Even with aggressive decarbonization, climate shocks will hit; this session explores how communities and economies can adapt and build lasting resilience.
At Davos, leaders argued that adaptation is no longer a defensive “cost center” but an investable growth agenda that must sit alongside mitigation. The moderator noted 2024 climate losses above $300B and warned impacts could shave 10–20% of global GDP by 2050, while adaptation investments can return “$2 to $20 for every dollar invested.” Standard Bank’s Nonkululeko Nyembezi showed how bankable adaptation depends on blended structures: in Eswatini, financing solar-powered subsurface irrigation plus drought-resistant seeds lifted yields 20% and enabled repayment; in Malawi, reforestation became financeable only because “policy…allowed” carbon-credit revenues to service a $10M loan. Nadir Godrej framed the business case through “shared value,” using India’s mandatory CSR to fund watershed development that reduces water stress, raises farm yields, and sequesters carbon—“we can both adapt and prevent.” Clay.foundation’s Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño argued adaptation starts with “planetary awareness,” using satellites and AI to trigger forecast-based financing before floods or crop failures. Sylvia Earle pushed nature-first resilience: “Save what remains of the natural world…our life support system.” UNICEF’s Catherine Russell focused on “protect[ing] the services that children rely on,” noting only 2.4% of climate finance targets children and highlighting solar-powered schools and clinics as practical resilience.
Would you like some water? Welcome. Welcome to everyone who is in the room and all of those joining us online. Welcome to our incredible group of panelists for today for this conversation on adaptation. I'd like to kick us off by framing what we mean by adaptation. When we talk about climate action, we often conflate mitigation. Adaptation. Mitigation is about lowering emissions and decarbonising our economies, whereas adaptation is about a wider adjustments to our assets and institutions, to the changes that are already here in the shocks, to come with resilience as the ultimate goal. And adaptation matters. Because even under optimistic decarbonisation scenarios, we are still entering incredibly uncharted territory of climatic extremes. And the economic implications of this are deeply material. As we'll be discussing today in 2024, global losses from climate impacts exceeded $300 billion and without serious adaptation, further impacts are estimated to erode 10 to 20% of global GDP by 2050. So while we're on this journey of energy transition, we have to become skilled at living in a climate impacted world and we have to become good at adaptation. That's why last year's Cop was framed as the cop of adaptation. Whilst a lot of the conversation frames adaptation defensively through the lens of risk, today's conversation thinks that that's a bit incomplete. And actually, the question for this audience is one of human ingenuity and transformation. Not only what do we stand to lose, but what new value can be created when we look at adaptation front on? And what are the returns of adapting? Well, a lot of people are now showing that adaptation is the foundation of tomorrow's value, with returns ranging from 2 to $20 for every dollar invested. And yet to date investments in the space have been a fraction of those of decarbonisation. Just very briefly, what is an adaptation investment? It could be climate smart agriculture, cooling and heating systems, heat resilient buildings, supply chain resilience and ecosystem restoration. And just to close, adaptation is not separate from net zero or the move to restore nature at scale. It's a cross-cutting theme and actually strengthens the returns of mitigation investments. We should run mitigation projects through an adaptation lens to ensure they're going to work in the long run. So today's discussion isn't about whether we can afford to invest in adaptation. It's about whether we can afford not to and how to do it in ways that are investable and scalable. So with that, to look at what it looks like in practice, we have this top notch panel of leaders from the frontier. And we're going to explore what this looks like. In reality, we have Miss Nonkululeko Nyembezi, who is a South African business leader serving on several boards and has worked in senior levels in telecoms and mining. She is now chairman of the standard Bank Group, Africa's largest banking group. We will then hear from Mr. Nadir Godridge, chair and managing director of Godrej Industries Group, where he leads India's largest conglomerates with interests in chemicals, agribusiness, real estate, consumer products and financial services. And the word on the street is that he is also very recognized for his poetry. We then will have Mr. Bruno Sanchez-andrade, executive director of Clay Foundation, where he stewards one of the world's leading open foundation models for Earth observation. He co-founded ND, a planetary intelligence company and previously led geospatial analytics and AI programs at NASA, the world Bank and Microsoft Planetary Computer. We will hear from Doctor Sylvia Earl, who is the creator of the Mission Blue Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting marine areas and is possibly one of the world's most famed marine biologists, oceanographers and explorers. Sylvia, you were the first female chief scientist at NOAA and recorded the deepest ever walk on the seafloor by a human, and we will then finally hear from Miss Catherine Russell, executive director of Unicef, the UN agency dedicated to protecting the rights of children globally. And prior to joining Unicef, Miss Russell served also as Ambassador at Large for Global Women's Issues at the US Department of State. So welcome to Kick us Off. We will begin with Miss Nonkululeko. I apologize. One of the long held beliefs about adaptation is that this isn't necessarily an investable space or profitable, it's purely in the governmental domain. Yet standard Bank is doing billions in deals in domains such as resilient grids and climate smart agriculture. So from your perspective, is adaptation solely a risk to manage, or where do you see real opportunities for returns?
