I want to talk to you about America's fifth child, because one in five children is poor and if they're black and Latino, and I'll give you, they're even poorer. And half of those children almost are living in extreme poverty. That's unworthy of us, and it's going to be our undoing. The greatest threat to America's national security, military security, and spiritual security is not coming from any enemy without, it's coming from our failure to invest in each of our children. Just imagine God visiting our very wealthy family, the largest economy in the world. Blessed with five children, four of them have enough to eat and comfortable warm rooms in which to sleep, one doesn't. She's often hungry and cold, and on some nights she has to sleep on the streets or on a shelter, and even taken away from her neglectful family and placed in foster care our group homes with strangers. Imagine this rich family, giving four of its children nourishing meals three times a day, snacks to fuel boundless energy, but sending the fifth child from the table into school hungry. With only one or two meals and never the dessert that other children enjoy.  Imagine this family sending four of their children to good stimulating schools, preschools and making sure they have music and swimming lessons after school, but sending the fifth child to unsafe child care with untrained caregivers responsible for too many children or leaving that fifth child occasionally with an accommodating relative or neighbor or older sibling or even alone. Imagine four of the children living in homes with books and families able to read to most of their children every night, but leaving the other fifth child unread to untalked and unsung and unhugged or propped before a television screen or a video game that feeds him violence and sex and racially and gender charged messages, intellectual pablum interrupted only by ceaseless ads for material things beyond the child's grasp. Imagine this family sending some of its children to high quality schools and safe neighborhoods with enough books and computers and laboratories and science equipment and well prepared teachers and sending the fifth child to a crumbling school building with peeling ceilings and leaks and lead in the paint and asbestos and old old books and not enough of them. And teachers untrained in the subjects they teach and with low expectations that all children can learn, especially the fifth child. And imagine most of the family's children being excited about learning and looking forward to finishing high school, going to college and getting a job. And the fifth child falling further and further behind grade level, not being able to read, wanting to drop out of school and being suspended and expelled at younger and younger ages. Because no one has taught him to read and compute or diagnose his attention deficit disorder or treated his health and mental health problems and help him keep up with his peers. The challenge for us as educators in this era is a more complex challenge than it has been in the past. Because in addition to all of the issues that are raised by the neglect of children and the growing poverty gap and income gap in this country, we're also being asked to teach young people in ways that were particularly reserved for a few in the past. The new common core state standards, the next generation science standards. Look for deeper learning for children to be able to apply their learning in more critical problem solving oriented ways. The kind of education that used to be reserved for the kids who are allocated to the gifted program or the advanced placement or honors courses is now being asked for and expected for virtually all kids. And so it's a form of deeper learning that we need to be able to cultivate. And I want to start with a hopeful message that our students are capable of deeper learning when they are well taught. And I'll give you an example of how that can unfold. I am a former English teacher myself, so I like to collect examples from the English teachers classrooms of the kind of teaching and learning that many of us worry about. So I'm going to give you some examples of how children can illustrate for us the path to deeper learning in the teaching of the concept of metaphor. And initially, of course, we know when students encounter something for the first time, their attempts are more shallow. They are not necessarily fully understanding deeply what the concept means. And here's an example of the beginning of the process. He was as tall as a six foot three inch tree. Okay, there's the word as in there, but this is not yet an example of deeper learning. But here with a little bit of work, we see a pace forward. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who also had never met. There's a glimmer that the concept is being understood. But with a little more work, a little more teaching, you can see progress being made. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs. But don't give up. There is hope. There is the possibility of deeper learning and we can see it here. He fell for her, like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River. That's a New York kid, gotta be. So deeper learning is possible and we can see how it unfolds.  Only one that had been left out so long and had rested shut. And this is one of my personal favorites. He was as lame as a duck, not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a real duck that was actually lame. So you know who this kid is, the one that doesn't want you to write cliche in the margins, right? She grew on him another favorite, like she was a colony of E. Coli and he was room temperature Canadian boots. I think that's an example of deeper learning. That is, the plan was simple like my brother-in-law, Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work. A final example where you add a touch of irony to the concept of metaphor. Her vocabulary was as bad as like whatever. So our kids are capable of deeper learning. We are capable of helping them learn deeply. But there is a lot of work that needs to be done to help us get to the place where that will be routine and where the conditions for that kind of work will be in every school and every classroom. Much of the conversation around education these days is about achievement scores and rankings and among the things that we hear about a lot are the international assessments, the program for international student assessment or PISA. And the OECD countries participate in this survey of student learning. It is a little different than the test that we often give in the United States because two thirds of the items are open-ended requiring students to write a response that applies their knowledge to a new situation rather than bubbles in one answer out of five on a multiple choice test. And what I've highlighted here are the rankings from 2012, the countries that are in purple print are the ones that we're used to seeing at the top of these rankings, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Finland, Canada. The ones in red were surprises in the last round of PISA, Ireland, Poland, Estonia, and Vietnam. Also Germany had been doing much less well and regained prominence in the list. You can see that the US ranks much lower at 21st in reading, 32nd in math, 23rd in science. And often these results are put forward as evidence that the US system is failing, which I think is not the right inference to be drawing from the data. But it's also interesting to see what is happening in the countries that have over 30 years really improve the quality and equity of their outcomes. And I'm gonna talk about both of those things. One of the inferences, however, that I do draw from PISA is that on average, over the 12 years or 15 years almost that we have been implementing No Child Left Behind, we've seen no improvement in our average scores on this international assessment. So the theory of reform behind No Child Left Behind, which is simply to test and apply sanctions to the failure to meet expected targets on the test, has not proved to be enough to make a major difference overall in student achievement. In every one of the areas tested by PISA, math, science, and reading, we're a little further behind in 2012 than we were in the year 2000. However, if you look at how the US does by poverty rates of schools, and this is the point that I'm gonna just jump from, Marianne's talk and piggyback upon, in schools where less than 10% of the kids live in poverty, we ranked number one in the world in reading. In schools where as many as 25% of kids live in poverty, we ranked number three in the world in reading. Even in schools where as many as 50% of kids live in poverty, we are way above the international average. So our teachers are doing some things very, very well because in the high achieving countries, all of the schools have fewer than 10% of kids in poverty because they don't allow children to live in poverty. And so we're being compared in this country against societies that are making the investments in children that are not being made here. I've really enjoyed actually the past two conferences that I've been to, there's been student panels, which as a board member is really important. So pay attention, Superintendent Evans. I wanna, I've actually quote, I've tweeted Austin today, you said something that was really important for me is that students excel when they have choice. And I have a comment and then I do have a question for you all. I know one thing that we're doing and I'm really talking to my superintendent on the side here because I really want a student voice at the board level. I want someone to make sure that we're on point as adults making decisions about your education but you having that voice. And so hearing that for me just continues to reiterate that and I will continue to take that back and say, how dare we make policy and decisions about the future of education without having students at the table? That's my comment. My question is, your junior seniors and sophomore in college, if you could go back to your freshman and junior year, what would you do differently and how would you do it? I will focus less on the social aspect because I thought a lot or paid a lot of attention to what my peers thought about me and didn't really focus on my teachers to the extent that I should have and also on the same lines of Austin, coming from eighth grade. Like I always had a problem back then like asking for help. I was afraid to tell my teachers like, yo, I'm struggling in math, can you help me? So just stepping up, I would have stepped up a little bit more academically and getting, like how we've been talking about getting you guys to know us on a personal level. I also feel like it's important for us to know you guys on a personal level. So you know I may be able to try to do that as well to my freshman year. That's a great point. The importance of teachers being known to their students as well as teachers knowing their students.


