LIVE: Jeff Bezos, Janet Yellen and Christine Lagarde speak at business summit in Rome
TRANSCRIPTION OF JEFF BEZOS SPEECH [which he read in it's entirety from a script]
It's a pleasure to talk about climate. The recent IPC assessment concludes that things are worse than we thought and we thought they were pretty bad..
The task ahead this coming decade is huge. We need major transitions in the way we power our economies, build our cities, grow our food, manufacture our products, and transport our goods. Other than that, this is going to be really easy.
I was in New York last week for Climate Week …I was struck by just how much innovation is occurring and how leaders are stepping up. But it also reminded me just how much we need to do.
We need to replace the internal combustion engine completely. We need to develop the hydrogen economy. We need to de-carbonize the hard-to-obey sectors like steel, cement, shipping, aviation. We going to have to envision a completely different economy.
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I’d like to make one final point on nature. We simply cannot address climate change without reversing the loss of nature and vice versa. Nature provide the oxygen we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, it’s our life support system and it’s fragile.
I was reminded of this in July when I went into space. I heard that seeing the earth from space changes one's view of the world, but I was not prepared by how much. Living down here, the world and the atmosphere seem vast and stable. But, looking back here from the atmosphere seems thin and the world so finite.
When people hanker for the good ole days and glamorize the past, they are almost always wrong. By most metrics, life is much better than it was in the past. Global poverty rates are lower, infant mortality and life expectancies are better and education rates are much higher. But, there is a notable exception, the natural world is not better today than it was 500 years ago when we enjoyed unspoiled forests, clean rivers and pristine air of the preindustrial age. We can and we must reverse this anomaly.
That’s why last month, a group of nine philanthropies, including the Bezos Earth Fund, announced they were committing $5 billion to the conservation of nature. The point isn’t only to raise money for conservation, but to ensure that it’s effective. Many top-down programs in the past on conservation haven’t worked. We’ll support a new generation of programs led by local communities that focus on the livelihoods and incentives and offer a better path to prosperity. We will choose regions and countries where needs and opportunities are great, where leadership is strong and where there’s a strong commitment to the local communities and indigenous peoples at the center of the conservation programs.
Our overall objective is to support the implementation of the 30 by 30 commitment, the goal of protecting 30% of sea and land by 2030. It already has the support of more than 70 countries.
I hope we will see all G-20 leaders join the 30 by 30 commitment in the long term. I have a lot of optimism on this…
Thank you.
https://youtu.be/zKEGhETa_1M