Thank you very much. And it's a real, real pleasure to be here on really a very important topic, particularly coming from an African perspective, where climate impacts are disproportionately large, but the capability to deal with them is also similarly disproportionately small growing, but very, very small. So as a bank focusing on the African continent, we have actually been doing mitigation for over ten years doing renewable energy. We got to understand that very deeply built the knowledge base to do it successfully. But it wasn't enough. It was very clear that in that continent, adaptation and mitigation are symbiotic. And you refer to that. So to take the conversation from 3000 or 30,000m up to to the ground, just give you two examples of projects that we have done successfully. One in agriculture, another one in, in reforestation. So starting off with agriculture, we worked with a, that was the pilot one with a farmer in, in Eswatini, small country bordering South Africa, sugarcane farmer. And because of the droughts and he didn't have irrigation on the farm, he was facing ruin. So we financed a, a solar installation for them to be able to do subsurface irrigation. But coupled that with, drought resistant, seeds for him to replant the farm, the net effect of a long series of actions is that he became 20% more productive on the farm at the tail end of all this, and because of that, could therefore repay the loan. It would not, I think, have been possible to just do the drought resistant seeds alone and get that kind of benefit. So in this one, in Africa is just a land of paradox. It's got to be able to do the one together with the other, not and or the other. So having been successful at that level, we have then essentially used it as a playbook across a few of the markets where we support farming, particularly small scale farming, and today have on our loan book roughly $130 million out to farmers doing pretty much a similar thing. The second one was then became somewhat more ambitious, and this one was a reforestation in Malawi. Again, another smallish country where here actually it was intelligent, policy that allowed us to do it because essentially the reforestation, reforestation was going to cost them $10 million, but they could then generate 40 million tons of carbon credits over the lifetime of the project. So, again, would not have been financeable without the carbon credits. And then became infinitely more because the multiples of the initial loan they could get back over the lifetime of the project could service the loan. So in the second example, it is absolutely key for government to come in and give us intelligent regulation and legislation.
Thank you so much for sharing examples that are really tangible and on the ground. It helps make it a lot more vivid and real, and also noting how these small, small investments up front unlock so much value. Nadir, you your work spans across so many different types of industries and sectors, and I'm very curious to hear what adaptation looks like from the perspective of a company that's really doing this on the ground. How has climate change already been impacting your businesses, and what concrete adaptations have you found? Also, make business sense and drive new value?
