Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit: Fast-Tracking Solutions To The Crisis Solutions

This week's Current Climate, which every Monday brings you the latest news about the business of sustainability. .

New York was abuzz with activity last week due to the annual United Nations General Assembly that brought world leaders to town and Climate Week, in which scientists, activists, writers and politicians discussed efforts to slow and reverse the rapid buildup of greenhouse gasses threatening the planet's health. Forbes was in the thick of it at the Sustainability Leaders Summit where members of the inaugural Sustainability Leaders list , corporate executives, environmentalists and investors focused on concrete steps to accelerate the shift to clean energy, improve access to clean water and ocean health and sequester carbon pollution.

The common theme among speakers including environmental writer Bill McKibben, Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus, actor Matt Damon, cofounder of Water.org and WaterEquity, former U.S. Secretary of State and climate envoy John Kerry and billionaire investor Tom Steyer was the need to move faster because the window of opportunity to limit the worst effects of climate change is closing.

"It's not like a big secret what we're supposed to do," said Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, cofounder of Urban Ocean Lab. "It's a matter of how quickly we're going to implement these solutions."

Rapid growth in clean energy, particularly from solar and wind power connected to batteries is especially promising but needs to scale rapidly. "How you actually bring the promise of the revolution that is changing the way that we consume and produce power is one of the things we're wanting to do," said Jared Blumenfeld, president of Waverley Street Foundation.

The looming U.S. presidential election came up repeatedly as a critical factor for making progress, owing to Donald Trump's vow to further accelerate fossil-fuel production and roll back environmental regulations.

"If there ever was a no-brainer election, this one is it," said McKibben. "This is the last legit shot we have at making a difference."

But Washington Governor Jay Inslee, among the most ardent advocates for regulations and programs aimed at curbing CO2 pollution, told conference attendees that regardless of who becomes the next U.S. president the push for sustainability will continue.

"If a climate denier ends up back in the White House, we aren't going to give this battle up," he said.

The Big Read

Matt Damon On Helping 69 Million People Get Access To Water

Women and girls spend 200 million hours every day getting water, an astronomical amount of time that could be better spent. Increase access to water, and girls stay in school, their families' incomes rise and the broader community benefits. This is what Matt Damon learned, starting back in 2006, when he went on a trip with Bono's organization to South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. "I was there to learn about extreme poverty and I was shocked how water undergirded every aspect of extreme poverty and nobody was talking about it," he said at the third annual Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit in New York last week.

The Hollywood star, who's appeared in the Bourne franchise, "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Oppenheimer," ultimately co-founded Water.org , the non-profit that helps people in poverty get access to safe water and improved sanitation, and WaterEquity, an asset manager focused on the global water crisis. By using microloans, those very small loans pioneered by Grameen Bank's Muhammad Yunus, for water, the 16-year-old nonprofit has been able to reach 69 million people, up from 1 million in 2012. "If we had just stayed digging wells it would've taken us 600 years to get where we are now," he said.

Climate change has only made the issue of water access and resilience more acute, as the recent flooding in Bangladesh and water crisis in Mexico City have shown. "The climate crisis is water crisis, and we all feel climate change through water," Vedika Bhandarkar, Water.org 's president and chief operating officer, told the Summit. "We do feel the climate crisis through water, and the people who are the poorest and the most vulnerable, they feel it the worst and they feel it the first."

WaterEquity recently raised $100 million from investors that include Microsoft and Starbucks to invest in water infrastructure. Undergirding the work is what Damon calls "a philosophical difference" of how to view people who live without access to safe water. "Rather than a charity, it's actually a market to be served," he said. "And they're just living inside a failed market."

Watch the full conversation on video here.

Hot Topic

John Kerry, former U.S. climate envoy and Secretary of State, on why he's optimistic about the global transition to low-carbon energy

At the COP28 conference a year ago, developed nations made big commitments to helping developing nations. How is that progressing at this point?

It's going too slowly, and it's not coming to scale fast enough. So we have an enormous challenge. What we accomplished, and I think it's not insignificant in Dubai, so building out of Paris and Glasgow and Sharm El Sheikh was an agreement among about 200 nations. And that's the hardest diplomacy of all because it's done by consensus. So one nation could have walked out and said, `We're not doing this.' But they didn't. So we agreed, all of us, that we had to transition away from fossil fuel to achieve net zero by 2050 in a way that is fair, equitable, orderly and accelerating in this decade, according to the science. That means trying to hold on to a 1.5-degree [Celsius] increase [in temperature]. 1.5 degrees is the limit of the warming on the planet right now. We've probably blown through 1.5 honestly, and the challenge may be to claw back from wherever it is that we land.

But the bottom line is how do you transition away from fossil fuel? You have to literally begin phasing your usage down, transitioning to alternative sources of energy. So we're doing that.

Last year about $2 trillion of the $4.5 to $5 trillion a year that we need between now and 2050 went into venture capital on new technologies and on addressing this challenge. It's the first time in human history that's twice as much as what went into it as fossil fuel. So there is a transition. It's just not fast enough. There are technologies coming online that will make a huge difference – new batteries, better solar. Solar is now 90% cheaper than it was 10 years ago.

So we're seeing a revolution. It just has to hold. If we're going to achieve our goals, we've got to move faster.

Why are you optimistic about this challenge?

Number one, because I think we innovate and do entrepreneurial initiatives like no other country, like no other people on the planet. We're doing it now. Bill Gates is building new nuclear plants. We've got geothermal in Colorado, in Utah. People are now figuring out how much power we're going to be able to get from that and can we standardize it? There's just so much happening, partly because the [Inflation Reduction Act] put a significant incentive into the marketplace and people responded to it. There are almost 80-plus new battery companies. So there's an amazing amount happening. I'm optimistic because of that.

I'm optimistic because it's we humans who have created this dilemma. We burn fossil fuels and we don't capture the emissions. That's the problem. It's the whole problem. So if we either capture the emissions or find other ways to provide our energy, which we have now, increasingly we win.

See the full video conversation here .

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