Stanford Sustainability Summit 2026: Faculty Panel on the State of Sustainability Today

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: so uh so since there are endowed chairs involved i will have to read the names to make sure that we give credit where credit is due so let me introduce uh professor noah diffenbaugh the william wrigley professor and kimmelman family senior fellow at the door school of sustainability stanford door school sustainability professor rodolfo durso the associate dean for integrative initiatives in environmental justice and being professor in environmental science professor of earth system science all at the stanford door school of sustainability and a senior fellow at the woods institute for the environment professor jamie jones who's my favorite professor by the way what professor of environmental social sciences sorry and by courtesy of earth system science at the stanford door school of sustainability we have michael masprandrea a senior research scholar at the stanford woods institute for the environment and professor stefan reichelstein the william r timkin professor of accounting emeritus at the stanford graduate school of business senior fellow at the stanford institute for economic policy research and senior fellow at pre-court institute uh for energy so thank you for for coming uh colleagues and now as you all will remember that uh we didn't have faculty panels the last couple of summits but uh marissa and i felt that the sort of zeitgeist around sustainability made it a good idea for us to start by hearing the some just some quick updates on the research front and so this set of uh of scholars were chosen because of the variety of of uh research perspectives they take and so i'm going to really just ask two questions i gave you guys the heads up on these questions before uh the meeting the first one is an update on new developments uh in research and impact and uh and then we'll go on to look at uh future opportunities and challenges and so noah since you're right here i'm going to start with you uh what are uh give us an update on uh what's going on [00:02:28] Noah Diffenbaugh: with climate yeah thanks for uh the invitation and thank you all for being here and um we heard in the introduction that the the direction of the winds uh maybe have changed a bit and if anyone didn't know exactly what that referred to uh we're now back to having 100 male panels um so um the winds have changed um well it wasn't for lack of it wasn't for lack of trying but yeah um bill and i are good [00:03:02] Speaker 1: friends um i knew i knew it was going to come at some point so i guess right away since i'm not his [00:03:08] Noah Diffenbaugh: favorite professor i thought i would say something um all right so climate so i i'm a climate scientist i study um uh what it is about the climate system that most directly and acutely impacts us that's my interests are right at that interface i'm not an expert at anything as a result um but i would say the you know what's really changed in my field um there you know there's there's probably a list um you know our uh strongest um most uh kind of community engaged national research center is being dismantled so that's you know that's changing um but in terms of the research ai has really you know is really a revolution and um there's both a micro version of that and a macro version of that so the micro version is like i went from thinking um i couldn't do research anymore and uh would need to go into administration um up until spring break when i started using claude to code and i realized wait a second now i can now i can still do this um so you know i think you know there's the micro version that everything that everyone is experiencing um and but but in climate science the macro version really is that um ai is enabling us to make um it's changing the way that we do science and there are panels upon panels just about that um check out the video from the hai data science summit um in may for a whole panel on that but i would say uh for my research group for the field as a whole ai is really um changing not just not just in the uh in the kind of chat gpt uh interface for each of us as humans but really the fundamentally the way that we that we do climate science i'm happy to talk more about that that's an interest it's such an [00:05:11] Speaker 1: interesting point you bring up noah because normally when we think about ai we think about the tremendous amount of energy that's used obviously by ai but they're uh given that the uh that ship has sailed uh it's intriguing and and i find it heartening to hear that applications of that might be then addressing the very problem [00:05:36] Noah Diffenbaugh: that uh that it's caught up with yeah certainly certainly in our research we're able to um the ai is able to learn relationships in the climate system that you know the the human you know it's very hard for the human brain to kind of do that analysis and you know so we're able to make predictions that are falsifiable which um as i said somewhere else now after two decades i'm a scientist so yeah fantastic thank you final [00:06:01] Speaker 1: predictions thank you noah thank you noah mike let's turn to you next you're at the interface of uh of research and practice and uh let's get an update from you thank you yeah hello everyone thank you all [00:06:14] Speaker 3: for being here as well um i'll just pick up on some of the same themes that the noah spoke to so so first of all just to introduce as bill mentioned the kind of work i do so i co-lead a policy program that sits within the door school of sustainability on climate and energy policy uh writ large but the key areas of focus that we have these days are around wildfire electricity and insurance policy and all of the interconnections between them so we do a lot of work at the state level here in california and and in the western u.s but also look more generally at federal policy and in other parts of the world that are dealing with fire as well and this is one area that has really been changing rapidly over the last you know 10 to 20 years noah is one of the people who's done research on this um there are a variety of factors why wildfire has become such a a new set of risks in in the last while one of those is climate change it's also a legacy of fire suppression that's led to fuel build up it's more people living in vulnerable places it's a whole range of different factors that have come together and i'm sure many of you have seen the kinds of catastrophic fires that have happened here in california over the last several years as well as in other other states and in other parts of the world too and so the work that we do is really on how do you uh connect the kind of work that's coming out of the research community into public policy making and um have interconnection in kind of real time as policy conversations are going on and so one of the places where ai is just to pick up that thread is is coming into play is there's a huge amount of research that's being done and a lot of emerging understanding of what are the effective interventions to reduce risk across various aspects of the system as you may know electricity utilities um who have been implicated in some of the most catastrophic fires over the last uh years have been investing heavily in reducing the risk of ignition from their infrastructure during dangerous conditions hot dry windy conditions so that's that's one thing that's happening but there's also quite a bit of of research going into how do we create safer communities how do we create healthier landscapes so that in fire adapted ecosystems like here in california where fire is a natural part of of what we experience you don't have the same kinds of catastrophic outcomes for people and for communities and for the economy and and also for public health as well because smoke is a big part of this as well and so there's a lot of opportunity there's a lot of work that's being done to learn on the science side there's a need to translate that into how it can inform better policy making [00:08:38] Speaker 1: i'm happy to go deeper but i'll leave it there for now oh yeah well that's very exciting very exciting thank you mike uh so rodolfo uh before i i open it up to you i just want to comment many of the people in this room many of you were introduced to marissa and i by rodolfo uh and so it's strange for me to be introducing you rodolfo because you're the root cause of of the existence of this very event the way that uh we go about uh we go about identifying people to bring in we want this to be very much a bottom-up event and it's actually difficult to create bottom-up events that sort of top-down uh