and legal structures in each of our countries has been really a way and a tool to protect some ecosystems as fragile as they are, and nowadays there are, like many efforts to put out rivers under rights of nature in New Zealand, or we have been accomplished such a good job in Cop 30, trying to put out with the government of Colombia and the Amazon rivers, and the water flows from the Amazon in the top of one of the legal considerations for the region to became the Amazon water flows as part of the rights of, the Amazon waters will have the rights to become part of the, the, the system in the whole region. So rights of nature has become not just like something that is happening in different countries, but is becoming a world wide movement. And I think this has been a very strong and powerful tool as well. Indigenous peoples, frontline defenders putting out their voices to protect permanently the most important, biodiverse places on Earth, which is in the Amazon region. And I think these two important, the like actors coming from civil society and indigenous people have been very successful and civilizing and communicating why it's so important to have youth and indigenous peoples in these frontlines on the negotiations, at the climate conventions, at biodiversity conventions, on climate Weeks, on Davos forum and, the, the, the deep message coming out is like young people need to listen carefully. What, what is coming out, not just from the systems like to making more money, but what is really happening to our connection on on nature. So I think that I will end it here.
Thank you. So moving now from the Amazon back to Switzerland here, you've emphasized that snow research must give something back to society. Your institute recently warned that glacier changes are happening faster and more intensely than predicted. What are the most critical gaps in our understanding of snow atmosphere interactions that will be essential for accurate predictions of water availability? And, what would closing such scientific gaps be enough to address the challenges that we face?
All very good questions. So I think as of one of the critical gaps is that the systems are changing. So a lot of our physics and our models are based on the fact that, glacier models, we have this snow coming down and it's dry firn really high up. We have dry snow and it gets wetter and wetter towards the bottom, and it's kind of a little bit wet in summer, but we still have a lot of dry snow and firn on top of these glaciers. This is how our model presumably works. This is what our past data shows us. However, now this system is changing and suddenly there's very little dry firn left in the world on the glaciers. There's still a lot in Antarctica, but even Antarctica is getting wetter and wetter. And coming back to the difference that that makes is how do we define those, those processes. Right. Like Johan was talking about the albedo, and that feedback effect, albedo is essentially, how much sunlight energy do we reflect as the Earth reflects back into space? And that means I sound really funny, Okay. And, the concept of the albedo is something we talk about these feedbacks, right? Like what happens and I always think about and everyone who lives in Davos knows that if you go out on a day when it's got fresh snow without sunblock, you're going to get sunburned. And that means because a lot of the light is getting reflected, if you go a little bit later in spring, it's less bad. And I really like I think it's really important for us to recognize that these feedback effects are from the albedo. And I really like the analog, of, you probably you all have a car. I have sat in a car before and in the car we have this when it's really hot. There are these, protective screens that we put these silver screens. And I always imagine a parrot sitting in the car on a really hot day. Now, there's a little hole in that screen, and the parrot gets a little bit hot and irritated. Right? Goes and scratches at the screen. And the more the parrot scratches at the screen, the bigger the hole gets, the more irritated the parrot gets. And that's a feedback effect, right? Like the screen gets bigger, there's less the the car gets hotter. And we are also talking about the resilience. Now, if you think about that screen, and if we think that that screen could be self-healing, that's resilience right. Like the parrot goes and sits in the screen and then the screen fixes itself and their fan starts going. And so the parrot kind of chills out. And that's what what the feedbacks are. And that's what the resilience is. And what we are trying to do is to figure out how the systems work, how these feedbacks works work, and how resilient the system is to one of these feedbacks. And whether we there's still time to actually fix it. And what we try to do when we try to improve our process understanding. Right. Like from the dry snow that we know to the wet snow that we know, we try to kind of, see what those effects are, but we also try to essentially what we do. I mean, we know that climate is changing, Glacier is are melting, and whether we improve our processes or not. I mean, it's essentially your second question is that going to help to close that gap in science? I mean, I'm asking you all, are you going to care more about it if I tell you that the glaciers are going to disappear by 2070 or 2080, probably not that much, right? I mean, it helps us to see the urgency, but it really it needs a little bit more. It needs to we shouldn't care whether it's going to happen in 2070 or 2080, because that's what we can tell you if our models improve, and that will maybe make it a little bit more urgent. If I say, oh, it's actually not going to be 2070, but it's going to be between 2045 and 2050, then suddenly companies are going to see that urge a little bit better. So we can do something by closing these gaps. But also the question is really we know what's happening, and it's really just these little margins that we are working on. And the question is really like, does it matter whether it's 2070 or 20 80 or 2060? Not really. But we have to know that we have to address it.
