⚡climate change > game of thrones
Good morning! If you haven’t read yesterday’s update, you can find it here. Apparently, climate change searches have outpaced Game of Throne searches. #winterisnotcoming #remakethelastseason
Sustainable social media
Finally, the social media platform we’ve been waiting for! The World Economic Forum announced the launch of UpLink, “a new, open-source digital platform to foster mass participation from entrepreneurs, community groups, and other interested parties or individuals to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals.”
Designed in collaboration with Deloitte, Microsoft, and Salesforce, the platform will have some pretty sweet features -
Insights from leaders of international organizations, governments and research institutions on overcoming challenges to implementing SDGs
Platform to crowdsource ideas / innovations to advance the SDGs, coupled with a fund to finance the best ideas and innovations
The first platform will launch at Davos in 2020 and focus on SDG Goal 14 related to life under water, and the other platforms are set to launch by January 2021!
Our take: We are 100000% aligned with this. Building platforms like this is the best way to scalably deploy ideas that address the SDGs. We firmly believe that the solutions cannot come from just a handful of elite academics and institutions - we must put people at the center.
How Britain gave up coal
Last Friday, we covered the existential crisis of Shell and yesterday mentioned how the FTSE Russell reversed their sector labeling of “non-renewables” back to “oil and gas.” Though sometimes we’d prefer if change could happen in an instant, letting go of what has been working and producing a lot of cash is hard, even if it’s regrettable.
With that said, Britain’s shift in energy use has been transformative. Employing more than 600k people in 1960 to almost coal power-free today has been a huge shift when countries are currently grappling with how to meet the 2015 Paris climate deal. In 1971, 88% of electricity was supplied by coal and oil power plants. Coal’s share shrunk to just 5% last year and now is now at the end of the road at 0.6%.
How did this happen? The fast shift occurred after the government decided to stamp an expiration date on the industry in 2015. One decade. That’s all they had left.
UK has produced a third of their electricity from renewables including biomass and hope to source another third of all electricity from offshore wind alone by 2030.
Our take: Currently, (we included) there is more faith in the private sector’s ability to produce change than in the public. We’ve basically given up on the public sector. Talent is moving away from NGOs and nonprofits; and governments are characteristically subjugated to an image that manifests ineffectiveness. However, there’s power there. The public sector still oversees vast societal and policy-based infrastructure and if revitalized, could very quickly reshape the world we see today.
On the other hand: Biomass is dirty. It might be renewable, but environmentalists warn that it isn’t the cleanest source of energy. Biomass grew in popularity as european countries set standards for renewable energy use, but scientists believe the source of fuel was incorrectly placed in renewables due to the time required for trees to grow and the deforestation that occurs from harvesting.
Devex: UNGA Week Takeaways
Our friends at Devex laid out some awesome takeaways from UNGA week - here’s a summary:
Public Health: Governments pledged to help all people access health services by allocating an additional 1-2% of GDP on health, and the World Health Organization and other multilateral organizations launched a plan to streamline support to governments. Check out our earlier post covering this.
Philanthropy: Experts discussed the power of donor collaboratives in helping philanthropists be more “informed and intentional” in their giving.
Climate Change: Many players (public and private) made stronger commitments to address climate change, but these are far from enough. For example, the world’s largest emitters barely budged.
Moral Money: There was a key focus on diverting mismanaged money from the global financial system towards addressing the SDGs. This could include tax revenues, illicit money, and more. The UN and EU launched a partnership to address this by creating “integrated national financing frameworks that lay out a financial strategy, set priorities, manage risk, and maximize financial resources.”
Private Sector: As expected, businesses still aren’t doing enough. Many of them made pledges, but as we covered earlier, these pledges are pretty soft.
Ben Rattray, Founder of Change.org
“There are a lot of complaints by the older generation about the lack of action in this generation. My retort: give these people something to be engaged in. Cutting a check is not engaging.”
Change.org is the world’s largest social change platform with over 80 million users in 196 countries. Anyone can start a campaign on Change.org and immediately mobilize hundreds locally or hundreds of thousands around the world, making governments and companies more responsive and accountable. Change.org is a "social enterprise" —using the power of business for social good, and a certified B-corporation—a new class of companies dedicated to positive impact.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16
Feeding Our Future: Perspectives Across the Value Chain in Food Sustainability
Interested in learning more about the different areas of innovation across the value chain in food sustainability? Please join the NY + Acumen Impact Circle on World Food Day for a discussion on the future of food sustainability. We will explore different perspectives across the various parts of the value chain, including investment, production, distribution and waste/renewability.
MONDAY OCTOBER 28
Conversations with Plant-based Entrepreneurship: Vegpreneur is a global entrepreneurs community that is made up of innovators who are building a plant based future and they’re hosting an evening panel on the state of plant-based entrepreneurship at General Assembly. Light snacks and refreshments will be served.
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