uh events that look take the handful of the most famous people in the world it's pretty obvious what you do you go get the handful of most famous people in the world but if you want change makers who are making a difference in practice there has to be a sampling scheme so we stratify by geography and organizational form and then we scrape the research publications of all the faculty at stanford to identify country by faculty and then when we go into a country we turn to those faculty and say who's amazing and that's the way that we have gone about doing this and then of course the problem is the one and done problem that american academics are famous for showing up and you never see them again so we keep circling back and rodolfo has been really central in our ability to identify people who otherwise would be uh entirely overlooked in a world where we focus so much on uh marquee names and so forth not that there's anything wrong with that but uh i just i just had to say that before i went any further rodolfo thank you for everything you've done to make it possible for the stanford community to hear from these voices uh give us an update please thank you [00:10:33] Speaker 4: let me start by saying that i am a little bit sad to learn that i am not his favorite factor but i can i can tell you guys that he is one of my favorites one of so this is not a by completely biodirectional uh interaction but i am my field is actually on biodiversity that critical component of sustainability we cannot imagine sustainability without paying attention to biodiversity unfortunately what's happening to biodiversity is not good news so let me tell you a little bit about developments in terms of understanding what is happening to bother us today as you all know we have this fantastic technology to monitor the pulse of life on the planet and that is a remote sensing technology right those amazing uh satellite images that we can get and we can do all kinds of really wonderful things from assessing what was the situation 50 years ago even thousands of years ago uh project what could happen if we continue with business as usual in terms of the components of the earth which is plant life unfortunately that fantastic technology does not help us to understand what is happening with animal life and so i want to share with you that uh a relatively new development is that we are beginning to understand what is happening to this other component of biodiversity which is animal life so we have now the development of infrared cameras those cameras that are placed somewhere in the forest or in a savannah and they have a beam that if an animal passes in front of them the beam will be broken and the animal would be photographed with that kind of of technology with an incredible amount of field work mostly by local indigenous peoples in many parts of the planet who are sharing information with us and with big databases now we're beginning to understand what is happening what is the pulse of the situation of animal life on the planet not good news in 2014 we published a paper indicating that uh calculating that the declining the abundance of vertebrates on the planet in four decades was about 50 percent they have reduced their abundance in 50 percent now this study promoted other studies that have been conducted frequently by the WWF the world wildlife fund and they have come up with information that shows that the situation is even worse now they calculate that the abundance of vertebrates on the planet is declining by about 70 percent in the last five decades or so and now what are the consequences of that is that what I am really interested in now now that we understand and how we can measure what is happening with animal life where and what happens to the locations where these animals occur one of the important connections that has become an important development in terms of us becoming aware of what's happening with life is the connections between biodiversity and disease there's a field now that we call disease ecology we're understanding now what changes in biodiversity have consequences for the disease not only for the functioning of ecosystems but also for the well-being of humans from the point of view of disease particularly zoonotic diseases it turns out that now we understand that big animals are declining in their abundance and those big animals are the competitors and predators of the small animals unfortunately many of the small animals that are now thriving on the planet they are hosts and vectors of many many many diseases leptospira leishmania borrelia play you've only play is now evident in some places in places increasing i just want to close my comment by saying that unfortunately right now we'll be living a moment which is really critical via emergence of ebola there's another case of ebola in the drc now which is the actual numbers are as of as on friday 1813 cases confirmed cases of ebola most in the drc and a few in uganda and 687 deaths so the fact that we're changing the ecology of these animal communities promoting the contact between humans and and and and zoonotic animals is creating a very big issue for us you might remember a thing called covet a couple of years ago a few years ago and we are terrified of the our lack of attention the lack of perception of the importance of biodiversity might put us in a very difficult situation but we're hopeful because now we have much better ways of assessing the situation and hopefully provide some remedies to that [00:15:22] Speaker 1: you know you're you know your comments uh rodolpho bring me back to uh silent spring rachel yeah a book which does not discuss climate [00:15:35] Speaker 4: yeah pesticides was the emphasis [00:15:38] Speaker 1: and came about only a few years into what we often refer to as the great acceleration and it sounds like now we can measure the great acceleration as it's also applying and occurring with animal life that's incredible incredible thank you very much by the way we'll be circling back with the panelists and for references to the various findings if people want to do a little more reading on this a little bit later thank you very much rodolpho jamie jones give us an update [00:16:09] Speaker 4: your favorite right yes [00:16:14] Speaker 5: i'll just point out that being bill's favorite is not without its costs so i anticipated that rodolpho might be kind of a downer and maybe even noah so i figured i'd talk about something positive um because i could have talked to you about human extinction and and work on existential threats but i chose not to so you can thank me later uh i'm interested in adaptation broadly and adaptation is a process by which individuals or populations communities uh improve their life prospects it's sort of a generic definition of adaptation and uh given that we're sitting on top of a business school i should note that adaptation and innovation are actually very similar processes they have different intellectual genealogies have some different vocabulary but they're very very fundamentally uh similar adaptation generically requires two things you have to have diversity and you have to have feedback right so you have to have a you have a challenge in the environment broadly considered it might be the social environment it might be the economic environment it might be the biophysical environment and you have to have a number of different candidate solutions right and so that's the diversity part the feedback comes when one solution does a better job than other solutions and it gets promoted right and so it spreads in a population it increases in frequency so this is a very generic type of uh definition of adaptation and it's something that we need to do with respect to the changing climate it's something that we need to do with respect to the changing economy to the development of ai to all sorts of things right um so what i've done recently uh work with collaborators and with students is to look at the conditions that favor the spread of innovations that that that that can serve as climate adaptations and it turns out that uh there are a lot of intuitions about this but the intuitions are generally wrong and one of the things one very robust result that we've that we've found is that innovation comes from peripheries so if you want to to to to have an innovation spread through a population you want it to happen on the periphery of the population typically in a minoritized population and there's structural reasons for this and we've we've we've we've uncovered this it has nothing to do with the psychology of cool or whatever right there there are very clear structural reasons why it's easier for an innovation to to start on a periphery of