Whenever you are stuck on a project, move your body and change your location and see if that gets you unstuck. Simple as that. When you are working on something and you can't seem to figure a way through, you keep spinning your wheels, maybe you're procrastinating, you're surfing Facebook or doing other unproductive activities, I really encourage you to move away from wherever you are. So you have to move your body away from wherever you are and find whether that gets you unstuck. Because when we're stuck on something, it's because we're stuck in a mental loop, okay? And that means we need to get out, we need to change the context of our mind in order to get unstuck regarding that project. So moving your location, moving your body away, getting up from the computer and walking down the hallway is a way to get unstuck. And you may find yourself having a new idea on how to move forward in that project as a result. Or you might find some new energy, some new courage, some new joy in doing that project or a new perspective. Literally by changing yourself in terms of your body and your location, you oftentimes change your perspective. Let me give you a couple other ideas, okay? So first of all, like I said, moving your body away, I do this a lot when I'm trying to get a fresh idea, a fresh perspective. Another idea is to go outside, just step outside your home or your office and take some deep breaths. First start with some slow deep breaths, again, do this outside if you can, okay? Then after some slow deep breaths, take some fast deep breaths, okay? So by doing that, you kind of reinvigorate yourself. You will probably give yourself a new perspective when you come back and continue working on that project. Another idea is to set a timer for five minutes and write nonstop. And you can use, there's an online free timer called Egg Timer. The link is e.ggtimer.com. And once you go there, you can type in five minutes or you can just simply go to e.ggtimer.com slash five minutes and it'll just start a five minute timer for you.  So if you write nonstop for five minutes, I promise you, it'll give you a different perspective and you'll probably be unstuck as a result. Now, if that doesn't work, all right, then you may need a different method of brainstorming, okay? So if you've been trying to get unstuck by just writing something, then maybe you need to take out a piece of paper and draw out a solution to the problem. Or you need to create a mind map. There's a lot of free mind mapping software out there. My favorite one at the moment is MindMup, M-I-N-D-M-U-P, mindmup.com and start mind mapping the situation. For other people, what helps is to light a candle. So move your body, go to the kitchen or go to where you can find a candle or find some incense, okay? Light it and see if that helps. Other people like using an essential oil or some kind of aromatherapy to help get them out of their mental loop or maybe you just need a nap. Sometimes you're stuck because you are simply tired, mentally tired or physically tired. You may need to go take a 15 minute nap. Even if you don't fall asleep, you're just laying down for 15 minutes relaxing, knowing that you are getting some rest or maybe you need to eat something.  So what you should not do when you're in a mental loop is doing any kind of addictive activity. So Facebook, playing games on your phone or surfing the web, looking at news or watching a TV show. Those things can be addicting and it can make you feel worse afterwards. So just be aware of that and don't do that and do one of the other things I've said earlier. Oh, one more thing is music. Music can help. Maybe you want to do a dance. Turn on some, if you can, if you work by yourself in a place where you can do this. Put on some of your favorite music and for five minutes do some dancing and that will almost always get you unstuck from a mental loop and you'll come back and have a fresh perspective. I'll give you one more example is the creator of the famous television series MacGyver. Remember MacGyver? MacGyver was a very creative person. He was able to solve problems in all kinds of creative ways. Well, the person who thought of all these ideas, the creator behind MacGyver, you know how he came out with many of his ideas? He would ask himself the question that, you know, how do I, how would MacGyver solve this problem in a situation? And you know what he would go do? He would go home from his office. So literally physically move his body and he would take a shower. So this is for a particular challenging problem. He would go and take a shower. After taking a shower, he would come back and almost always he would write the question again on the piece of paper or something. And he would almost always have a fresh perspective and usually a great answer to what the challenge is by going and taking a shower. OK, nowadays what I hear actually I should say an alternative that he decided that he discovered showering is for bigger problems, a small for smaller challenges. What he'll do is he'll again, he'll write down the question or the problem and then he'll play with a game like a not a not an online game, which can be addictive, but like a physical, some kind of physical. Actually it was building some kind of model like a model airplane or a model playing with some something with his hands, some kind of fun thing with his hands. And after doing that, he would come back to the challenge or the issue and almost certainly he would have a new idea that would get him unstuck. So see, so you may find that to be helpful to try as well. But the idea again is to get unstuck, move your body and get out of that mental loop. So I hope this is helpful. If you have other, if you have an example that has helped you to get unstuck, I welcome you to comment below or if you have any other ideas that you might want to share with others, feel free to comment below as well.