It is no longer climate change within a tolerable range. A crisis is what it's about with storms, floods, as well as drought every week, a constant blast far worse than seen in the past. If we must, we will adapt, but prevention would be much more apt. There is a cost to adaptation. It's rising fast in every nation as well as for the world at large. And this will be a heavy charge. In fact, we should by now conclude prevention would be really shrewd. It actually would cost much less indeed, avoid a lot of stress. But some opportunities are heaven sent where we can adapt as well as prevent. The monsoon is now in a mess. We have to worry about water stress, but in India, compulsory CSR can help us go very far. And when it comes to being green on watershed development, we are very keen at a low cost. Much water is saved. For many farmers, the way is paved to greatly improve the yield in every orchard and every field. And as a bonus for this toil, carbon sequestered in trees and soil and with the help of farmer training, so many farmers are now gaining with climate change. There's water stress for our factories. This is a mess. But providing a local watershed, we can stay one step ahead. It's a solution that's heaven sent, as we can both adapt and prevent.
Almost want to clap? If there was ever any doubt that adaptation was a compelling field to operate in, you have made the case very well. Thank you. Absolutely excellent. I apologize that you have to.
How do I follow with that?
Yes. Bruno, you have this 10,000 foot view right from geospatial data analytics satellites, and you work at that cutting edge of applying AI and large data models to challenges. So when it comes to adaptation, specifically, what would you want people to know about some of the greatest innovations in your space? And especially tangibly, maybe. Is there a project where some big data open source model has really affected adaptation strategies on the ground?
Thank you. So how does adaptation look like? Right. The title of of the session, I think it looked like planetary awareness. And what I mean by that is let's take some also some perspective, because how something looks like is also from where you are looking from. And if we look here at Davos, we are looking at a leadership global leadership that seems to be more interested in their national interest, that we are seeing workouts in dinners we are seeing haggling or token of on a piece of land. And no, no, not how that land is has ice that is melting. So that's the stand. We have to reframe adaptation. And to me that means that adaptation is our ability to respond. Our response ability also. And that means understanding the data, understanding the world, creating that public, that planetary awareness so that we can rebuild trust so we can rebuild conversation so we can reveal that global village specifically, who is going to help understand better the mispriced capital that Nonkululeko has? Who is going to help Nadia support farmers in India, measure their needs? Who's going to help Silvia with better measuring the oceans? And who's going to help Catherine with better protect children, for example, in the face of floods, who I believe science. I believe satellites because they allows us. You don't see political boundaries, you don't see ownership from satellites. So we have examples, for example, in Bangladesh where we have this forecast for financing, where it triggers payments ahead of the floods. This happened in Bangladesh in 2010, or examples where, measurements of the flood, measurements of the crops being having less, less yields also triggers payments before the issue happens without any claim. What we are seeing and what we are focusing on is in better understanding Earth, so that everyone has a shared reality to create that planetary awareness. That means satellites, but also misunderstanding. And that's why we focused on tools to understand the planet scale, which in our case it means AI AI for Earth.
Absolutely fascinating. I'm also hearing a common thread here about these preemptive payments for ways that we preempt these shocks and actually support the farmers on the ground or the water systems before we have to pay the costs and damages. So it's interesting you've all picked up on that, Silvia, you have been a staunch advocate for the oceans and ocean conservation. And obviously we'll refer to oceans as nature based solutions. So when it comes to adaptation, what are some of the most promising ways that you think nature, nature based solutions or the oceans can offer adaptation strategies at scale?