Yeah, absolutely. And as you know, many of the young folks in this audience will at least care for the fact that this is going to be happening in their lifetime, that things are going things are going to be evolving and changing, and they're going to be starting to feel the impacts of all of this. If we don't move now, and if we don't do some of the things that we need to do to address the fact that we are in a climate crisis, I think we're going to be we're going to be seeing the impact of that. So your research, as you just talked about, it spans the Alps and the Arctic. And, Donna, you've worked across Central Asia and Belen. Your work connects the Andes to the Amazon. We have three very different mountain systems here in these parts of the world. And, you know, what can these regions learn from each other in terms of how they work? Other solutions that genuinely transfer between these areas in Central Asia and Switzerland and the Amazon, or do they fundamentally require different approaches? Maybe you want to take the questions. What do you think, Donna?
Yeah. So mountain systems are different. But the climate physics is global. Right. So I think that, one of the solutions might be a digital platform where all of the data that are being used by researchers may be published, publicly. I mean, we I'm also, by the way, an ecologist by profession. Right. But I'm not that much into research. But I see that, like, people they don't really know, even not maybe understand what scientists are doing. So sometimes I think there is a need to create some kind of, all in one digital platform, publicly available as it is in Japan, for example, in there are some, platforms where there are digital, digitized, all of the risks, I mean, risk reduction platforms. And each citizen of Japan can see where the earthquake is coming. So even it's even if the, glaciers are not that much, as you said, urgent thing. But if you will be updating every day what's happening and maybe it will be kind of, watch, where it is, like two years before glaciers are becoming less and something like this, it will be more understandable for just citizens who don't understand clearly what scientists are doing and where is the data. Because data governance is very important in these kind of things we don't have. If you Google it, you will just find maybe some articles but not a proper data. So maybe we can learn from each other in this kind of thing.
Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, I think certainly AI approaches those, those are kind of global types of approaches. Maybe. Belen, do you think that the Amazon requires sort of different approaches than other parts of the world?
Well, I think principles are not transferable. Like we know that climate, is completely connected. Doesn't matter if the glaciers or the Amazon or the oceans are separate. Everything is so much connected. And, what we have seen that the last report on the scientific panel about connectivity mentioned is that definitely we need to put a lot of attention on, on connectivity, meaning that the borders between countries in the Amazon region should be looking at policies in a different way, and we should invest hours, connectivity rather, putting What's this word? Like we need to look at connectivity instead instead of fragmentation. So the economy model that is based now in the Amazon based on extractive industries, extraction, mining, oil development, hydropower is basically putting a lot of pressure on the water bodies, bodies of the waters. So we really need to see that the government governance among the Switzerland to Nepal or to the glaciers, it needs to be understood in this way that governments should be transporters and should meet these, requirements about connectivity, biodiversity corridors, biocultural understanding of communities of indigenous territories. So if we see in.
The Amazon Basin indigenous territories. They are the bonds that connect all of these longitudinal biodiversity that connects among forests and rivers, such a much dense biodiversity and standing forest, and all the flows from coming from the oceans to the to the region, and all these hydrological systems that are then create patterns of waters, not just through the Americas, but to the whole world comes from the Amazon. So if glaciers are going to be going down as well, the Amazon and Amazon, for sure the Amazon is going to be deteriorated in a way that climate stability for the whole world is going to be very affected. So make sure that connectivity is such an important understanding that will avoid some of the tipping points. But also we need to see not just ecological tipping points but socio ecological tipping points. What happened with indigenous peoples and their territories will affect the rest of the.