a population and move to the to the center of it uh the great harvard sociologist james coleman 40 years ago noted that that cohesive cores tend to frown on on deviance right and we think that well that's probably a good thing right because deviance is anti-social it's criminal well deviance just literally means different from the norm right and so the valence on deviance can be different it can be positive it can be negative when it's negative we call it deviance when it's positive we call it innovation cores are terrible because of the conformity that's induced by a core peripheries have a huge advantage for this and we've we've documented this we've we've we've measured it um and let's see is there anything else i want to say yeah and and so there is diversity comes into this in multiple ways right and one of those ways is the standard sort of socio-demographic economic geographic diversity that we see creating subgroups of of people but there's also a structural diversity and it turns out that the types of of population structures that promote the spread of innovations and the adoption of of adaptive behavior in general looks an awful lot like a multicultural city where you have weakly connected or moderately connected enclaves of very close connections basically what happens is that things can percolate and and amplify in the dense populations and then they spread through the the weak ties between them they don't it and this leads to much greater adaptation in uh adoption of innovative uh technologies behaviors uh and so that's fun we know we know stuff that we didn't we didn't know and we uh about how we actually make this happen and how we can promote that we're in a tough time for both diversity and for feedback yeah right some of the best mechanisms that we have for feedback include democracy and markets and we're we're doing our best at least in the united states to undermine both of those right and so uh and god knows we're we're apparently fighting diversity as well so as the mantle highlights maybe um uh so these are things that we need to fight for uh because that's what's going to get us into a better place it's going to make our lives better and maybe allow us to survive this difficult time you see what i'm talking about i mean really you [00:21:23] Speaker 1: you know in many ways what the the uh the clustering of otherwise uh probably not affiliated uh enclaves is well represented in this room and i remember uh when uh uh in fact i was with you rodolfo when we were on a study trip to the philippines where we have secretary tony here and um yeah some of the innovations going on with respect to the coastal ecosystem there looked very much like the innovations going on in uh the coast of chile in uh in and in mexico both areas that are also represented here and that's the hope you bring this together in ways that wouldn't happen in a in a core right it's uh a super interesting um stefan reichelstein so stefan was the voice of sort of economic analysis applied to sustainability here at the gsb when practically nobody else was doing that and um i would i would consider that the kind of positive deviance that jamie jones just uh just described not criminal and uh yeah not criminal not yet and uh and in fact is under as as most of you know is under such high demand uh that he spends much of his time in europe as well as here but we're so glad to have any of your time [00:22:53] Speaker 6: stefan please give us an update gladly so um bill asked what developments would you like a group of sustainability practitioners to know about and what immediately came to mind is what i've been working on with colleagues mostly in europe but also at other u.s universities and most importantly a group of companies we have about a dozen companies multinational firms in this uh coalition the topic the subject really is nothing more and nothing less than corporate carbon accounting uh something that you have of course all heard about that's not new what is new hopefully is that we bring more rigor to the exercise companies have for a long time been reporting both corporate and product carbon footprints um but we also all know that there have been a lot of uh worries that these numbers are not reliable there's a lot of green washing going on uh and the question is can this be made more rigorous ultimately also can we bring a higher degree of verification and certification to these numbers and that's why really where my background as an accounting faculty here at the gsb came in and so we started this initiative uh really with an eye to developing um relying on traditional financial and managerial accounting uh to get metrics out there to basically institute a carbon ledger uh very similar to a financial ledger uh that at the end of the day would lead to such a thing as a co2 balance sheet and the equivalent of an income statement which we call sort of a co2 flow statement that companies would first prepare at the company level the information would then percolate down the supply chain these numbers would be audited and in contrast to what we have sort of seen thus far it would really be a set of numbers that would rely on primary data obtained at every level in the supply chain and hopefully lead to a new form of accountability when companies state their net zero goals so that the public but also management regulators can see to what extent they have really made progress and have made good on these net zero pledges what's missing still is really a set of uh specific carbon accounting standards as you might imagine there are a lot of things that are sort of um up in the air still um organizations like the greenhouse gas protocol or the science-based target initiative have issued certain guidelines but to our from our perspective these are not yet specific enough so it's really going work in progress and we're currently at the stage where we're doing a couple of demonstration studies for relatively simple supply chains to really trace these numbers uh have them audited and verified and issue then ultimately these more comprehensive carbon reports so i am there are a lot of organizations currently that are pursuing similar goals so the competition is the competition is on but uh i think it's a healthy competition uh we hope to bring this to a conclusion within a year or so um we always tell each other climate change isn't waiting exactly for the accountants to get it right so we have to sort of get a a product out there that's usable and implementable and i'm [00:26:48] Speaker 1: pretty optimistic that we'll be able to do that within a year's time my goodness so stefan um how are how are things looking with respect to uh how are things looking with respect to governments requiring reporting right so that's a large impetus [00:27:04] Speaker 6: uh both in terms of general corporate disclosures but also policy instruments say the carbon border adjustment mechanism um that the uh the european union uh will be imposing now to basically check that uh uh jurisdictions that don't have carbon pricing are not at an advantage in terms of producing and selling goods to the european union those kinds of things provide sort of an immediate motivation for what [00:27:32] Speaker 1: we're doing yeah yeah super exciting thanks so much for that that update um i'm going to come back through again and now let's look forward uh what are the sort of challenges and opportunities each of you sees going forward and then i think after that there'll be time for questions before we have a break so noah get [00:27:50] Noah Diffenbaugh: us going yeah i think um from my perspective um major challenge and it relates to some of what we heard um in the previous comments is that the investment and i mean i don't mean just financial investment but the societal investment in adaptation is a small fraction of what's required and we can have a discussion about whether the investment in decarbonization what fraction of what's required that is but if we look uh globally um i don't know if anyone from or related to cpi is here the climate policy initiative so they have tracked financial flows um for climate related projects and you know according to those data it's about 20 to 1 investment in decarbonization um compared to adaptation or resilience and and if you know if we look at what was the inflation reduction act here in the u.s it was you know similarly you know order of magnitude larger for decarbonization i haven't calculated the numbers for the door school but i'm certain that it's similar you know order of magnitude more investment in in decarbonization than adaptation um so you know we're really um falling uh the the reason this matters is that we're falling further