This discussion beyond COP 27 leaders on the road ahead. My name is Antonia Gavel, head of climate change with the World Economic Forum. I will start, of course, by noting that COP 27 is not over yet. Negotiators are still gathered in Egypt working to push forward strong outcomes. As a brief recap for our viewers, COP 27 was dubbed by the Egypt presidency as the COP of implementation. The major objective, of course, was to see progress on implementing the many commitments made in Glasgow last year at COP 26. But this is also the Africa COP, providing an important opportunity to table issues critical to the continent and many developing nations. A few priorities on the agenda going into Egypt included one, mitigation and adaptation finance. Pacific countries have still not delivered on the hundred billion US dollars committed in Paris to help developing countries decarbonize and adapt. The second is loss and damage. Now climate change is here and now with devastating impacts being felt around the world, particularly in the most vulnerable nations who don't have the resources to respond. And of course food, energy and water security. The world is currently in the midst of an energy, food and water crisis all compounded by climate change. It's hard to currently express optimism about where we currently stand. Many, including myself, are leaving Egypt with continued frustration at the slow pace of progress. There were murmurs in the halls that political leaders were on the edge of giving up on the 1.5 degree target rather than driving negotiations towards it. So on one hand this lack of political progress in Egypt can leave us feeling defeated. We did however see some positive movements alongside. And I would say a reinforced conviction that in all of society response will be critical to unlocking progress. Let me share seven quick examples of where we saw some positive momentum. Stay with me. These are all really important. So first the scientist Johann Rockstrom put it so clearly 1.5 degrees is not a political goal. It's not a compromise. It is a physically based boundary. This position was shared and communicated by thousands of leaders over the weekend urging parties to double down on efforts. Second coming out of the G20 a new just energy transition partnership was launched in Indonesia to help finance the energy transition. There was also word of positive dialogue bringing together back the China and US conversation on tackling climate change. Third African nations announced a carbon market partnership and are not waiting to embrace the opportunity of a clean economic transformation. Again, Sharma shake adaptation dialogues were announced seeking to enhance resilience for four billion people living in the most climate vulnerable communities by 2030. Another example our own first movers coalition in partnership with Secretary Kerry of the US State Department announced his expansion to 65 companies now sending a 12 billion dollar market signal to pull forward critical low carbon technologies of the future. And a further market signal 26 countries have now also signed a global MOU committing that 100% of new truck and bus sales will be zero missions by 2040. And last but not least major agricultural trading and processing companies launched the agriculture sector roadmap. This will move the industry towards science based transparent and traceable actions to avert and reverse deforestation. These are just a few examples there are many more and it's by no means sufficient. So what we now need to focus on is how we continue to drive collective action to close that gap between ambition and action. The upside of this economic and social transformation is such an important opportunity for innovation, entrepreneurship and collaboration if we fully embrace it. So in this discussion today I am joined by a brilliant cast of leaders who are on the ground in Egypt are following discussions closely. Let me briefly introduce them. We have Janet Ranganathan, a managing director and senior vice president with the World Resources Institute, Jesper Broden, CEO of INCA Group and co-chair of our CEO Climate Leaders Alliance, James Mupé, the economic advisor to the president of Namibia, Anisha, managing director and CEO of Mahindra Group and of course we also have Pato Kelesitze, a global shaper from our Gabaron hub who also has launched important initiatives to drive climate action. So we'll discuss their perspectives, experiences and importantly I think vision for the way forward. So let me start with you, Janet. It would be great to kind of hear your perspectives. WRI has been closely tracking the negotiations for many years now both looking at what needs to happen, driving policy change. Would love to kind of hear your experience and take on where you see things standing now. So Janet, over to you. Yeah, great. And thanks for having me on here. And yes, I'm going to focus on the nuts and bolts of the negotiations, not maybe as exciting as some of the other things you're going to hear from the panelists, but bear with me. And I actually wrote out some careful notes last night about what I was going to say. I woke up early this morning and there had been a flurry of activity. So I've got, I've got red pen all over my notes, but anyway, bear with me. So I'm going to frame my comments around what WRI, the World Resources Institute, saw as the five critical tasks that negotiators needed to complete in SHARM. So bear in mind that all of this is still in flux, there's another 30 hours of crunch time in SHARM, but this is where we are right now. So the first one you already alluded to, that's about creating a financing mechanism for loss and damage. So loss and damage refers to when impacts of climate change are so severe that actually adaptation is just not feasible. So it was probably the issue of the genre for the whole conference. It was rightfully seen as an issue that had to be resolved for climate justice, solidarity, and just simply building trust. So there has been progress on that. I mean, the first thing I should say is that the G77 in China, they're united around this. And I think thanks to that, it actually got for the first time on the official agenda. We've never seen that before. So that in itself was progress. Of course, there's still major fault lines and what that's going to look like, who's going to provide the money, who's going to be eligible to receive it. But we saw some concrete options put into the cover decision, which is the overall draft note that will summarize the conference. So it's still draft. There's going to be another version. But three concrete options appeared. First one is that they actually agree to create a facility here in China. The second option was we actually agree to push it down the road to the next COP in UAE and create a facility there. And then there was a third option around, well, we just agree on the financing mechanism. This third option was a little bit more nebulous, but also reflects the fracture that some countries really want to see a dedicated single facility that replaced other mechanisms. Well, other countries would like to see a sort of what we call a mosaic of approaches that combine sources of funding from different places and makes use of some of the existing mechanisms. So still it's good progress. Let's see what happens in the final cover decision. The second must have task was to scale up support for adaptation. So a little bit if beyond this one. In Glasgow, what had happened there was that the developed countries had committed to double their adaptation finance from 2019 levels by 2024. In other words, double it from 20 to 40 billion. And I should say that that's still a drop in the bucket for what's actually really needed. Unfortunately, there was no progress on creating transparency and more detail around that doubling committee. Despite the best efforts of the group of African negotiators to get it on the official agenda, it was dumb. So there was no further discussions on that. There was some rays of hope, though. About 170 million was put forward to go into the adaptation fund. So that was good news. And there was some progress around this sort of long discussed adaptation goal and how that might be framed. So we're going to definitely see next year a push for more transparency and accountability on that.  