She'd said. Do you have anything to add?
Yes, I would just correct. I didn't mean that the glaciers are not urgent. I think it's extreme. I think 2050 is extremely urgent. And but I think what you said to actually feel that urgency and there are already some tools that have been developed in different countries. Amongst them, I think Switzerland also has some tools to actually show the changes of glaciers in New Zealand has a tool where you can play with an app. So there are there are these things exist and they need to be kind of translated in a better way. I mean, it could be something like a parrot ometer to see what that global albedo is doing. Right. How irritated that parrot is for the feedbacks. And it's not just the glaciers, right? I think it's the albedo in the Arctic and in Antarctica. I mean, the sea ice has really deteriorated in the last year, and that makes a really big change, to that planetary albedo. And just to kind of realize how urgent that is. And even if 2050 or 2060 might not look that urgent right now, if we had something like that, then it would make it feel a little bit more urgent than not the scientists, but also because the population is actually really interested. Every time I talk to someone in Davos, there's a lot of people who are really interested in the processes that are going, and it's sometimes frustrating to think that, the the best thing I can do is go and vote. And the political systems are extremely slow, which is where some of these companies that you've talked about come in, because they can push that a lot faster.
Great. Yeah. So, Johan, you've argued that, staying within planetary boundaries requires absolute budgets that must be distributed fairly. And, Zoe, your customers are big businesses that depend on healthy ecosystems. Of course. And Belen, you've pioneered bioeconomy approaches with indigenous communities. So how do we create economic incentives powerful enough to protect our ecosystems when the short term economic pressures are often pushing in the opposite direction? Maybe. Johan.
So what you're pointing at me, Anna, is nothing less than a major paradigm shift. And, it may sound utopian, but we have many of the elements of it, and we have many examples of how things are moving in that direction, recognizing that we need to define scientifically quantified boundaries. That gives us a safe space for economic development, for human well-being, within safe boundaries. And of course, the one that we talk about is the climate boundary. But we have similar scientific quantifications now even work for the cryosphere. Actually, there are a whole group of Christ for scientists working right as we speak on quantifying the safe boundaries for the minimum surface area of Arctic winter ice, Greenland volume of mass ice, alpine glaciers. To give that as a guide for policy, which then can provide the right economic incentives. I think it's really important to to say that you cannot just hand the science over in the hands of business directly. I think you need to have a partnership with regulatory means, where you put red sand, red lines in the sand on on how far away from the mainstream can you move before you get penalized or fundamentally violating regulations, which we know from empirical evidence, drives innovation constraints, drives efficiency and innovations for economic development. So it doesn't have to be a hinder. And to me personally, the cryosphere dynamics we see in the in the physics of science, they're so dramatic that I think we need to urgently use the cryosphere as a lever for those economic incentives. And I think that's one area where we're failing. And I'll just give you one, one example, the FIFA World Cup on on football, which we will have coming up soon, is now starting to adapt itself to the fact that they will have to be a factor. Ten larger number of breaks in the games because of player threatening heat levels. So this is human induced impacts, which means that the professional football cannot operate as normal. So any viewer of the world's most important sports event will start getting frustrated by the fact that these players have to stop all the time because they have to drink water because it's simply too hot. Now, this will send signals that something is uncomfortably bad. Is is the FIS World Cup organizer for all the cross-country skiing and downhill skiing doing the same? No, we're just kicking the can down the road and trying to find higher altitude glaciers. For their early spring kickoff of events and the Davos, World Cup events. And we do artificial snow, and we're kind of pushing ourselves into artificial adaptation instead of using the changes as a campaign beacon for rapid impact, which then can change policy, which then can impact economic incentives, because we also know that the transition away from danger, which means mitigation, which means bringing us off oil, coal and gas, can be done on economic terms. Today, we don't even need science because we know that this can outcompete oil, coal and gas. If you just remove subsidies and really, really invest in a proper way. So I think the cryosphere can be a vehicle for change, which we're quite frankly, so far not using.