behind in terms of the gap between what we're prepared for and what's happening and this really comes down to some pretty simple statistics and uh first principles physics about how the climate system works right so if you think about a bell curve um temperature in most locations around the world it looks like a bell curve in terms of the daily temperature and so if you think about the hot end of the bell curve as the mean the bell curve shifts the area under that hot tail increases exponentially so i get asked wow it seems like this is happening faster and faster is this faster than what climate scientists predicted and actually no it's it's accelerating because that's just the basic statistics of a bell curve and there are some thermodynamics that are very um kind of fundamental to the physics of the climate system that also create this acceleration including with extreme precipitation and the the way that moisture increases in the atmosphere with an increment of warming but the bottom line is that even if the world is as successful as possible in reducing emissions stabilizing the global temperature we're going to continue to get an acceleration of the most extreme conditions in addition we know largely from work done by faculty and research groups here at stanford as as well as elsewhere that the sensitivity of many societal systems also increases exponentially as conditions get most extreme so this is a second contribution to this accelerating uh impact of climate change so even if we get another half degree of warming globally a degree a degree and a half and for each of those increments we can expect accelerating climate stresses and we're simply not investing and again not just financially but also more broadly societally in being prepared for those conditions and we see that unfortunately day after day month after month year after year around the world what it takes to actually adapt that's a question for other people on the panel and in this room but it's clear that from a climate perspective we're we're going to keep getting farther behind until we're actually you know [00:31:48] Speaker 1: really investing in leapfrogging ahead could i push a little on a term you use that i think has a lot in it that connects to the people in the room make sure that everybody's seeing the link you talked about the sensitivity of uh was it institutions or basically the status quo could you push on yeah so if we look so so if we [00:32:12] Noah Diffenbaugh: look at uh you know this summer in europe where where there's been another record-setting heat wave and you know new york times had an article this morning estimating how many people have died that's that's almost certainly an underestimate um in terms of the excess depth so uh you know the the excess mortality as a function of how hot the week is is exponential right so as you add another increment of of heat yeah in that week and you know it's half a degree hotter than the last record that the number of people that are likely to die relative to would have died in a normal week actually goes up exponentially okay and this is different than the fact that that increment of mean warming of the climate will increase the frequency of that heat yes exponentially and that so i was wondering about [00:33:15] Speaker 1: that because that's a direct effect it it strikes me that there may well also be and i think you've written on this catalytic effects on human institutions uh war conflict migration which themselves would then [00:33:31] Noah Diffenbaugh: have environmental behavioral scientists and global uh environmental policies what do you what's the noun uh what's a person a policy not they're not politicians policy analysts but they're all economists right here they're actually all economists well there are many sociologists and social psychologists in the mix as well but that's fine yeah so your department you know has many of the world leaders in in understanding that you know those those impacts so yeah work with that i've been involved in with marshall burke and others um analyzing uh yeah economic growth and um foregone economic growth uh mortality etc so i'm those are those have been really fruitful collaborations for me and my research group um i think that in terms of the question about what's on the horizon um i'm i guess i'll i'll maybe i'll be dramatic and just say i've kind of reached the end of my patience with getting asked if it's surprising that that this is happening so fast like this is just exactly as predicted exactly as understood yes yes [00:34:44] Speaker 1: no i understand that you know we have i think our uh person from brack is going to be arriving late i think ironically it had to do with the weather but you know brack's work for with respect to trying to keep uh millions and millions of uh field workers largely women exposed to extreme heat uh across uh the subcontinent but also now in africa and other places um addressing that we have olga uh where are you olga wouldn't have from uh superhumans dealing with uh the consequences of war uh in ukraine and uh so many of our change makers are dealing with the very world that you are describing yeah so that example [00:35:30] Noah Diffenbaugh: and then i'll be quiet but that example of of people working outside in um areas that are already hot and humid is a great example of this kind of double exponential or maybe it's triple exponential because the the in those regions the frequency of extreme heat will for a mean warming will increase exponentially for the reasons i described the humidity also goes up exponentially for each mean increment of warming and then you have the effect of that on the human body so again if we if we're wildly successful and we reach net zero by 2050 globally and we only have you know another half degree of global warming we should all expect an exponential increase in the frequency of those conditions that are that create that vulnerability all right and you [00:36:24] Speaker 1: always preface your remarks noah by saying and then i'll be quiet and i hope you are never quiet so let me just say that september 1st i'll be on sabbatical and very quiet all right mike what do you see forward [00:36:37] Speaker 3: yeah i'll i'll pick up a few of these threads i guess so like i said before i one of the big areas we work on is wildfire and so that actually has both adaptation and mitigation components of it to some extent i the work that we do that i was describing earlier on how to reduce the risk of wildfires i think sits within that adaptation umbrella and one of the challenges i see is we are increasingly understanding what are effective interventions to reduce risk but there's not consensus of actually implementing those in lots of ways just to give one example of that so the five feet around a structure if you have burnable material in in that part of of a home or of another kind of a building that is one of the things that is seen from the research side to be most important in whether the home survives a wildfire or not because the embers burn in and then they ignite that and then the home ignites but you can see areas for instance in la adjacent the the catastrophic fires that happened there last year who are the most vehemently opposed to regulations that would require removal of burnable materials in that five feet they have you know in these kinds of of canyons in the la area for example you know yard signs that say like keep your hands off of my yard i i don't want my you know rosebush or my other you know landscaping they are probably yeah yeah yeah and and so adding to it as well and and and other things like fences and connections and so it is changing not just you know there's a scientific aspect of that and firefighters are going to come in and say well you need to harden your home against wildfire the ember attack and all of this kind of language that a homeowner if if you're hearing that is not going to think well this is going to make me still have a beautiful house that is the way i want it to be the landscaping is the way i want it to be so there's a big aspect of behavioral sciences and other aspects of of how you think about societal change to the point you made of kind of if this is coming from the core or the extremes i think that's another part of that example um there's there's others um but but that is one of the things of how do you actually implement another is to the point on on financing there's a huge amount of money being spent and one of the things that i guess i'm seeing to to pick up a thread that noah brought up is that as um the the real world manifests the kinds of theory that we've seen from climate science since the beginning of more extreme