So again, going back to Glasgow, there was a request for all countries to revisit their targets in the light of the 1.5 degrees target and strive to create more ambition. So we saw several major emitting countries step forward. We revised these nationally determined contributions to so-called NDCs. That included Australia, Mexico, Indonesia, and India. So that was good news. But there's still a big gap between promises and what's actually needed. There was also work on this so-called mitigation work program. So we're going to wait to see what's going to come out of that. Is it going to be sort of this is basically informing ambition for the next decade and how concrete is that going to be? So that was the third one. The fourth one was not surprising here about delivering the 100 billion and underscore the and moving forward on discussions around how to create a new finance and committing commitment that goes beyond that 100 billion. So I think it's quite fortunate that just before the COP, Germany, the UK and Canada prepared and released a report on the status of the 100 billion and actually transparently put the action notes in there. So that kind of diffused that issue because it already been dealt with. So then the focus was on creating this new collective quantitative goal. And I think, again, there has been some progress there. We've still got to wait to see. And then finally, we wanted to see some progress on the treasure trove of commitments, voluntary commitments that we'd seen at Glasgow. And I think organizations like the Forum and the World Resources Institute, we certainly convened a lot of those groups together to see where there was progress. Even these concludes things like the global methane pledge, which by the way now has 150 signed up things, but also net zero emissions vehicles. The forest deforestation commitment. So on the financing, let me just one quote that I thought kind of captured. It was from the African Development Bank Chief. He said, you know, there's being like mega watts, mega watts of talk about financing and sort of near net zero mobilization of funds. So I think we've got to watch that space definitely as we go into the next COP. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you, Janet, for that. I think I kind of captured loss and damage, adaptation, mitigation, finance and actual commitment implementation to sort of synthesize your five. We'll come back to you also on how you see us sort of moving forward in those areas of action as well. Now, Jesper, if I can turn to you, of course, you were very actively on the ground in Egypt during the first week. And I think in particular around this challenge of keeping 1.5, the focus of commitments in the negotiations, as well as working with business leaders to really drive their own actions in addition to supporting a message that actually governments should be confident to set strong policy as part of our climate leaders. Maybe can you just talk to us about your experience, what you saw, what you drove and some of your thinking on how we move forward from here? Well, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity and collaboration, Antonio. And big thanks to the forum also for bringing us together. And I have to say a big thanks to Janet and WRI, this amazing organization who's so deep into expertise and at the same time on the ground, helping to both count, change and scale things. So big thanks for the job that you're doing. And I would say from my perspective, building on what you started with, Antonio, it's a strange sense of the glass being both very, very half empty and very, very half full. So we are not on track. The world is not on track. And there is a lot of, I think, fear, rising fear, rising concerns. And even as you said, we hear low voices, even speaking of giving up on the commitments that now Johan has helped us understand this is not a political target, but an absolute limit for the planet. On the other hand, I've never seen so much activity and I'm filled with optimism actually when I when I witnessed there, the collaboration between, in particular, I would say NGOs, companies, corporate leaders and the youth movement has been very active at the ground. And what I think is worth sharing with everybody out there, these discussions have not been about whether there is an issue with climate change or what we think about it. But they've been centered around solutions and actions in each and every conversation that I've been part of. There's been an immense amount of great examples, things that have been done, things that are in the making and things, of course, that we haven't yet cracked, but together we'll do. And I want to call out also the youth leaders who started on the streets with angry, rightfully so voices on actually participating with their competence in an incredibly constructive way in helping us moving the agenda. Now, I think also maybe especially to call out to all the companies here are not waiting for a legislation or waiting for the pledges, but actually have started by their own ethical and moral motivation and by the motivation and understanding that sustainability and climate is not about making sacrifices. It might be about making upfront investments and taking some leaps of faith, but it's really about being a winner in the economy where it's simply the only way to be cost smart is to be resource smart and climate smart. And I think the list of corporate leaders and companies who understand both the moral and the economic aspect of this is getting longer and longer and asses the list of actions. Now, a big applaud, I would say, to hard to debate sectors. I think I represent the IKEA and the retail sector. And we have a huge scope three change that we are going through with our companies. We see cement. We see car industry. We see a lot of brave leaders taking great steps of transformation. And we see some sectors that still is being called out that can do much more like representatives of fossil fuel industries. To that note, I was glad to hear that now it's not only coal, but it's also fossil fuel from G20 that is called out where we need, of course, a deep transformation for all of us to actually reach the one point five level. The letter you referred to, Antonio, just to say that I think it's quite unique because during COP, not after, but during COP, we rallied hundreds of organizations and leaders. And I think it's the first time I know about the letter signed by youth leaders, NGOs and company leaders to say it's one point five. It's hard. It's difficult. We don't have all the answers. But it's one point five and we need to double our efforts to get that point. And then to finalize, also to say, I think one of the things that sticks with me is that this will require, continue to require radical collaboration and unity, unity, both for reasons of solidarity, but also unity, because it's the only way we're going to crack this together. And as such, I would like to just continue to engage, to encourage the negotiators to be bold and brave. And do the job now, the last remaining days to take important decisions for the world. And I would like to reach out to all fellow company leaders also to continue the pursuit to take actions in advance of some of the decisions that needs to happen. And I'm sure that together we will be able to make and reach the goal that we need. Thank you. Thank you, Jesper. I think your optimism and your inspiration and commitment certainly fills us with kind of the continued energy that we need to drive this transition forward. Now, James, I've had great discussions with you about some of the exciting activities that you've been driving out of Namibia as the special advisor to the president. Now, this is, of course, an African cop, as I said at the beginning. There is a central focus, as was mentioned, on on issues of adaptation, finance, loss and damage, as well as I would say what you look at as the positive transformation opportunity. So what's your sort of sentiments coming out of the discussions today, but also how are you looking forward into the future? Yeah, I mean, Namibia has been really, really interested in a couple of issues at COP. Look, I think we came fairly well prepared. So we ended up mobilizing about sixty three million dollars in grant funding to get some various projects underway in Namibia, that in one way or another would would help us with mobilizing concessionary financing. And then we also mobilized about five hundred million euros, sort of a framework loan, and that would be available to us in very concessionary terms as well. So all in all, if we look at the 12 months, we've mobilized about six percent of GDP in concessionary climate financing to help Namibia become, yes, a potential exporter of molecules, but also to become energy secure as well. And then, of course, contribute to regional energy security. Now, one of the things that we've really tried to focus on from a financing perspective as an emerging market nation was to be fairly coordinated in a what we were asking for, but also in creating tools that would make it very easy to collect concessionary financing and climate financing from around the world. So we sort of saw eight and a half billion that was pledged to South Africa a year or so ago. You know, it was fairly sort of scattered around and it was very hard to access. So we came and announced a blended financing infrastructure fund that we were going to be structuring as a government in partnership with climate fund managers from the Netherlands. And we gave quite a bit of details of the three different funds within the overarching fund. So there would be a development fund, a construction fund and an operation fund. And then very strategically with the Dutch government, we seeded the development fund in that particular fund that we're calling SDG Namibia One. So Sustainable Development Goals Namibia One. We seeded that with 40 million dollars grant. Now, what that does is it really, really sort of gives you a very robust platform to go fundraising with. And from there, we've started