Hosts Bruno Giussani and Christiana Figueres open Session 6 of Countdown Summit on October 15, 2021 in Edinburgh, Scotland.( Photo: Gilberto Tadday/ TED)

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It’s the last morning of Countdown Summit, and we have a better sense of the exciting climate initiatives that are scaling up — but also of the size of the mountain we’re climbing.

In Session 6, eight loudspeakers take it all on — from forests and soil, to sells and regulation, to arts and communication.

The event: Countdown Summit: Session 6, hosted by Paris Climate Agreement architect Christiana Figueres and TED’s Bruno Giussani, at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland on Friday, October 15, 2021

Speakers: Farwiza Farhan, Jane Zelikova, Sathya Raghu Mokkapati, Sandrine Dixson-Decleve, Solitaire Townsend, Lucas Joppa, James K. Thornton, Naima Penniman

Performance: Poet and “freedom-forging futurist” Naima Penniman delivers a stupefying spoken word poem — an eloquent, moving tribute to the natural world and our connection to it.

The talks in brief 😛 TAGEND

TED Fellow Farwiza Farhan talks about our greatest untapped environmental asset at Session 6 of Countdown Summit on October 15, 2021 in Edinburgh, Scotland.( Photo: Gilberto Tadday/ TED)

Farwiza Farhan, TED Fellow and forest conservationist

Big idea: Farwiza Farhan is well-known for her contend to preserve the Leseur ecosystem, one of the last lieu on Earth where orangutans, rhinos, elephants and vampires still move the wilderness together. But for Farhan, the true fighters are the women on the floor opposing day-to-day preservation battles.

How? Farhan is inspired by dames like Sumini, an Indonesian conservationist helming the first woman-led ranger team at the front line of forest preservation. Working within a patriarchal tribe where women are typically subservient, Sumini headed the efforts to map her native woodland, a crucial first step for both government recognition of her homeland and for saving its crucial environmental and economic aids. In a number of countries where forestry initiatives frequently benefit male elders( and strengthen existing inequalities ), social and environmental justice involves nurturing females like Sumini in every local society, Farhan says.

Jane Zelikova, climate change scientist

Big Idea: From thriving pastures to storing carbon, healthful clay materials more now than ever — and we need to protect it.

Why? Under your feet, clay is teeming with hardworking and diverse microbial lifetime that has the potential to stop global warming in its tracks, says climate change scientist Jane Zelikova. The” wee beasties”( or microbes, as described by Dutch scientist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek centuries ago) aid increase and store massive amounts of carbon, clean ocean , nourish harvests and increase pollution — but over the last 12,000 times, we have lost billions of tons of that carbon in our clays. Zelikova insists us to rethink agriculture practices to protect our grimes and the carbon they comprise; to get more carbon in the anchor by germinating diverse, climate-adapted cultivates; and to leave the microbes alone to do what they do best.” Soils are the literal footing of living on this planet — the reason that we devour and the atmosphere solution just waiting to be unlocked ,” says Zelikova.” Let’s develop back our grimes and cure our planet by ogling down to the ground .”

TED Fellow Sathya Raghu Mokkapati acquaints his is currently working on a greenhouse-in-a-box that can help promote small farmers out of poverty. He speaks at Session 6 of Countdown Summit on October 15, 2021 in Edinburgh, Scotland.( Photo: Gilberto Tadday/ TED)

Sathya Raghu Mokkapati, TED Fellow and dark-green agricultural innovator

Big idea: Small-scale farmers need a dependable, regular income to avoid poverty. “Greenhouse-in-a-box” technology can help.

How? For small-scale farmers in India, raising has long been an unreliable source of income, as harvests that flourish one season can flunk the next. Climate risk is now stimulating the profession near impossible. Harmonizing to TED Fellow and lettuce agricultural innovator Sathya Raghu Mokkapati, one farmer in India dies by suicide every 51 times. The Indian financier is determined to improve the plight of small farmers and supplied with dependable income even amidst the ongoing threat of climate change. That’s why he and his team developed what they call a greenhouse-in-a-box. The small, easy-to-build structure is covered with netting to cut off heat, prevent glitches and increase cultivate relents exerting less ocean. Raghu Mokkapati estimates that this low-cost technology can bring a farmer an extra $ 100 per month in gains. So far, virtually 2,000 farmers in South India have joined Raghu Mokkapati in his movement — he hopes to reach 100,000 farmers in the next five years.