Well, first, I think it's critical that we realize where we are in time and space. For the first time, we're able to ask the questions that you're putting forward. Imagine if we did not know the trouble we're in. I mean, whales may know that the world is changing. Elephants might know they're very smart, but they don't know what to do. Even if they knew why. We know why the world is changing in ways that don't favor a prosperous future for us. What are we going to do? Well, first, realize that this is real, that we have this miracle, the blue planet, in a universe that is not very friendly to the likes of us. Get that and hold that. Our home is in trouble because of us. We know what to do. We need the will to do what each of us has the power to do. I can't do what all you can do. You're you have superpowers, but everyone has some power. Know what the problem is? Look in the mirror. Think of what you can do and then do it. And together. We got 8 billion lines right now. But we also have 8 billion appetites, 8 billion needs for water, a place and a future for our kids. All of those things, if you just wake up in the morning, say, okay, here's what I'm going to do, and it counts. Never for a moment think that either what you do or don't do doesn't matter, because of course it does times 8 billion. So here's the thing highest priority save what remains of the natural world that got us to where we are. We've been consuming nature. I mean, all wealth anchors back to what we've taken from nature. We cut the trees. We captured the whales. We've taken the fish. Krill from Antarctica, squid from the high seas. We're not paying the real cost. Fish have an accounting base of zero trees. A thousand year old tree. What's it worth? We assign a value, but it's nothing like the actual value of a thousand year old tree. Or even a hundred year old tree. We just haven't appreciated the cost. Now we are beginning to see it. Nations have come together and say we commit to protecting 30% of the land and the ocean, including the high seas. The area beyond national jurisdiction. Bravo! That was just like a week ago or so that enough nations ratified the High Seas Treaty, that we have a method now, a framework to take action to protect what's working. You want the machinery that keeps us alive, our life support system to stay intact. And then we need to do everything we can to restore the damage we've done. That's adaptation. Restore the coral reefs. But if I had to choose one thing, save the existing coral reefs, save the kelp forests. Half of them are already gone. Save the tuna. Save the krill in Antarctica, the squid in the high seas, the tuna. I mean, it seems a great sacrifice. I can't eat tuna fish sandwich anymore. We don't have to do that. They are important parts of our life support system, and we can make the choice to save what remains, keep our life support system and healthiest state possible, and then do whatever we can to restore the harm. So here we are. We've got the best chance we ever have to take action. We're the luckiest humans ever because of what we know that nobody could know before. And we still have a chance to get it right.
It's an important message of hope. And I also appreciate that you've both invoked this overview effect. Right. The Earth from that distance. And what is actually tell us about our place. And we can know so much more about the tuna from some of the observations and satellites. So it's interesting to to think about that part. Katherine. Yes, ultimately adaptation is also about human livelihoods and well-being fundamentally, and Unicef has made adaptation a massive priority. And increasingly, you're forging collaborations that haven't necessarily existed before to reach those goals. So I'm really curious, where are you seeing the most effective partnerships emerging in your work? And not only that, but what actually makes them work in practice? Because collaboration is a word we throw around a lot. Well.
It's interesting when Sylvia talks, it's so compelling, obviously, in any case. But for for us, we work with children and it's so much about the future. And what does the future look like? What planet are we leaving these children for? Unicef. We focus. And it wasn't obvious actually from the beginning that we would get into this space. We obviously have a lot to do, you know, try to feed children and make sure they're educated around the world. But we saw more and more that children were being so impacted by what's happening in climate issues, climate change and climate problems. And so we have aggressively moved into this adaptation space. And what we're really looking at is trying to protect the services that children rely on. And it's a it's a sort of a niche part of this. But if you think about any children, they rely on government services or community services. So water and sanitation, education, health care. Right. If you can't work, if there's no health clinic or if the school is flooded constantly, as I saw in the Pacific because of cyclones, or because heat is so extraordinary in Pakistan that the schools close down, these have dramatic impacts on children, and we estimate that a billion children live in countries where they are at high risk of climate change. So when you think about what that means, right, in the life of a child, it's very dramatic. And so we look for partnerships all over the place of trying to say, look, can we think about how to make this a little bit more resilient so that we can protect children? So in many cases it's doing a lot of work on solar. And that's where a lot of our partnerships are. Because if we can make sure that schools you know, again, I saw this just in the Pacific last year where it was a school that Unicef had built, got knocked down once by a cyclone, then it got knocked down again by a cyclone. So we're like, okay, maybe we need to move the school to a different part. And a lot of what Bruno, you're talking about to this sort of understanding what's coming makes a big difference to us in that this sort of mapping and understanding through AI, where the perils are and how we can better adapt, adapt to that, is really critical to our work. So I think we look for partnerships with people who who are like minded, really. As I said, the solar folks are the most helpful to us at this point because they see the value. And I think all of us are just looking for opportunities to try to protect these services that children rely on, just.