approaching multilateral development by international finance institutions and other countries as well. And so it's a story we would love to share with other emerging market nations and other African nations to say, look, COP 27, of course, the negotiations are super important. And so our team are involved in that. But it's also a platform sometimes to showcase innovative ways you can access the money and then to use that as a as a platform to then launch your fundraising campaign. I think one particular item. I mean, everything that Janet said was absolutely true. I've been getting a lot of feedback from our negotiators, but one that we are particularly interested in, for example, is actually Article Six. And so that's where we're really going to be looking to see whether we can't trade our carbon credits with other nations that are not necessarily meeting their NDCs. And in particular, two items that love to shed some light on or is Article Six point two. And that essentially sets out the guidelines for trading of internationally transferred mitigation outcomes, essentially between two countries, right? And the negotiating countries are still working on that text and trying to get an authorization and authorization and design of their view process. And then six point four was important for us as well, because that establishes a framework for a multilateral carbon credit market that would be overseen by a supervisory body. Now, those two are particularly important for Namibia, because if indeed we do manage to get these massive green hydrogen projects going and we can start producing a lot of green electricity, it's very possible that we start going beyond our own nationally determined contributions in terms of our ability to to a baked carbon, right, to a into a beta emissions. And so it would be a fantastic financing opportunity for us if you can actually trade those carbon credits with, say, a Switzerland and raise that additional money to to bolster your adaptation and mitigation efforts as well. And so for me, that was one in particular that I really wanted to highlight for countries with a very small emissions profile, but a really, really large renewable energy opportunity. The molecules and the electrons are not just your only potential sources of financing. I think those carbon credits are an interesting one. And we're keeping a keen eye on article six and how it develops as well. Great. Thanks, James. And I mentioned at the beginning the launch of the carbon markets partnership in Africa, I suppose sort of that's part of the the movement that you're describing. You know, anything that you want to connect to that in the context of how you see that type of collaboration bringing forward some of the ideas that you mentioned. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, the Africans coming together to try and really articulate for the establishment of a carbon credit market is is a fantastic example of that in my sort of deliberations. I've been talking a lot about even this African green hydrogen alliance, right? A whole bunch of countries coming together and beginning to collaborate on, for example, standards and certifications of the products that they will produce. And I was saying that Namibia, of course, is collaborating a lot with the EU. We signed an MOU with the EU on critical raw materials and hydrogen. But around the EU, they're collaborating on, say, for example, the Delegated Act, right? And they're agreeing amongst themselves what will be the various parameters that, you know, specific molecules would need to meet in order to meet the specific definition of a product. Whereas us producers, we're not engaged in as much organized an effort to say what characteristics of our products would need to be considered by buyers as well. And so, you know, I think those are two very good examples of South collaboration that needs to happen in order for all of us to be more effective in decarbonizing the planet. So specifically, we've started talking to Mauritania in a lot more detail. Of course, we're going to be going to the South African green hydrogen summit at the end of November. And we're going to be championing quite an interesting concept between Namibia and South Africa of how we'd love to be building common user infrastructure pipelines, transmission lines that would go from Namibia into South Africa so that Namibia could start almost acting as the Dutch proxy to the Germans, right? So we would love to act as the Namibian proxy to South Africa and for us to be strategically placed as a key element of the decarbonization journey for South Africa as well. And then we'd love to package that and take that to the African leadership summit in Washington December the 13th to the 15th. As an example, again, of South collaboration, but again, the common goal here is look, let's make sure our planet is hospitable and we have a real chance to really attack this 1.5 target. Thank you, James. And for your leadership, I think in driving those innovative financing mechanisms, it's really promising.  You've heard the various leaders so far on the line. Yes, we're kind of talking about the commitment and drive from the private sector. But also one thing that we saw emerge really in surface at the core of conversations in Egypt was adaptation. And in particular, the business's role in adaptation, we launched a report on this as a framework for how businesses should think about this, because I would argue it hasn't really been at the center of thinking. But I think given the impacts we see today, it has to be now. So just welcome your sort of thoughts, what you're seeing and where your thoughts are now as we as we look forward as well. It's only the imperative to address climate change is very clear. It is driven by a high level of awareness. And at this stage, I feel that most are aware of the implications of climate related disasters. But for the business case to be equally clear, we need to make it personal. What is the impact on the society that I live in? What is the impact on my company on me as an individual? And not just in terms of threats, but also in terms of opportunities. We've seen many commitments, but we need to see a lot more in terms of tangible outcomes. And therefore, as we think about it, we've developed a framework for this business case. And let me share that. There are three areas. Each of them have an economic rationale and a social rationale. And most companies may actually start with the economic rationale first, but I do hope that many graduate to the social rationale as well. The first is around greening ourselves. Various products to reduce coupon and two emissions. And here I would say that the work done by the World Economic Forum and by your leadership, the dialogue that has been generated in many sessions that I've seen over multiple years has really helped create a greater level of a call to action for companies to drive these projects. There has been a sharing of ideas and that has helped us get to the next level. This includes various projects in terms of renewable energy, energy productivity, water positive, etc. And there are clear returns from these projects. The next step that we've seen again over many of these dialogues has been around decarbonizing industries. And there are costs and opportunities associated with them. An automobile, for example, electric vehicles is a classic example, but not just four wheelers. In India, three wheelers is a big part of the industry here. And our business, which is reasonably large and three wheelers has moved from 100% ice to 70% EV just in the last three years. We've set up auto recycling and are taking the iceberg and ideas around circularity and trying to see if we can create something around that in the auto industry. Still early for us, but that's again where sharing best practices helps. We've also seen that consumer preferences are changing. A real estate business launched India's first net zero residential community. And we sold out in a matter of days, which was something we had not expected. And today we are actively considering, should we transition our business to be one that will launch only net zero communities? We're not quite there as yet, but hopefully we will get there soon. But investments in technology are required to make a big difference here, because many of these are small steps, but we need to take much larger steps. Here again, the first moors coalition and forums like that help us come together to help others in terms of making small commitments that together become a big commitment. But the tougher part here is the third aspect, which is nurturing a planet. We've done a fair amount of work on regenerative agriculture, a forest station, water positive, zero waste to landfill, etc. But this is one where it requires everyone to come together. And while the first two points can be driven by economics and incentives, nurturing a planet is a step we have to take together by placing purpose before profits. But even in this case, while we talk about purpose, there is a benefit for businesses. We know that climate change impacts geographies and communities unequally. And extreme weather events will impact the poorest and the