Crisis and opportunity in sustainability

- Hi, I'm Andrew Winston, co-creator with Paul of the Net Positive Framework. When we look at the serious challenges the world faces, climate change, biodiversity loss, inequality and more, it can seem overwhelming. They are serious crises, but we have the tools and skills to tackle these problems. It can also seem expensive to act, but the world has reached an interesting tipping point. The cost of inaction on our biggest problems is now greater than the cost of action. It's useful to understand what inaction looks like. The extreme weather generated by climate change, historic heat waves, huge storms and floods, extended droughts, and devastating fires like those that swept through Los Angeles has cost the US alone trillions in recent decades. The insurance giant Swiss Re estimated that in a generation, climate change will reduce global GDP by 18% unless we act, and that's an average number. For some places, the loss will be 100% of the economy as communities become unlivable. Other environmental impacts from human influence are also incredibly costly as well. A broken food system that uses too much land and wastes up to 40% of the food, along with vast deforestation, is costing the world trillions of dollars. Using regenerative agriculture, which means using practices that protect the soil and capture carbon, and restoring biodiversity, will create at least a $4 trillion economic opportunity. The risks from loss of biodiversity are hard to measure, but they have potentially dangerous consequences. What's the cost of losing a species that may have provided a useful medicine? What happens to food and agriculture if we lose pollinators like bees? And what happens to another important species, humans? All of these costs are easy to underestimate because we think linearly and use history as a guide to imagine the future, but since our challenges are moving exponentially, we often fail to recognize how fast things are changing. But, and here's the good news, we also underestimate how fast the solutions are coming. The International Energy Agency has repeatedly projected linear growth in renewable energy, greatly underestimating the real growth, which has been exponential. The costs of wind and solar power, as well as batteries for electric vehicles and power storage, have plummeted, driving incredible growth in renewable energy and electric vehicles. In total, the world now invests about $2 trillion annually in clean technologies, double the amount invested in fossil fuels. Despite all of this progress and the evidence, the idea that sustainability always costs more is still fairly dominant. It's a broken paradigm kept alive by misleading information and a bias against what some see as a distraction from real business. To many, sustainability is just philanthropy. But the solutions to our problems have been getting cheaper, which helps everyone profit from them, and the makers of these new technologies are also big businesses. The world needs solutions. We need governments to set the rules and invest shared resources in the newer pathways to wealth, but we also need business and its wide reach, immense financial resources, and deep problem solving abilities and creativity. Your business can and should be part of the solution.