conditions with wildfire that's something that is leading to societal outcomes that are creating urgency for action and people are paying attention and trying to figure out what to do about it one aspect of that is how do we use financial like insurance and other mechanisms to spread that risk around but there's too much risk that risk is growing you can't just spread it around you need to reduce it but how you do that and how you pay for it is something that is really unsolved at this point in terms of of the the wildfire realm again so utilities here in california but elsewhere are often uh financially responsible if their uh infrastructure ignited the fire whatever the consequences are a lot of those come back both through insurance and through directly from those who are impacted by the fire they are spending mass in california it's about 10 billion dollars a year to reduce the the the the likelihood of an ignition from their system there's an order of magnitude less at least being spent on what happens after an ignition what are the consequences how does that fire move through landscapes and through communities because urban conflagrations are one of the ways that we see the most catastrophic outcomes where a fire burns into a community like la last year those are some examples of that but again the understanding of what we could do to reduce that risk is not necessarily in sync with both the the will to actually take those changes and then also to pay for it so that's where there's really active policy conversations but lots of other conversations innovation in the private sector too of how can tech help how can social movements help to to get to better outcomes all right well thank you mike rodolfo looking forward thank you [00:40:24] Speaker 4: because of wildfires that affect not only urban and semi-urban areas but also wild areas natural forest natural savannas those kinds of things that's one factor that contributes to the decline in the in the coverage of nature particularly vegetation on the planet in addition to that there is land you change particularly from the point of view of production of meat which is a massive way of using the land we have now believe it or not rates of deforestation measured currently in the order of 10.9 million hectares per year in case you hate metric and you know one 10.9 hectares means it's roughly um 11 football 11 11 million areas of football fields you i mean proper football right 11 million those areas are being destroyed on a yearly basis so the thing that we are excited about now is to find ways of doing reforestation or rewilding of those areas and so in the area of conservation science associated with social sciences there is a tremendous impetus now to recover or to restore rewild many of those areas at the moment unfortunately about 14 to 15 percent of the land surface of the planet is under some kind of formal protection and npa natural protected areas but we're finding mechanisms of discovering which are other critical and imperative areas that we need to protect and rescue before it is too late and we're also combining sociological information at the pixel level with the characteristics of the vegetation and wildlife in those areas to put enough to organize an overlaying of those two and define the critical areas areas that we need to protect going forward and so that leads me to this important comment and challenge but at the same time fantastic opportunity we do know that about 53 percent of the areas of the of the total area of the planet terrestrial area of the planet which is in good shape in terms of biodiversity is in lands of rural and indigenous peoples which is a critical issue to pay attention to if we want to protect those areas we really need to think differently to be innovative in human behavior in sociological aspects in communication in really multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to protect those areas in support of those communities we cannot leave the responsibility of protection that precious remaining of our nature of our planet to those communities we need to support them i think that's a very exciting and promising area that we should be paying attention to going forward but i wanted to share if i have one more minute another more macroscopic aspect that i see as a challenge but at the same time an opportunity we tend to think of global change as climate change and of course this is really very important as we have heard climate change is absolutely essential critical mega problem that we have in front of us but that is not the only global environmental change we do have land use change as well dramatic i mentioned almost 10.9 million hectares destroyed per year we have over exploitation of resources we have pollution and all of those things unfortunately do not operate and impact nature and humanity in isolation all of them are connected in complex ways in synergies direct and indirect effects and so on and so forth so that is in my view being a scientist in biodiversity but i can see i can see this is relevant for every discipline the way in which can understand and model and create ways of addressing this multiplicity of factors affecting nature and humanity i think that's a very important critical challenge that is so exciting actually from the scientific point of view from the social point of view and i hope that we can begin to think more about the complexity of global environmental change beyond [00:44:43] Speaker 1: climate change thank you so much for that rodolfo you know a number of our change makers are dealing in a bottom-up way with the very challenges that you describe and it is very inspiring to see action taken [00:44:54] Speaker 5: in the very first time jamie jones so when bill wrote us this weekend warning us what he was going to ask us he said uh what are the most important sustainability opportunities or challenges coming up in the next few years as seen from the perspective of your field i had a moment of panic because i was like oh my god what is my field i don't know i don't know what that is so i have a lot of fields uh and a commonality of them is that of these different areas of my research is that i use ecological and evolutionary principles to understand change um and so there's a type of change there are two there are two big challenges that i see uh that honestly i think they're the biggest challenges we face um and they're not given they're not taken very seriously and and i don't mean to i don't mean to throw shade on on our wonderful door school of sustainability but it has a very engineering focus right and the thing is that engineering innovations don't do any good if they're not adopted by people if they're not used by people okay so the two the two big challenges that i see are behavior change and collective action right um how do we get people in communities societies and our species to behave in ways that are compatible with and and sustainability is really about two things right it's about persistence we have to survive uh you're not sustainable if you go extinct and we have to have a sort of notion of inter-temporal justice people in the future have to be given the same opportunities that we are given right and and and so how do we how do we get behaviors to change to promote both our continued persistence and this this notion of inter-temporal justice and uh and how do we get together to solve the greatest collective action problem in the in the in the history of our species so those are challenges and the thing is if we don't solve those problems it you know it doesn't do any good to to come up with the cool new gimmick for for sequestering carbon or for you know everybody adopting electric cars right it's it it simply doesn't matter for an engineering solution uh to move some problem people have to adopt it and i've got i've got just a couple examples historically of situations where you had a clear innovate an innovation that was obviously better it was an improvement on the way things were done before and society didn't adopt them so starting in 1840 semelweiss and hand washing in austria he realized wow if the if the doctors just wash their hands after doing an autopsy before they deliver a baby we can reduce the the epinatal mortality rate from approximately 20 to less than two percent like that instantly right but the doctors being a conservative core were just like no we're not going to do that that sounds like women's stuff right we are still fighting it right we absolutely absolutely we're still facing that right um the the gauge war in 19th century europe in 19th century britain right the great engineer burnell had a superior broad gauge that was safer faster more effective