Yeah. Zoe, do you have any comments on economic incentives?
Am I allowed to disagree slightly?
Absolutely, absolutely. This is a discussion.
So I agree, with all of the fundamentals in that I think I disagree that regulation is going to lead the charge. And I think we've seen so many examples of that being the case. If you think about social media, smartphones, how long has it taken any government to regulate anything to do with social media access? How long is it going to take them to regulate AI? Do we really think that they're going to put those red lines in the sand and affect change in any of these spaces? And so I think if we expect that to happen in this, I think, I think we might be setting ourselves up to fail if we if we expect that to be the solution. And the other thing that I, I know from the I've spent my career pulling different levers, trying to affect change. And one of the things that I have profoundly learned is that if you want something to change, you have to be able to explain to an individual human why it's immediately urgent for them, why it affects them today, and then what you want them, that individual person to do about that, and that you have to give them that evidence and you have to give them information that enables them to act. And while we still talk in theoretical, abstract terms, there's nothing tangible that somebody can take and say, I understand that this is hurting me today. It doesn't matter if it's a decision maker in a business or an individual person that's going to vote, somebody that's deciding how they're going to travel, the decisions that individual humans make every day, if we want them to change how they make those decisions, we have to inform them with something that's tangible and actionable that they can take that information and change what they're going to do. And if enough humans on Earth do that with information that we can give them, then then we can affect change. But until we can say you as we're talking to humans rather than we're not talking to institutions, we're not talking to governments, even governments, just humans making decisions. And I think, I think we get lost sometimes in the big picture. And I think sometimes we have to bring it down more to the tangible detail and providing information particularly, I mean, I work in the business sector and I provide information to businesses about how it's hurting them today. So the ecosystem resilience is lost in the places where you depend on the crops that are grown, in those places that is hurting your products, it's hurting your profit. And I can give you information that tells you how to act. What should I do? How can I invest in natural capacity? Where should I invest the money in that? And when I make those investments, is it working? I have a feedback loop in the information, and I think that those incentives are already here. There is already impact in business and that will move the needle quickly. That's what I believe.
Just that I don't disagree with that. I mean, one thing does not exclude the other. I think we need to have multiple approaches top down and bottom up. And the good news is that we have so much evidence that economics itself points in a direction of moving towards safety. So we need to create the boundary conditions for that. And of course it has to do with individuals and awareness. But I think it also has to do with leadership. And I think it's not one thing that excludes the other.
Yeah. Yeah. Before we actually throw the questions out for the audience, I wanted to actually get back to Belen and ask, you know, economic incentives from the indigenous, framework.
So in in this report from the scientific panel of the Amazon remarks that, extractive industries and extractive economies are putting a lot of pressure on connectivity. So, Taras, the design and the creation of a ecological economic system, for that will bring more understanding about that biodiversity as an asset, environmental services, water flows as an asset instead of an externality. We see the Amazon a very important way to do it, such with the design, good projects in the region that are related with bioeconomy, social bioeconomy economy as the forest economies. So bringing these kind of Economies that are respectful with nature, we think that are very important that this transformation towards this cycle of becoming less extractive countries, towards this new way of seeing biodiversity as all these conversations that we see, not putting out commodities in nature for all the reasons, but we see that. Bio credits, biocultural credits, jour credits, water flows, tokens are becoming something, are becoming a conversation over the region. And yesterday I had a conversation with someone, after the concert in, in the big conference hall that she was very worried about his son becoming an environmentalist. She, she comes from, from the industry of health and technology. And she said, I'm worried about my son becoming an environmentalist. I think he's not going to will not we will not make enough money. And because he's going to dedicate his life to to environment. And I was having this conversation with her about how tech people around the world, very young people that I know all over, around the world, they are putting a lot of attention on biodiversity units, biodiversity credits and supporting indigenous people led organizations and projects that are coming with superfoods and great ideas about biodiversity, from the Amazon to the world. Still, we see that impact investors, people that are putting money to create new companies in the region are looking for the returns. And that's completely, of course, important. But there is something that needs to be part of the shifting that will improve economies, that will come with more restoration to the region. And I think this is the time. So I encourage all the young people to to work towards this tipping points analysis, but also about new regenerative economies that will bring life to to.