A level deeper there very quickly, the solar piece, why is that so critical in the adaptation for the children?
It's critical because, as I said, children rely on health care, education. And so if we can make sure that the health clinics, for example, out in the middle of nowhere, have solar capacity, then it doesn't matter if they if the heat gets knocked out for one reason or another, or the the electricity gets banged up, there's still ways that it can support itself. And I think for us it's a really critical component here because so many children live in places that are isolated and can't get to electricity.
Thank you. I think one of the big challenges facing everyone in leadership positions such as yourselves is a world that's, you know, facing these these increasingly unpredictable events socially, ecologically, politically, everything that we're seeing unfold, it means that you have to be a very different kind of leader. And the world has always been volatile and uncertain. But I think that most people would agree these these times are also at a fever pitch in that sense. And so to be a leader of, say, finance or business or what are the decisions or the ways you're having to be on a day to day basis to face that kind of uncertainty and predictability? You have to make investments. Now, that might be difficult to convince people to do, because they might not want to accept some of the some of the things they're seeing. So I would love to hear from from each of you in turn. What does leadership look like for you in this context? And who do you have to be to get these things passed and convince people and make arguments?
So in if you think about adaptation, you actually can't really bypass government, in any particular national, circumstance, it is front and center because there are some things that private capital just will not do. So the leadership position that we play and can play is convincing our government, and we operate in 20 countries around the African continent. And because we work quite closely with all of them as a lender to the sovereign, we then do have the space to advise and advocate for where government can direct the limited resources that they have. So if the real issue in a particular country is loss of biodiversity, which is starting to have really negative impacts, we can point that out and advise government as to how they can best deploy the capital. And we do actually quite a lot of that kind of work. And it's not something you can charge for. So we do it because that's what we do. The second part of it is we play a leadership role in putting together packages. So you talked about partnerships, for example. This cannot be solved without that. So I co-chaired B20 South Africa last year, and we did a whole bunch of work on blended finance. And we now understand blended finance in a more detailed way than we've ever done before. So we did did the detailed analysis. So but somebody still has to put that package together, has to get the multilateral financing institutions, the actual client, the government, the commercial banks, the syndication of of, of of the loans that need to be deployed. So we play quite a significant role, but much more significant, I would say, in that, in that structuring than than almost anything else, I would also just say, thirdly, and finally, we were quite early in making public pledges and commitments about the level of sustainable financing that we were going to deploy. I think in 2021, 22, that sort of time frame, we put a number by 2025, which in fact we've exceeded and therefore increased, into 2027, in how we're going to deploy into broadly sustainable finance. Much easier in mitigation, as I say, that still eats up the bulk of our sustainable finance. I've got to be very honest about that. We do social housing, all of that sort of thing as well, but became quite deliberate and intentional about carving a certain percentage that had to have adaptation as a part of it. So you spoke early on about grids, for example? Zambia had a drought that went on for multiple years and they use hydropower. Suddenly the country was going to go dark without actually finding power sources from somewhere else to deploy in Ghana. But the grid doesn't isn't shared. And so coming in, in a fairly accelerated way to plug that gap is the kind of thing that we can do. So I think very much of ourselves as working with the last mile, we, we have now issued the big talking sort of fora like this. And we work with work with clients on, on the ground to, to try and deal with problems on the ground. The downside of that is that it's reactive. Okay. So there isn't as much forward planning as one would like, but we quite late to the game. So we're kind of trying to catch up. But it's an exciting phase because we're starting to see the tools to use. We talked about Misprice risk starting to use AI now to get very targeted about where we may be exposed, for example, on the seaside, on the fires. ET cetera. ET cetera. So I think most banks are doing this kind of work, and you should see things starting to come out that could be quite, quite impactful in the next year to two years.
Just very quickly to reflect what I'm hearing you say. It's really setting the bar and being the first movers and then gathering the right actors and using all the evidence. You have to show why this matters and is important. And that's that's really exciting. Yeah. Thank you. Please. Same question.