more robust and parliament actually voted it down made it illegal to use the broad gauge despite the fact of its clear engineering superiority because it was complicated right and and there were political interests who wanted the standard narrow gauge okay the third is the dvorak simplified uh keyboard in the 1930s right there there was this this this this um dvorak developed the keyboard some of you may use it actually right that reduces the amount your fingers have to move by 60 percent it's a much more efficient solution but the qwerty typewriter held sway and right the qwerty was was designed for a problem that no longer existed these hard mechanical typewriters of the of the 19th century and so these are examples of where there's a clearly superior solution where we just ignore it we need to figure out how to do better particularly for these things that are literally existential for ourselves and for all the species who who comprise the systems that protect us some good news i want to end on good news collection collective action is typically framed as a social dilemma you've probably heard of the prisoner's dilemma and you know the the thing that makes a social dilemma a social dilemma is that there's an incentive to cheat right to defect and to end to cheat i actually think that most environmental problems are not social dilemmas they're they're coordination problems and coordination problems are actually much easier to solve and the thing that makes a coordination problem a coordination problem is that everybody does better if everybody cooperates it's just a matter of getting them to cooperate on the right thing right and so um if we can agree on a course of action if we can figure out the ways to induce behavior change and then and then induce this cooperation and the good news is if we look back on if we look sideways if we look backwards or sideways on the the diversity of human social structures and cultures and and traditions everything about human society is about inducing coordination right successful societies are coordinated on on their ideals on their economic principles on their social principles right and we know how to do this we don't know how to induce it on such a large scale we don't know how to induce behavior change uh we know some things and i'll just conclude by saying given that i i i said that you know the door school has this engineering focus this is science these are scientific questions we don't wear white lab coats we don't put on goggles to protect our eyes when we go out and we ask people questionnaires right but it is science we are using the scientific method we're not just sort of adding a little policy flourish to the big science that the engineers are doing and so we need to promote scientific methodology and and a culture of science within uh the the behavioral social sciences well thank you thank you so much for that jamie and [00:51:45] Speaker 1: i you know it's interesting because one of the one of uh the social scientists who's who's been working very hard on exactly the question that jamie raises which many of you change makers are dealing with in context uh is uh is nicole who i'm putting on the spot now um you're probably wondering why isn't nicole up there well i just found out she was going to be here what day before yesterday so i wasn't going to make you do that but if you get a chance to talk with nicole i what i find so refreshing about nicole's research and many of you would know it uh those of you who don't you're either living it or you ought to read it or both right because the somewhat atomistic approach that we typically take when we think of this collective action problem as a dilemma evaporates when we think of the context and it's that context where uh you call it what you want call it kapwa i call it community but uh it's in that context that people solve this problem all the time and uh nicole's research is you know is designed for that so thank you jamie uh stefan looking forward [00:53:02] Speaker 6: looking forward so i'll keep this uh short and uh picking up on uh your remarks um i want to talk about an opportunity uh that i think will be taken up in fact it is already being taken up uh but i think some of us may be underestimating the impact of this and this is something that comes out of the course that i teach here at the stanford business school on climate technologies um we have of course for years i've been talking about the energy transition and the energy transition as really being the main lever in societies and the world obtaining decarbonization results so one of the things that of course led to the first wave of decarbonization was the adoption of clean energy generation technologies primarily renewable energy which has really been responsible for most of the emission reductions that have been achieved the development that i want to sort of focus on here for just a few minutes is the cost of energy storage this is an area primarily or in in large part in the area of battery storage this is one of those areas where um i think we have seen a steady um innovation effort led by various countries and various companies um it has sort of confirmed to us the patterns that we have seen before say with renewable energy in the context of solar or wind energy um basically what people in the engineering literature refer to as right's law where basically with every doubling of installations costs are coming down by a certain percentage and we're now at this at the stage where uh let's say for lithium-ion batteries to give that example um with every doubling of uh those installations worldwide um the prices are falling uh roughly by 30 percent that's a huge learning rate that has been basically going on for 10 years now it putting us in a situation where we basically can do energy storage now at one-tenth of the cost that we could do it 10 years ago in my mind that's huge uh both in terms of reinforcing the use of renewable energy uh think of um integration of renewables onto grids think of transportation the whole adoption of electric vehicles think of data centers being built uh that have to sometimes rely on off-grid solutions that then requires naturally energy storage so i think this is a process that has sort of not been properly um appreciated and highlighted uh that's going to be very significant in terms of reducing emissions and here um sort of to on your earlier point i'm optimistic because it is not only useful for society and for the whole climate uh equation but it's also becoming increasingly economical it will be [00:56:27] Speaker 1: adopted okay well thank you very much so we have a few minutes that we'll take for your questions for uh for the panelists so uh go ahead and raise your hand and then i think we have a runner to come over so um so we have three hands here four with don's here comes the mic [00:57:01] Speaker 7: hi good morning thanks for the talks and the perspectives i am daniel i run i run silva silva is a supply chain player that uh supplies native species seeds and seedlings for like a large-scale restoration in brazil primarily in degraded pastures in the amazon the brazilian amazon so we supply native seeds and seedlings as i said and clients they and we uh face a a difficulty meaning we don't know whether the species selection that we should offer should be the species that are ready and prepared for two days or five years ago or 10 years ago climate conditions or should we select species that are going to thrive considering climate 10 20 30 years down the road since we're building new forests right so how would you go about that challenge uh and what that definite kind of data would you use to say here's the new normal it's here to stay droughtness is here to stay or five degrees above normal levels in paris state are here to stay for example how would you go about that species selection given the new normal that's a great [00:58:28] Speaker 1: question daniel so thank you for that so the way we'll do this what i want to avoid is there's often a norm in panels where every single person answers every single question and so instead jump on a question you want to answer and then the bar goes up after that so who wants to jump on that great question [00:58:50] Noah Diffenbaugh: i'll just say i'm certain the climate will be different 10 years from now than it was 10 years ago how to do the how to do the species selection is for another expert [00:59:04] Speaker 4: do it i i guess with the models that we have currently in terms of how plants are going to be tracking the space given the distribution or the modifications of the distribution of climate climatic envelopes i think one possibility is to look at the diverse the