most vulnerable. And therefore, we must strive towards achieving a just transition, one that leads to a more sustainable environment for business by mitigating systemic risks related to climate change, inequality, and things that may lead to adverse political, economic and social restructuring. So even in purpose, there is a benefit. I'd like to conclude with a call for action. For us to continue working together to drive tangible outcomes by placing purpose before profits, sharing best practices and, as Janet said, delivering progress on the treasure trove of commitments. Thank you. Super. Thank you, Anish. I certainly support your vision of only constructing net zero communities. So I think we'll kind of make note of that publicly here. I think that's a great aspiration to move towards. Now, Pato, you've been incredibly patient, I think, listening to many of the discussions here, and I know, though, that you are not patient to see progress on climate action. You're joining us from Egypt. You're very closely tracking discussions on loss and damage and other issues. You're there as part of a wider youth movement. Now, what is your sentiment and your message that you would like to share as well as your vision for the future as well? Hi, Antonia. Hi, everyone. Okay, great. Pleasure to be a part of the conversation. And yes, we have been tracking, I think most closely, I've been tracking the Santiago network and loss and damage when, at first, they spoke about how last night what we thought was, and then this morning had to change comments because, as we know, it's something that's still in discussion. It's something that we hope to see. And I'm going to speak more to, I mean, so far we've spoken about policy. We've spoken about business. I'm going to speak more to the role of youth and what we can do at a time when we sometimes feel a little bit powerless, a little bit overwhelmed. But even as I speak about what we can do, this is on the foundation and acknowledging that the biggest actors who can move as quick as possible to ensure that we maintain 1.5, our big businesses and our governments. So with that being said, we have to acknowledge the power that we have. As young people, we have a lot of power. And as long as we're not using it, it won't count for nothing. So we have it and we need to flex it. And how we've seen that come to a reality in this COP is, for the first time, we've got a children and youth pavilion at COP. Just yesterday in the evening, the Africa Youth Action Plan was launched. We're seeing more young people in negotiation, rooms, someone shared that with me earlier, that they haven't seen as many young people in negotiation rooms. Today at the closing session, Ghana's closing statement was submitted by a 10-year-old. We've seen an increase of just the word youth in the cover text that was seen today. So it shows progress. Whatever efforts we've been making, wherever we've been making them, have clearly created progress towards creating climate justice and creating climate action. So when it comes to accountability, I'm going to speak to accountability for governments and accountability for businesses. First with governments, Prime Minister Mutli of Barbados spoke about how we as people need to tell them to act in our names. When governments come here, when they get into negotiating rooms, they're coming to act here for us. We need to ensure that when they get in there, they're saying what we want them to say. And when they don't, governments only speak votes. Governments only speak who's leading the country. So we need to reward and punish with our votes the way that we would want people to act. So if your government is not doing what you wanted to, try another one. If your government is doing what it wants to, then give it a chance. That way, government knows that when we say we want climate action, we are demanding it. And if we don't get it, we will try someone else who can deliver it to us. And then on business, Anish actually said something that is going to speak to what I wanted to say now. On languages, business speaks profits. That's it. Yes, right now, they're speaking to ESG. They're speaking about being more purpose-driven. But we know that businesses speak profits. Shareholders speak profits. So when we use our money as young people, we need to know that whatever we're giving it to is what we are voting for. Whatever we're giving our money to is what we're demanding. It's what we're encouraging, or whatever we take it away from is what we're telling you, we don't want that. So when we come to COP 27, businesses, when they come here, need to know that if you're not going to get us closer to 1.5, you are not going to be getting our money. And then another example that Anish gave was on the net zero village that they built. And because the money was so good, they might be continuing to do it. So your money speaks. As young people, your money speaks. Let's make sure that your money is saying what you wanted to, and it's giving power to what you wanted to. And then I think as I draw to a close, in COP so far we've gotten, back to loss and damage, so far we've gotten the Santiago network. It's a win. But it's not what we came here for. We came here, the main thing as we came here was loss and damage. When we talk about the success of COP 27, we're talking loss and damage. Santiago network is a small win. Loss and damage is what we're really here for. So as young people, let's keep the pressure up. On social media I've been seeing young people have been protesting, you walk in, all the protests have young people. Whenever there's a conversation around loss and damage, there are young people, even those who aren't here, who are talking about it. The conversation on loss and damage is not closed yet, as you heard. We still have a chance to continue to put pressure on. When negotiators go into the negotiating room, they need to know that when they come out, they're gonna have to answer to you, whoever's negotiating for you. They know that whatever decision I make in here, as someone in power, as someone with influence, when I get out there, I need to answer to the young people who allowed me to be in here and who allowed me to speak to them. So let's keep the pressure on. Great, thank you, Pato. I think for that message, as you said, there is still time to push, push, push for a solid outcome on this agenda as well. I mean, I think clearly there's so many dimensions to this discussion. We've heard everything from kind of youth to opportunities to the new molecules of the future, to the markets, to financing mechanisms. And of course, there's never enough time to delve into all of these things. I do, though, wanna take an opportunity to come back to each of you, just to really close this conversation, which was a brief one on where do we go from here? I think we heard some positive messages. Of course, we know there's still challenges. I will also make a brief note that what we didn't hear discussed in this particular group is also the importance of nature in driving climate change mitigation and also societal benefits. We are also moving into CBD in Montreal, the Convention on Biological Diversity Conversations in just a few weeks. So we're going from really this conversation in Egypt to then also looking at how nature can serve as a force for positive outcomes when it comes to climate, but much more broadly as well. So let me, again, turn back to each of you, Janet. I'm actually gonna close with you because I think it'd be good to hear sort of from your perspective in terms of kind of the negotiations moving forward, how should we galvanize our efforts and start with you, Jesper, just for your reflections on where we go next. Well, thank you. First of all, not as an argument, but maybe a word of hope. I think not every company is driven by profit as a purpose. In our case, and in so many more companies case, profit is just a means to reach a much more important purpose. In our case, the profit, the dividends we send goes to IKEA Foundation, who is deeply engaged in, for instance, in Africa, into, together with other foundations, doing amazing things. And I also strongly believe that companies that are only driven by profit as it was spoken to, will have a problem with their customer base unless they are doing this right. When it comes to going forward, I'm curious like everybody else, where are we gonna land? Let's all of us continue to encourage the negotiators to represent the will of the people and the will of all of us who have raised our voices and shared where we stand. And when it comes to myself and to IKEA and to INCA group, we will continue to deliver to our scope three plan to both the things that are easy, but also the things that are really hard to crack. And we will continue to engage with others in the cases where we see that we can have an impact that is wider than ourselves. So looking forward to the coming period as well. Thank you so much, Antonia. Super, thank you. Yes, for James, over to you. Just a brief reflection. Yeah, I think from my side, Antonia super, super focused on transforming policy into bankable financial closable assets and into starting construction and getting going