As a group, we've always been involved in corporate social responsibility. And in 2010 we had a study done and we included the all the employees in the study to develop a program which we called Good and Green Corporate Social Responsibility Program. A few years later, the government made 2% of profits mandatory spending as corporate social responsibility. This actually is a big opportunity because as long as you're doing social good, you can spend this money whichever way you want. And we try to take Michael Porter's idea of shared value. So try to make sure that there's a business benefit along with the social benefit. And I describe the watershed developments. We do farmer training. We do training related to our other businesses as well, which helped promote the business indirectly because this is training sometimes for users of our business, we have a beauty business and we train salon workers. Many of the salon workers actually become salon entrepreneurs. So this helps us to do adaptation as well. We were prevention was a big focus in the early days, but now adaptation as well. And we try to see opportunities where there is technological advance. Green energy is very cheap in India today and in our businesses we only use biomass energy because we need energy 24 by seven. So, biomass works out very well. We do cogeneration for steam and electricity, and we do adaptation for heat stress, as I described for water stress. And we will look at all the disclosure items like TNF and so on. They give you what the risks are and then we will spend on that. We'll try and have intelligent solutions using the latest science, so that the cost will not be overwhelming. And that's what we do.
I really appreciate that good leadership is training people to be good leaders as well. Yeah, thank you for that, Bruno.
So what leadership looks like you were asking, right? I think it looks like data in your mind mad on your toes to understand the local needs or water and children, your heart. And I want to emphasize the role of children not only because they are the future. They will live in the earth we create. So there's 3000 participants here in Davos. She represents Catherine, represents a billion children that need that future to be as good as possible. And it's I think it's a great help to to cut through a lot of the narratives these children view on, on adaptation and to bring it extremely specific. I'm Spanish, but I live in Denmark, and I think Denmark is a is how leadership looks like in adaptation. And what I mean by that is that in Copenhagen, we have a lot of data of heat. How much heat island is in the city? We have a lot of data on the bike paths we need. We have a lot of data on the green spaces that everyone has the right to be within a few minutes. That is fantastic. And that means you can have a low tech life, but you have a high data governance that is leadership. Now, we cannot pretend every city to have the same facilities and same sensors that Copenhagen has. But that's when satellites come, because satellites can see that heat, satellites can see the needs of the farmer, can see the needs of the coast of the oceans, the pollution, the all the trash we're putting everywhere. And that allows us to then expand that model of data in your mind, with the local needs of modern, your toes and the lens of okay, what future are we creating for our children and for everyone?
It's an amazing slogan. It's very good.
With a license to license from from you.
You've got many poets on the panel. Sylvia, what does leadership look like in your space and in the oceans? In that sense.
For me, I look to the kids coming along for leadership. Just think about it. A ten year old kid is armed with knowledge that nobody could know. When I was ten years old, smartest people who ever lived did not know what today's children have available to them. Not everybody knows, but there are enough. Kids have the concern about what is my future going to be when they look at the evidence that is all around us? Wills. Again, I look at an intelligent alternate for us. They know so much that we do not, cannot know, and we're just beginning to look at what they, the world they live in. It's our life support system. I mean, Earth is habitable because we have an ocean that is alive. It's taken a long time for that ocean filled with life to make our existence possible. I mean, we're talking about hundreds of millions of years. We've been around for maybe a million plus or minus. Our ancestry goes way back to the beginning. But it's the first time that we're able to anticipate a future that isn't good for us. World that has been evolving to be just right for us, and the future that is moving in the wrong direction because of us. So we know the problems. We have to figure out the solutions. And you're coming up with some really good examples of how we adapt, how we overcome, how we heal the harm, how we keep the planet safe, and that we don't have a lot of time next five years, according to really smart scientists who are crunching the numbers, adapting with AI. Bravo that we've come to the point where our computing technology is so good, we can really do better than we have in the past. Look, imagine if we didn't have satellites. They didn't exist. When I was a kid, we didn't have spacecraft. There were no space stations. We did not know what is now known because we have the technology that has given this gift. At the same time, that technology that cuts both ways has enabled us to consume nature, so that about half of the land is converted for one species to feed us and to have accommodation for where we live and how we travel. We've been squeezing nature so that our life support system. We've mostly been mindful of the land. But consider this we're just beginning to explore the ocean. We are about the same level of understanding that we were a hundred thousand, a million years ago, about the nature of the ocean that we were when I was a kid. We were like the early days of aviation. It's getting better fast. We're getting monitoring stations in the ocean. Submersibles can actually take us like astronauts up in the sky, but even kids can do this now. Not feasible when I was a child. So we're right at the edge of the greatest opportunity we've ever had to fill the knowledge gap so that the computers can crunch the numbers. They can't crunch numbers when you don't know what's there. And we have this big ignorance gap. And if you could choose a time to be around, choose right now. It's the best chance we'll ever have. The leadership, the kids who start out with a level of understanding that has taken some of us a lifetime to acquire.
