Nine takeaways from Climate Week NYC 2024

With Climate Week NYC now well and truly wrapped up, I’ve had a chance to digest my takeaways from the wonderful sessions I attended.

I met innovative climate tech companies (SORA), fascinating nature-based solutions (Ponterra, TIG), NGOs working deeply with local communities to ensure a just transition (WWF Pakistan), foundations pursuing systems change at scale (Vihara), and forward-thinking impact investors (ImpactAssets). We also helped Vinay Jaju launch EarthON Foundation USA to support climate entrepreneurs in the Global South.

Here are nine challenges and solutions on the intersection of sustainability, technology, and the Global South:

Social Innovation in the green and digital transitions

1. Challenge: Artificial intelligence is a tool and, like other tools, can be used to make the world better or to harm.
   Solution: The UN Secretary General has outlined a number of principles for information integrity and AI. We need to work together to ensure the principles trickle down to national policy and legislation as well as embodied across all sectors.
2. Challenge: Public systems are not keeping up with the rapid change in technology. Governments are ill equipped to leverage the positive aspects of emerging tech or mitigate the negative aspects it may pose.
   Solution: The good news is that social enterprises can take risks where governments cannot. Let’s let the social enterprises be the “R&D” and government be the “customer”. See also: Schwab Foundation’s public social innovators initiative.
3. Challenge: as we transition to a green economy, there is a big job of reskilling workers so they are able to take advantage of new career opportunities instead of being left unemployed. The risk of massive unemployment might lead to civil discontent, similar to the period of unrest in the UK following the closure of coal mines (interesting paper by EBRD on this).
   Solution: A huge opportunity exists for social enterprises to help skill and reskill workers so they are fit for the digital economy. They will need to work with the government and wider ecosystem in order to do so.
4. Challenge: government departments responsible for decarbonisation are often averse to innovation and risk. They also often struggle to collaborate with other government departments, the private sector, and local communities.
   Solution: The US Department of Energy is setting up a foundation to work alongside government in order to commercialise energy technology, invest in communities, and bring decision makers together. This is an innovative initiative and it will be interesting to gauge its success in the coming years, particularly after the upcoming US presidential election.
5. Challenge: A football pitch of tropical forest is lost every 5 seconds
   Solution: We need stronger policies and legislation to protect the world’s forests. At the same time, we need to scale up Nature Based Solutions (NBS) to promote the natural regeneration of forests. I was particularly moved by Esben Brandi (TIG) and Celia Francis (Ponterra) who detailed the amazing work their organisations are doing to crowd in financing to protect tropical forests.

Global South

6. Challenge: Many African countries spend more money on servicing existing debt than on their own development in key areas like healthcare and education. This debt is largely owed to the Global North and China.
   Solution: Debt restructuring would free up capital that could be used by these countries to spend on areas critical for their development (like climate resilient agriculture, healthcare systems, infrastructure, IT, etc.)
7. Challenge: Many countries in the Global South still look to the Global North to guide their development, despite many “home grown solutions” already existing in their own region.
   Solution: We need more funding towards initiatives that facilitate Global South-to-South cooperation in order to scale solutions across the region. For example, India’s success in Digital Public Infrastructure has facilitated financial inclusion, access to essential public services, tax collection, etc. Can we replicate this in other countries?
8. Challenge: Massive gender inequality still exists. It is unfair, morally wrong, and also prevents trillions of dollars of economic value by restricting women’s access to the labour market.
   Solution: We need to fix policy and legislation to better support girls and women. Gender lens investing can be a great tool for the path to gender equity. Metrics around gender equity should be embedded into all funding, whether philanthropic or returns based. Girl Effect has created an innovative AI chatbot that helps 23 million girls in India “stay in school, earn a dignified living, get pregnant only when they choose, get vaccinated, and stay healthy.”
9. Challenge: The future of our economies is digital, sustainable, and AI will play a central role. The Global South risks being left behind in this tech revolution. For example, computing power (i.e., servers) is 2-3x more expensive in Africa than in the Global North. Plus, AI is being trained on data sets that largely exclude Africa, thereby creating a huge bias towards the Global North. “Making AI models less accurate for local users…biased AI can exacerbate social divisions on a continent where diverse cultures and communities coexist.”
   Solution: In order to accelerate digital transformation in the Global South we need to increase the amount of local data sets that AI can be trained on. A good example is how the social business, Amini, does this by “utilizing Geospatial Data and AI / Machine Learning capabilities to solve environmental data scarcity for countries in the global south.” 

Let’s convince funders and investors to channel more money towards a just and equitable transition. And it is vital that money already earmarked for this ends up in the right hands. And, as always, we need greater collaboration across the ecosystem in order to make these solutions a reality.

Sattva has staff in London and Copenhagen and works with leading European DFIs, impact investors, and philanthropic foundations that want to deepen their impact in the Global South.

For more information get in touch: impact@sattva.co.in.