as soon as possible while mobilizing a significant amount of concessionary capital behind that. So, you know, it's very, very important to make sure that we're fighting for strong policy, ETC, but I've come to realize that sometimes our passion can only take us so far. And so I'm really encouraging, you know, folks in our government and our neighbors across the continent to really look at the hard things that are needed to actually get this project over the line. And sometimes it's just, for example, I'm in negotiations right now, things like change of law or, you know, sovereign immunity, these are not things you will find being discussed at a climate conference. But if you want to get out two gigawatts, three gigawatts of solar in order to really move your adaptation goal, these are the things that you just have to get done as well. So that's one of the things we're pushing hardest on is really getting projects to feasibility. I mean, the Hydrogen Council came out and said 10% of the projects that are being announced, at least from, you know, synthetic fuels projects, those are reaching FID, right? And so we want to do that in the media, but also learning and teach others as well across the region. And then of course, we really can't wait for the negotiators like Janet to bring home some of the really good news at the end of the day, just so that we can get those two or three or four cents extra over the line that are either grants or super, super concessionary financing. Because at the end of the day, that obviously impacts the levelized cost to be a product, whether that's levelized cost of electricity, ammonia or hydrogen, ETC. And that's what we need in order to make it palatable for the industries to be consuming a different source of energy, right? So that's what we'll be focusing on and we're really hoping to be coming back next year with projects under construction and others coming on stream as well. Thank you, James. Anish, last reflections. Antonio, I share Jesper's thoughts on hope and do personally believe that purpose does come before profits. And as we go forward, I feel that businesses have to work closely with governments. We cannot stand on the sidelines. This is a major challenge and it is only in working collaboratively that we will get to where we need to. Thank you, Anish. Pato, you've shared a compelling message of engagement. Anything else you want to close on? So mine is to keep the hope alive that we can change, flex that power, let's continue to demand, let's continue to where possible. It's expensive to come to COP 27, but if you can, try to get into the negotiation rooms so that you're also, as people are talking about your future, you are also talking about your future. Let's continue to speak, let's continue to advocate not only for climate action but for climate justice because if you're on this platform, you've got a level of privilege. Let's continue to use that privilege to ensure that the climate action that is achieved serves indigenous people, serves the environment, serves those who don't have the same access that we do, serves everybody because, again, borrowing from the United Nations, we need to leave no one behind, we don't only need climate action, we need climate justice and let's go make it happen. Great, thank you, Pato. So Janet, we started with you and I'm coming back to you to help us kind of see a path forward through these discussions. So I want to mention three kind of key things and first one is what James touched on. All the discussion right now is on these sort of pots of money, the financing mitigation, financing adaptation and loss and damage. In neither of those three pots have we got anywhere like the needed money. So we need to move beyond that, you know, not instead of, but in addition to actually focusing on transforming the entire financial system. And actually there is an objective in the Paris Agreement 2.1C that talks about transforming the whole system. So we need a lot more attention on that. The second thing is the nationally determined commitments. We spend enormous amounts of time looking at whether they've been strengthened and what they are, but they actually, they don't matter squat unless they're actually turned into action and impact in countries. And so we need the youth, we need citizens to be holding countries accountable, to see the policies being put in place and the money mobilized. Otherwise it's all for nothing. And then the third point I just want to make is that there's two systems that we have to fix to solve the climate change problem. The first one we're well on the way to fixing. It just really now creates political will to take that one over the edge. That's the energy system. The other energy system that we have to fix is the one that propels humans. That's the food and agricultural system. And there's just not enough discussion about that. We'll never get to 1.5 unless we address that system. Much of what is talked about there is around the adaptation angle, but food, the agricultural system is both a victim and a villain. So we need much more attention to that. So, and yes, we need to move from sort of profit and plunder to profit and prosperity for the planet. So really great to hear our business folks on the panel today. Great, thank you, Janet. And thank you all for joining. What I would say has left me feeling more uplifted than when I started and came out of Egypt. I think the optimism in this conversation is real and I think the sense of possibility is also clear. Let us, though, keep our eye on the prize, which is the 1.5 degrees reduction target that we're after, which does require stronger commitments and outcomes from policymakers. So I think Patu, your message was very correct and clear. It is up to us in our own capabilities in the positions that we sit in, but also as citizens to bring in others to really help vote for that transformation as well. So with that, I think thank you all incredibly for joining us and also those who are watching for joining into this discussion. Do keep track of what's coming out of the negotiations. We certainly will be, and I can say that we will commit, obviously, as the World Economic Forum to drive progress in this agenda, of course, also through to our annual meeting coming up in January. With that, I will also just welcome you to stay on and watch a video which shares the voices of many other leaders who are very much committed to seeing this agenda move forward as well. Thank you for joining. So many people have been speaking about the climate crisis. So many things have been put on paper, but the real question is, why is it that we're still not acting at the scale and speed that is necessary? What we want to see at COP 27 is moving pledges into implementation. Every stakeholder needs to step up and push forward. The extreme weather events that the scientists have long connected to the climate crisis are becoming far more frequent and far more destructive. The climate crisis is a threat multiplier, which means it exacerbates existing inequities in our society. The impacts are felt most deeply by black, indigenous, and communities of color. We're living through an explosion of inequality. We need to remember we're on the same planet, and this is the planet that we need to make sustainable for the whole of humanity. Climate change is impacting food security as well as political stability in many nations around the world. Five years ago, there were 80 million people marching towards starvation. That number jumped to 135 million. What caused the jump? It was man-made conflict like in Ukraine, compounded with climate shocks. No one is as vulnerable to climate change as farmers are. If you talk transformation, the first thing they want to know is what must I do on my farm? This is the moment to set up monitoring and accountability mechanisms and put money on the table to help developing countries to accelerate towards decarbonizing. We know that this transition will require a fast adoption of a lot of new technologies. And the question today is how to find the appropriate way to find this technology. To put a number around it, it's an extra two and a half to three trillion dollars a year of additional finance that we have to find in order to get those emissions down. Financial institutions have a lot of roles to play to bring the advice and provide the financing to make these transitions happen. Younger generations are demanding a sense of purpose. They want to look at companies and say, I am investing with you all for this reason. With two cops taking place in Africa and the Middle East, we have this tremendous opportunity to put emerging markets at the forefront of our collective response to climate change. International trade has to be part of the solution. How do we all get together to talk about a global carbon price that can guide us and help us to decarbonize the world? The solutions are there. What we need is governments to regulate, to invest, and we need business to act with values. History will look at us, people, politicians, corporate leaders. These times require not only solutions but speed. There is nowhere else to look than the mirror. We are the ones that need to do this.