Yes, absolutely.
I'd love to follow Sylvia because she's so optimistic. It really makes me feel better when you speak. Actually. You know, for us, leadership, really it's I would say it's two things. One is trying to make the argument about why children matter in this discussion about climate and adaptation. And it's not obvious. Honestly, a lot of people don't really think of the impacts of children. Obviously, you know, they understand that children are the future, but really, what does it mean for their for their daily lives? And how do we think about that differently? And the best evidence of that is about 2.4% of all climate financing has anything to do with children, and it shows you that it's just not top of mind. So for us, leadership is getting out there and making the argument and explaining how it's relevant. But the best people to do that are young people themselves, and they are incredibly impatient. You know, in every country I visit, the young people I meet with talk to me about climate, and they make demands on their leaders and say, we need to do better. They're worried about what the future is. And I think they really are. They they embrace it in a different way. And I think, Sylvia, maybe it's in part of what you're saying, that they understand it in a different way because they see things that we never.
Growing up in a different.
World, imagined. Yeah. And they, they really push their leaders. And I think that's critical. And I think it's the best hope.
And some of them are leaders. They are at a really young age.
Yeah.
Absolutely. Yeah. Many of them are. It's quite astounding actually. We have time. If there are any questions from the audience for our panelists, I'm not sure how the mix would work.
But, Bruno, a quick question. Would that is that okay to ask.
Bruno, please? Of course.
Go ahead. We're really interested in this issue of trying to understand and anticipate, based on data research, what is happening, how we how we best know what's coming in terms of drought. And we do a lot of work on with the tech companies and sort of satellites and looking for where to dig the right boreholes and things. And I just wonder how you would estimate how far advanced is that work, and how much does it make sense for an organization like Unicef to to really be in that space?
It's a new world. The whole ChatGPT has changed a lot. The T in ChatGPT the transformer is the architecture, the technical term for how we work. And that seems to be a humanities invention that understands a lot. And when we apply that to satellite images, it means now we have a much better capacity to understand what is happening. So that question was completely different. Answer three years ago, two years ago now, the capacity to do so much more, so much faster, so much cheaper. It's amazing. But it's not only that we can do completely different new things, because now we can understand how things affect each other, how climate change may affect the needs of tourism in a different in a country, something like that. Right? We have lowered so much the needs to, process the data we have that the answer to your question is specific to what question you have. So the school that you mentioned before, three years ago, it was a computer vision problem. It was a computer thing you had to do. Now it's not now. It's almost instant with this new AI, this embedding their goal. So it is a new world in AI and specifically in AI. For Earth, it is the better world to talk about AI because it's not chatbots. It's not about, taking away the engagement from one human to one machine. It's about planetary awareness. And we all need that.