All right. Thank you Belen. So now we will have the opportunity for the audience to ask some questions. And I would request that you please keep your questions directed and limit them to no more than a minute or so, because we want to give the opportunity to as many people as possible to ask questions. Maybe a young person there.
Hi, I'm Nick from the UK. Glaciers are a shared global resource, yet most climate agreements rely on voluntary compliance. Legally speaking, what binding mechanisms exist to stop states opting out and how effective are they?
Okay, who wants to take that question?
Well, I can just say, Nick, you're absolutely right. That's one of the big limitations of the Paris Agreement that it has a legally binding framework of keeping warming well below two degrees Celsius and aiming for 1.5. But the way to get there is voluntary through the National determined contributions. I'm very critical of this. This was one of the failures before Paris. We had the Kyoto Protocol. These were binding quantitative regulatory mitigation targets set over time. The problem was that they only had an annex, one, which were the rich countries in the world. So this was the only way to bring all the countries in the world. I think we need more regulated quantitative mitigation pathways. Do we see that in the world? Yes. The world's largest economic region in the world has it already. We're sitting in it right where we sit. The European Union, including Switzerland, UK and Norway. This is actually working. The European Union has reduced emissions by over 25%. And you have to pay your way if you don't meet your targets. I think that is one pathway that is really important. And the European Union is nervous about this, and so is business, because it means that business is operating under higher cost levels than those they compete with. Well, that is why European Union has decided on introducing the Cbam, the carbon border adjustment mechanism, which I think has a great promise because it puts a carbon price on imports to Europe, which is already spilling over to India, for example, putting a domestic price on carbon to not pay to Brussels, instead pay to India itself. So I think we're starting to see something along the lines that I think you were kind of aiming for. It's a bit on the regulatory frame again. Yeah, we'll have a discussion on this, I'm sure.
A question over there maybe. And then over there. Go ahead.
Thank you so much for this fascinating talk. My name is Merab Cohen. I'm a recent PhD graduate. I study social ecological systems resilience. And when I teach the planetary boundaries, which is a very, very helpful concept, I constantly asked the same question, but we transgressed it already and we're still here. You know, you told us it's not linear. You told us there's a tipping point. Seven have been transgressed. So how is this exactly communicating the urgency? And I know my answer to my students, but I would really appreciate to hear from Professor Rockström. Yours.
Well, you're absolutely right. I mean, I think we've covered it to some extent on this, this panel that the safe operating space, the quantitative boundaries are set to keep the planet within a stable, resilient life support system as close as possible to the Holocene interglacial state that we've depended on during our entire civilizational journey since we left the last ice age. Move out of that boundary. You enter the danger zone, so you enter the zone of uncertainty and science. There is quite a wide uncertainty range in science, and one has to admit to that. And we are in that danger zone and seven of the nine boundaries are transgressed. But that doesn't mean that we have fallen over an escarpment. It means that we have ample scientific evidence that the planet is losing its strength, its resilience, its health, its ability to buffer and dampen the heat stress that we're causing for some of the boundaries. We have moved into the red zone, which means high risk of causing irreversible changes, that is, for biosphere integrity. For example, we know that we lose species, we lose ecological functions. We can't. There's no turning back. It's actually a tipping point for the tipping point, the climate tipping points that we discussed here today, for example, the Greenland ice sheet, the permafrost systems, the Amoc, the West Antarctic ice Sheet, the Amazon rainforest. Those systems scientifically, even though we've breached boundaries, we don't have scientific evidence that we've crossed those tipping points yet. We're very close. For some of them, we might actually have crossed them, not having the evidence that it's already occurred. But what what the boundaries give us is, is a is a is a traffic light system of warning us to push things too far and are too close in the health check 2025. Our final conclusion is that when you integrate all the boundary transgressions, the planet is outside of the green space. We are in danger, but we're not yet in the red zone. We are at the at the edge of the yellow zone, which means we're in danger. Things can go wrong, but the planet is still dominated by bio geophysical feedbacks that dampen. It's quite remarkable that still, you know, Mother Earth is under tremendous pressure, but she's still standing. But we're seeing signs of wobbling. And I think that is the way to to that's what the science is saying is then, of course, for single boundaries, we are in many cases even more worried. Indeed. But, but but definitely it shows that it's a warning. But we can turn this around still. But but you're right that this is one of the challenges with the planet boundary framework. That's why, by the way, we're working a lot on on integrating metrics for the entire planet. And that is work in progress right now.