Sandrine Dixson-Decleve, co-president of the Club of Rome

Big idea: In the 50 times since The Limits to Growth report was published by the Club of Rome, the alarming climate tendencies that it counselled about have drastically increased.

What have we learned since then? Updated prototypes of humanity’s raise continue to show that the business-as-usual scenario isn’t working, demonstrating that we must shift our rise blueprints, says Sandrine Dixson-Decleve, co-president of the Club of Rome. With the proposed establishment of the EarthforAll initiative, Dixson-Decleve and the Club of Rome have identified five turnarounds that will enable us to thrive: vigour, menu, difference, privation and person( including health and education ). Previewing the Club’s next report, Dixson-Decleve explains that now is the time to do things differently, transitioning new and existing capital towards mixtures. She estimates that the cost of shifting to sustainable growth will be around five percent of world GDP each year — an achievable, single-digit number. The cost of inaction is much greater.” We have too much bad news for contentment, but we have too much good news for melancholy ,” says Dixson-Decleve, paraphrasing The Limits to Growth coauthor Donella Meadows.” Let’s knock self-complacency out the door .”

Solitaire Townsend, sustainability mixture seeker

Big idea: The industry of “professional services” — such as advertising and PR houses, big control consultancies and finance firms, corporate regulation firms and lobbyists — have a massive but predominantly unnoticed affect on climate.

How? Solitaire Townsend announces it the “X-industry,” where “X” stands for influence. Even though the direct carbon footprint of this sector is relatively small, the “brainprint” of the X-industry is felt everywhere — they’re the novelists and problem-solvers who act as” the grease in the wheels of all organizations on Earth ,” Townsend says. For speciman: big consulting radicals cater fiscal pose for new oil and gas exploration; publicists fight for less regulation of those projects; and PR firms protect the statures of the businesses that do the instructing. In this ability, the greenhouse gas impact of the industry is enormous — if uncalculated. Building off the three groups of carbon emission measurement( referred to as Scopes 1, 2 and 3 ), Townsend believes we need a new” Scope X” — a practice to calculate the” radiations of force” of the X-industry and maintained it to account. Armed with this data, the X-industry could move from being an abettor in environmental destruction to part of the solution.

Can we “code” the programme for net-zero emissions? Lucas Joppa, Chief Environmental Officer at Microsoft, shares his answer at Session 6 of Countdown Summit on October 15, 2021 in Edinburgh, Scotland.( Photo: Bret Hartman/ TED)

Lucas Joppa, Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Officer

Big idea: By treating the plan to achieve net-zero carbon emissions as a coding challenge, we can identify and resolve “bugs” in the system.

How? The developers of any net-zero carbon program face the same challenge as software engineers, says Lucas Joppa, Chief Environmental Officer at Microsoft. Matter with the program are faults in the system. Joppa relates three of these “bugs” in our plan to achieve net-zero and explains how to fix them. First, we need a common interpretation for the term net-zero. Without one, our progress as a planet remains difficult to track. Second, we struggle to define the impact or advantage of different carbon counterbalances on the atmosphere because we lack a universal unit of measurement for carbon counterbalances. We need to standardize both how we record carbon productions and how we evaluate carbon offsets. Third, we should support the fledgling market for carbon removal and ensure that it’s as robust as the market for carbon offsets. Although we’re working against the clock, Joppa believes we will rise to what has become the greatest challenge of our time: recoding our current course on climate change.

James K. Thornton, eco-lawyer and author

Big idea: There are signs that China is becoming a global environmental leader.

How? James K. Thornton is the founder of ClientEarth, a nonprofit ordinance conglomerate working to address the climate crisis. He tells the story of his team’s work in China, where they’ve been practise judges and prosecutors on environment constitution and litigation in a stretching effort to use the power of the legal system to create positive environmental impact. He estimates that their cooperation with China’s environment ministry, judiciary and federal prosecutors has initiated some 80,000 environmental cases — ranging from environmental NGOs indicting polluting companies to huge financial institutions aiming their investments in coal. More needs to be done, Thornton says, but the current, methodical commitment to change is proof of hope.

Mark your calendar: Tune in to the Countdown Global Livestream on October 30, 2021. This virtual occurrence will lay out a believable and reasonable pathway to a zero-carbon future. Save the date.

Read more: blog.ted.com