intraspecific diversity of species some species are adapted to multiplicity of environmental conditions so that's the diversity that jamie was talking about and also to see if you can see what the climatic envelope is going to be like you might want to start producing cities and supplements that are appropriate for those new climatic conditions so a combination of [00:59:44] Speaker 1: the two probably and daniel you and rodolfo should talk at some point for sure who's our next question [00:59:50] Speaker 5: can i just throw one more oh yeah all right all right yeah i think it's really important to to avoid trying to optimize honestly when you optimize you're adapting to the past right so you want to you want to actually build in the diversity um so that you have you have both intraspecific and interspecific diversity you want you want the things that have you know a norm of reaction that allows them to to you know to thrive in different environmental conditions but you also want to have a wider diversity than you might otherwise than the economist might tell you to do right of of the species that you put in because some of them are going to be underperformers in the present but they may end up being your over-performers in the [01:00:33] Speaker 1: church essentially you should optimize the variance you want as well as for sure so yeah [01:00:38] Speaker 7: i'm going to share with you group one thing we're bringing species from the savannah to the plant [01:00:44] Speaker 8: already so that's interesting it's interesting all right this is more along the fire resilience and i'm wondering if uh homeowners are getting better educated about what they could be planting and if native landscaping is more fire resilient if they knew about that and also if the insurance companies are financially incentivizing homeowners by maybe lowering rates that's a great question and also could you tell us your name yes for the group natalie pace and i am the co-creator and executive director of the earth gratitude [01:01:19] Speaker 3: project awesome thank you natalie i can i can jump in on this way and happy to have an offline conversation in more depth but but just to answer that quickly increasingly excuse me increasingly there is more education happening not just for homeowners but for insurance companies themselves as well as everybody else who's involved in the system two things i would say one is on the insurance side we see insurance more as a signal rather than a cause of of solutions actually being implemented so for example here in california insurance pricing is still catching up with how the risks are changing and so that's a really hard situation to then say we're going to majorly discount if you do these things that you should be doing and so that's a hard way to make a homeowner see oh this is in my financial interest instead you need to think about other ways to to incentivize that action both financially and otherwise and and a part of this too is back to what is seen as a beautiful home and and aesthetics that you know and other dimensions that go beyond the money um i would say that on the native native species and plants front you know part of that i think definitely is an important part of the solution because those species are generally going to in a place like california be fire adapted it still depends or it still matters where they are right if they're near the house or not like i was talking about earlier another thing that i haven't mentioned before but is a feature of our work is that we also do work with indigenous tribes and other peoples here in california and elsewhere who have cultural traditions that they were practicing for you know centuries before or for settlement and that was really halted in places like california there's an increasing understanding of actually the value of bringing more of that back onto the landscape in the areas not just to protect human communities but also ecological value and and and the species that live in those ecologies as well and so i think that's another place where the native species is an [01:03:10] Speaker 1: important part of it as well all right thank you mike now if you've seen your schedule you know we're supposed to stop i i am going to uh get us back on time later and i'll i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna use i'm gonna use some of the break time yes but i want to tell the panelists if if any of you have to leave because i want to respect the fact that you thought you would end two minutes ago you may but i'm going to go ahead and continue to take a few more questions for anyone who can stay for them so who do we have next in the queue secretary tony please oh yeah it's coming it's coming it's the logistics of this room is a little a little cumbersome but thank you so i'm tony loizaga i'm special envoy of the [01:04:03] Speaker 9: president of the philippines for disaster risk reduction i was previously secretary of environment so that's why he keeps calling me sec but tony please okay all right sorry i actually have two questions one for for professor rodolpho and professor james on whether or not there has been any work done on adaptation diversity and socio-ecological fragility that that intersection between what's happening ecologically and and what's happening socially and and your mention of zoonotic diseases i think is one of those things that actually bridge um both so so that's my first question and the second question for professor hicklstein is the role of of audit and advisory firms in in actually integrating carbon accounting properly into your your actual audit and financial statement for each corporation and whether that has been uh a barrier or or actually an enabler thanks [01:05:05] Speaker 5: go ahead i for your first question i guess the the thing that comes to mind immediately is is thinking about indigenous and and subsistence populations and the decline in harvests um of of traditional foods that they extract uh it can be devastating for communities absolutely um that's uh that's a really important interaction between the biodiversity change the climate and and the um uh and the socio-economic vulnerability of people who rely on you know on extracting wild foods um the climate comes in uh uh a former student of mine has been working and we continue to collaborate on uh inuit hunter-gatherers in in the arctic circle and you know the the climate effects on their subsistence practices are devastating um because they can't they can't pursue their sort of standard uh the historical adaptations for for uh extraction of resources from the environment so uh it's it there's i'm afraid there's a lot of bad news in that in that uh area [01:06:23] Speaker 4: given uh professor jones response i would not dwell on on that but i would like to take this opportunity to mention another dimension of the components of local people and biodiversity the sort of the bidirectional interaction there and this is to indicate a significant problem that we have in sustainability today which is not only the biological the extinction of biological systems biological extinction but but also cultural extinction and those two things are so uh critically intertwined that if you go to communities where because of anthropogenic impact some species are not lost that knowledge that cosmovision that is used to have is disappearing as well the best way in which people have been analyzing this is in the loss of languages because the language is not is just not for you to be able to say like in spanish una cerveza por favor that's not that's not that's not a language right but it's a vision and really engagement with with nature and so on so forth so we have really a dual problem of extinction biological and cultural and that's a very important challenge for society today for humanity today [01:07:31] Speaker 6: okay and then i guess part two goes to you stefan um i think a quick way to answer your question is when nowadays um company any company in the world issues a financial report typically auditors provide what they call reasonable assurance that the reports have been prepared in accordance with certain accounting standards um not so in the today in today's environment not so in the domain of carbon reports there uh the auditors typically only issue what they call limited assurance basically saying we don't quite know we didn't find any obvious this frequently takes the form of a double negative we did not find any obvious errors in in all of this uh and that's sort of one of the areas that uh our initiative wants to do better with um if we have more of a structure and codified carbon accounting norms then auditors ought to be able to provide on the books that