Also, we are still here, but at what cost? I mean, it's not like the planet is going to collapse in itself, but are we really willing to accept, dozens and dozens of deaths every year from heat? I mean, that's really the question. It's not like that we are going to collapse, but there's just so much cost to it. And that cost is getting higher and higher and higher. And the question just how far are we willing to accept that?
Yes, absolutely. Do you want to survive or do you want to thrive? Yes.
Because remember, the moment we cross the tipping point in the Amazon rainforest, it will take 100 years at least, for the system to transition into degraded bush savanna with massive impacts on freshwater degradation. But exactly what what Blair was pointing out. If we cross a tipping point in the Greenland ice sheet, it will probably take 1000 years for the system to melt seven meter sea level rise, but it would be unstoppable. I call that a drift. We would be drifting away unstoppably to less and less livable conditions. So that's, I think.
The key. I think maybe.
West Antarctic Ice Sheet would be much faster, right? I mean yes. Yeah.
So maybe we can move to another question at this point over there.
There you go. So in the back. Okay.
I'm Florian from Switzerland. And thanks a lot for the insights. And I mean, I appreciate the transparency and where you mentioned AI can do something. Technology they're helping. What we haven't talked about. Is there a role for scientific or technological innovation to solve this? Can that also contribute?
Actually maybe. Donna, you want to take that question.
Yeah. So I'm not sure what how scientific world can actually collaborate with those who are building AI because they're completely different communities. Let's say, I would like maybe to highlight, the most important thing in terms of data. So when we are talking about this climate change things, I, I couldn't highlight it during my speech. So I think that, the starting point may be to understand communities as data owners, not data source. Right. And when people will understand that they are right now a data source, not data owners, this will create a new dialogue between those who are building AI scientists. And and it will be a third person in this conversation, the community who are creating the most important thing data. Right. So maybe that could be something that will be creating this conversation and collaboration between these two communities.
Was maybe thinking about more practical aspects. So I give one albedo.
So I hear in India oh sorry. Yeah I hear in India they are starting painting the roofs white, which has the same color as snow. I know I'm not a scientist, but so I was also looking for the I mean, on top of the transparency of these things.
Actually maybe. Ruchika. Would you have some comments on that?
Yeah. I mean, people have there's quite a few ways that people have tried to change the planetary albedo. I think painting the roof white, not the discussion. Go for that anytime. The same way as you're going to wear a white t shirt on a really hot day and not a black t shirt, but they are. Some people have tried to do questionable things, like suggesting pouring white plastic beads into the ocean to change the planetary albedo to make up for the loss of sea ice loss. And these things have shown that they are, quite problematic. But if it's like just something like painting the roof white, I think those are really, really good solutions. And I mean, in the Alps, on the glaciers, you've probably all heard that people will put out these white blankets trying to protect it. But I think it needs to be clear. This is not actually protecting the glaciers. It's protecting the skiing infrastructure from collapsing. And that's okay. Right? I think if they if they put like a white carpet to make sure that this structure doesn't collapse, that's okay. But that's not something that's actually changing. The glaciers can't protect the glaciers like that. But solutions that are as easy as painting the roofs, I think they're great.