How much that we don't know about the ocean is affecting the way we live. I mean, we take things out of the ocean, we throw things into the ocean because we think it's okay. Ocean is too big to fail, but it is failing. But we need the evidence. We need, we need just as we've gathered evidence that nobody could before. By having satellites and having the ability to share knowledge that you can only share what you know. And it's the greatest era of exploration of this planet. It's just beginning. Most of life on Earth lives in the dark below, where sunlight shines most of life on Earth. Our history is there. We're just beginning to put it on the balance sheet, giving the information so that we can make calculations about how do we behave toward our life support system.
And it's making the invisible visible? Very much so. I would love to give. I think there was a question in the audience, just to give you the opportunity to to also ask your question.
Thank you so much. And thank you so much for really engaging discussion. I am Marina. I'm the executive director of research collaboration called The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change. And I also sit on the UK Adaptation Committee, and I served for the global goal on adaptation for the Paris Agreement on indicators, focusing mostly on health in what I do. And I really wanted to hear your thoughts on kind of, evaluation and data, because what we find from the health perspective is that there's a lot of remote sensing data that can help us understand kind of climate risks. But when it comes to understanding adaptation needs and evaluating adaptation process, understanding what works and what doesn't in terms of protecting populations, from the health perspective, we have a lot of sparsity of impact data that can help us understand what's working and what isn't. And I suppose that the same is true across the scope. And we work a bit on child health, and certainly there's almost no data that tells us what the vulnerability of children is and whether we are being able to offer protection or not. So that is generating kind of an kind of blindsight. That means that we cannot optimize interventions and we can't evaluate them. So I was wondering how you've addressed that and whether you've incorporated that kind of knowledge generation, evidence gathering and evaluation within the interventions that you've you've mentioned here?
I'll comment. This is an excellent question. We'll probably have time for one of our panelists to respond to it before we wrap up. Unfortunately, being the Swiss time clock of the group here.
I think the answer to your question might be a bit controversial, which is I don't think we have the right type of scientists because I think we are too focused on academia, where I don't think academia is what holds us back. I don't think it's another paper. It's important to do research. It's extremely important to research. Don't quote me that it's not. But we also need to apply that data for the specific tool of answering your question. Not for a paper, not for for to do that and what. Yes. But what. My point is that put the question as completely as possible. And then let's use scientists to answer that question with a very tight loop of how to answer those. And in some cases, like the what you're doing now with farmers is very clear, because they need the soil, they need the water, and you are working on those. In the case of air, I think it's a little bit more complex because it's much more holistic, what affects the health and how that works. But I genuinely believe the sensors we have are extremely good proxies to answer that question. The problem is that until now, it was extremely expensive to process the data. Now it's much easier. Like Google has just announced a Microsoft this Aurora models and all this. If Alpha Earth where they've done, they've done papers to analyze how they can proxy air quality and health impacts on that, which is extremely fascinating. And I'm happy to connect afterwards on this.
Yeah. Thank you so much, Bruno. Unfortunately, we're going to have to wrap this panel, but I'm sure that people will continue conversations after we close. I think if I'm to reflect on some of the main takeaways and patterns I've heard across what's been shared, I think the first thing is this sense of things are measurable now that makes them visible. We have the data, we have the approach, and that starts to illustrate the real costs and the real values that can be created from this adaptation economy like never before. So this is no longer niche. This is really here and present and measurable and real. I think the second point is that this really unlocks new values, new markets, new opportunities, new investments, different ways of seeing the world from geospatial down to how children are even leading. And I think that those returns are increasingly visible. And that's that's absolutely fantastic because it's not just a risk argument anymore. And finally, as exemplified by this panel, this isn't about a sector. This is a transversal theme. And adaptation touches on absolutely everything. And someone mentioned hydropower dam. And you know, if we're looking at mitigation etc., carbon, we have to be looking at adaptation because it's fundamentally affecting everything and it touches everything. So the transversality of it, I think, means that everyone should really be tuning in and applying this as much as they can in their work. So thank you so much to this amazing panel of humans, and for all the work you're doing, and to everyone online and in the room who's been listening. And thank you. Thanks.
Thank you.