the company um issues and reports at the end of the day really such a thing as reasonable assurance the way they do in the financial domain but that hasn't happened yet that's sort of one of the companies that are contributing to our initiative have made this very much sort of a priority to get to that level of reliability of the reporting okay thank you very much don mullen [01:09:00] Speaker 10: thank you bill uh don mullen i'm from ireland and uh a founder of 10 000 days hope initiatives uh jamie thanks for um raising the issue of deviance because i want to be a bit of a deviant at the moment and uh and it's about um one of the most powerful political voices in the world today of course and i'm sure you know this uh is telling us that climate change is a chinese hoax and drill baby drill particularly in the arctic irrespective of the rights of the indigenous peoples and two years ago i had the opportunity of visiting the beautiful muir woods here in near san francisco and there was a wonderful display on climate change and biodiversity and how it impacted the um the the ancient redwoods last year i went back and on instruction of the federal government uh the park services had removed that uh actual um display um i'm also conscious of the fact that 20 years ago i looked to silicon valley thinking that this was potentially the savior of the world and yet there has been a huge lurch to the right and i don't know how that's happened but as an individual i mean i'm beginning to feel more and more that uh we're losing the battle and i want to kind of try and maintain hope because my initiative are called 10 000 days hope initiatives so how do we kind of collectively work to kind of try and maybe even bring something about uh a realignment of silicon valley to what matters in the world today bill can we take [01:10:54] Speaker 6: another hour [01:10:58] Speaker 1: i'll jump on that one um so some work uh shobana raise your hand please so shobana who uh is just uh past her orals and will be finishing her dissertation soon uh working with me and on on a project that addresses uh don's question descriptively now there are other things you'd have to do and what do you do with this knowledge but there is some hope in it and that's why i want to talk about descriptively so uh we along with uh another of my advisees went back and looked at uh sentiment towards sustainability broadly defined from 1960 to the present in english language uh news newspapers so i didn't do it in other languages we just did it in the english language uh although it was worldwide and it's very and basically what we're looking at is the hype cycle and so what you see our sentiments going up and down over time the all-time low for sustainability broadly defined so it's not just that word uh was in 1980 during the reagan administration a time you and i would remember um we're almost at that point now with the hype cycle very interestingly uh the uh the slope of the hype cycle is pretty much the same between left-leaning and right-leaning periodicals just one above the other so you you see the same hype cycle you just see the right more skeptical uh than the left although that was not true always if you go back to when nixon signed uh the clean air act and so forth it was it was less polarized and we know about the changes in polarization separately though and this is where chauvin has skills uh with large language models uh have shown themselves and it's this is a one of the chapter i'm now i'm self-conscious because i'm i'm relaying to you a chapter from chauvin's dissertation so i may get this wrong in which case you can fail me on this but we're looking at a change with respect to the construals that people use to make sense of sustainability so think of construals as the broader sort of meta perspective through which we make sense of things the logics of how we understand the world some people construe sustainability to be a technical issue not only in engineering but also in biology or physics others construe techno sustainability to be a behavioral issue when we talk about uh incentivizing firms or collective action problems uh still others construe sustainability to be a moral issue we talk about justice for example and what's interesting is if you look at that the commentaries on the ipcc reports which is the corpus that shoba and i are uh are analyzing it's also in english although it's often hard to understand but uh but nonetheless if you look at those construals they are becoming more moral over time am i right on that okay okay uh and they are becoming more integratively complex so for the folks in the room familiar with cognitive and social psychology the idea that if you understand multiple perspectives simultaneously you're more integratively complex and integratively complex decision making is much better informed decision making and so what i'm getting at here don is it's important for us to understand the reality of the hype cycle but to stay the course and i know there's nobody on earth who stays the course more consistently than don mullen so sometimes i i try to give that message to folks here at stanford when they rename initiatives every now and then if you notice the name of this initiative isn't changing um somebody once two months ago somebody asked me about the name of my department which is environmental social sciences my department my other job in the uh in the uh in the door school and i said i was asked you know are you going to be thinking about somehow changing the way you refer to the department i say okay so they've taken all of our funding away why would i rename the department now i mean we're going to own it right because that's the that's the um and i'm and i'm conscious that i'm saying this in a room full of change makers who are absolutely uh being thrown about by the hype cycle right now but you you gotta keep in mind that there's that deeper current and if we react to the froth on the surface of the sea of life we miss the fact that that deep deeper current is going in the right direction so that's my response to you don i think we got a couple we've got yeah where's our next question oh i see we got more people want to talk you guys want okay fine fine go ahead [01:16:33] Speaker 6: okay from my perspective the line staying the course is absolutely crucial here and let's uh keep in mind the rest of the world is staying the course uh and even the united states large uh uh individual states and companies and individuals are staying the course i uh of course the the the empty blather about climate change being a chinese hoax doesn't help uh and there are certain new impediments in the decarbonization pathway of the united states but um if you look at this sort of in the grander scheme of what's happening in the world i think it doesn't make all that much of a difference [01:17:15] Speaker 1: okay and this will be the last word jamie and then we're going to have to bring it to a so we know [01:17:19] Speaker 5: empirically that that the adoption of innovations follows an s-shaped curve right this is this is like one of the laws of of the social sciences and it's as good as any physical law um and one of the things about when you have a heterogeneous group of of adoption curves that are shaped like that you end up with what's called a bistable uh equilibrium and and this is really nerdy but this makes me feel better at night when i think about how awful the world seems to be right now uh there is a the bistable equilibrium means that there's a good outcome and there's a bad outcome and these are stable and you can end up in those stable states there's also an unstable state in the middle i believe with with some evidence behind it that we're actually stuck in this unstable state and that by staying the course by letting some of the feedback mechanisms like the the pr the falling prices like the pressure to to to keep democratic institutions alive will push from the unstable one to our good equilibrium i think that the good equilibrium is in our future if we can manage to get there yeah and that's a nerdy mathematical way of of saying that i have i i have a base a basis for my hope i love it thank you very much let's thank [01:18:36] Speaker 1: our panelists thank you very much thank you very much so we're going to take a bio break so here's here's what we're going to do now so the the two days are scripted in a way where we allow for a lot of unscripted interaction and so the only thing we're going to try to be real clear on is when we begin and end things it's the coordination problem so we're going to have a bio break now when the big hand is on the nine okay so that's in 10 minutes everybody has to be at their tables