Okay.
I think actually.
Maybe let's go to the back of the room for a question.
Someone here.
Oh go ahead. Okay.
Go there, go there.
One one over there and then over there.
One woman.
Hi. I'm a student, and I really appreciate your work, Donna. And it's more a question towards you. And you talked about your project, which I really appreciate, but don't you think it's a bit like a paradox that you're using AI, which is using up a lot of water, especially now while talking about protecting our glaciers?
Yeah, thanks for your question. That's also a thing that I'm always trying to highlight when we are speaking about AI. So when I when I say AI based, it's more mostly machine learning. So for example, I always encourage all of my friends not to use ChatGPT when you can Google it, because any prompt you are doing by by using, for example, OpenAI or other ChatGPT or or AI services, it costs much more than just googling in terms of energy and carbon footprint. So when we are talking about AI, it's just some kind of sexy words for investors. But, we use basic mathematical models that are, you know, very important for, predicting how tree species will be surviving in this or that land. So we're trying to make it as much as possible as we can do.
Great. Thank you. And one question over there.
Yes. It's okay. Now, the thing is, we only have one planet. We have no planet B, and I see there is, two different worlds. The world is being separated in two different parts. We have on one side the developed world, the global north, which is polluting a lot, about 15 to 20 times more than on the other side, the global South. So these two have different challenges. The one has to do all they can to make their development more, more sustainable. And on the other side, the Global South is also developing, they have to prevent into going into following the same path of the global north. But since we only have one planet, I don't know if we're going to manage, but we have to manage for the sake of, the next generation.
So is that a question for anyone to to address? Or maybe we'll anybody want to comment on that.
No, no, I think that that was a fact. It's something.
That you.
Want to express.
Absolutely.
But I don't know if I can address to a question. It's someone in the back.
Any question up front here.
Hello. Here is one issue that I would like to address. And I think it's very simple solution to solve a lot of issues. And as we already know, about 14% of CO2 is animal agriculture problem. And there is a simple solution to eat more plant based food, which I did. My. I'm a pianist. I'm not, I'm a teacher. And I did this 13 years ago. Last 13 years I lived in California. And it's very easy to find any vegan option there. And I just moved back to Europe. And it's ridiculous that you cannot find a bread without eggs and milk, which is by I mean, I think if Europe Union would start to produce more plant based food overall, it would make this issue just less. And it's very simple because everyone can do it regardless of where we're from. I'm from Baltic countries, which we love meat and I change myself. I think everyone can do it just if we have more options, that's all.
Okay. Maybe. Zoe, did you want to say anything about that?
I mean, it's a really important part of this solution, right? We have to change how we consume. And you're right. Agriculture is the single biggest impact on particularly on natural ecosystems and that planetary boundary. I would say that in order to achieve that, we we go back to how do we inform people and how do we incentivize them to take that action at that moment? And you're saying they need more options, but then how do you incentivize the businesses that are going to create those options to put them on the shelf? And I think we also have to be realistic that plant based foods also require vast stretches of land in order to produce. Soy, for example, is one of the highest impact, including in the Amazon, one of the highest impact commodities that exists. Yep. Yeah yeah. Yep. For sure. Yeah. No. Exactly. But I'm saying that's not the entire solution. It's it's it's an important part of it. But it percent of people.
I think we need to actually move on to another question back there. There's a lady in red over there. Yeah. Right now. Yeah. One last question or no. Okay. I think we are actually at the end of our, of our session here. So I apologize for that. Cutting off the last question, I really appreciate the the feedback from our panelists here today. I hope that you will take away from here not just a sense of urgency, but also the fact that you have some agency moving forward. There is there are solutions, and hopefully we'll be hearing more about that, in discussions over the rest of the week. So thank you very much.