If hip-hop artists keep stealing each other's beats instead of making new ones, some day they're going to run out of fresh stuff and we'll all be stuck listening to the same Malthusian trap. Some ideas are so intuitive and compelling that as soon as they reach prominence they become default landmarks for navigating the entire territory of thought around them. You can't talk about thinking machines without mentioning the Turing test. You can't discuss ethics without at least paying some lip service to trolley problems. You can't talk about shared resources without passing reference to the tragedy of the comments. A thought experiment that has become the presumed starting point for conversations about everything from climate change to SUVs to Wikipedia. The idea has a long legacy, but the most recent and most popular formulation is widely attributed to Garrett Hardin, an ecologist whose original paper carries the ominous abstract, the population problem has no technical solution. It requires a fundamental extension in morality.  As rational beings, big ideological air quotes, each herdsman is trying to maximize their individual gain and they each make the same calculation. The upsides of adding one more cow to their herd will be theirs alone, while the downsides of exceeding the pasture's cow capacity and thus destroying it will be shared by everyone. To maximize their relative advantage, every herdsman will be forced to engage in a race to the bottom, adding more cows to their herd and burning through grass as fast as they can until the pasture collapses. As Hardin puts it, each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom of the commons brings ruin to all. Hardin goes on to call out what he sees as laughably naive policies that deny this fundamental truth of economy, including free parking on Christmas, fishing grounds, national parks, and what he calls the freedom to breed, which we're not going to get into here. Let's just say it's super gross and move on. If you recall Episode 145, this setup looks an awful lot like the prisoner's dilemma from Game Theory. Every player is aware that the worst possible result will occur if all players act selfishly. But if we presume they all subscribe to the infamous rational self-interest standard, each will be compelled to join a circular firing squad and pull the trigger. Hardin suggests that there are only two solutions to these sorts of scenarios, both of which are coercive. Either the resource is enclosed and divvied up among private owners, who will gate and meter access in order to maximize profits, or a government body of some sort can monitor, distribute, and punish overuse of the resource. Most of these options carry the implicit threat of violence if anyone tries to use the commons without transactional approval from the new authorities. But according to Hardin, the only other option is everyone clawing over each other to grab as much as they can until the formerly renewable resource is permanently depleted. This story about the helpless herders seems perfectly reasonable. Just about everyone can think of a time where a little flutter of anxiety that there might not be enough to go around has driven people into a frenzy of myopic behavior as they gorge on whatever they can get their hands on until it's gone. But quite a few people have raised their eyebrows at his assertion that this sort of thing is inevitable, that sharing resources inevitably brings ruin to all. We've talked a little about the problems inherent to mapping simplistic game theory models, like the prisoner's dilemma, onto real-life human interactions. The spiteful self-injury observed in the Ultimatum game might be hard to understand if you're just looking at the math.  Many have noted that while it's easy to find shallow similarities between just about any social interaction in the prisoner's dilemma, it's only a dilemma because it's so much unlike normal interactions. The prisoners have to decide whether to cooperate or screw each other over in a straightforward flipping-a-switch kind of way. With no expectation that they'll meet again or need each other's help in the future, with an external force preventing them from talking to each other or negotiating.  But it's unlikely the game theoretic analysis holds in any meaningful way once you add all the complexity back in. In the real world, if you set up a textbook prisoner's dilemma experiment and just let people talk to each other before deciding, they usually cooperate. That's all it takes. The tragedy of the common suffers from that same sort of oversimplification. The cattle consumption catastrophe cascade is supposed to chug along without any sort of debate, response, discussion, negotiation, sanctions, or retribution among the helpless herders, driven to its inexorable conclusion by the logic of individual self-interest and nothing else. It doesn't seem to cross Hardin's mind that if someone tried to graze too many cattle, someone else might say, hey, knock it off. Even the proposed solutions that Hardin recommends don't necessarily solve the problem. If a government body could have perfect knowledge of who was accessing the resource at all times. If they could catch and punish cheaters with 100% accuracy every time someone broke the rules, all without costing the resource users more than all that surveillance and enforcement apparatus is worth, yeah, sure, that could work. If every private owner is invested in maintaining the resource for the long haul instead of burning through their share to make a quick buck, and each has the support they need to chase off potential thieves, that could work, too. But if there's any error, uncertainty, bad actors, or unmanageable costs in either of those systems, they might not be the silver bullets Hardin thinks they are. So the tragedy of the common's framing for shared resources has some holes. That hasn't stopped it from finding its way into all sorts of explanations and theories about world events. From the organization of the Mormon Church to firewood shortages to congressional overspending. Hardin's grim warnings attracted the attention of Eleanor Ostrom, a political scientist who had spent several years studying the communal use of groundwater in Southern California when she first heard one of his lectures about the bleak necessity of population control. Surely, she reasoned, there must be other ways to solve the problems posed by shared resources. I mean, as compelling as Hardin's story sounded, she had witnessed people doing exactly what he said ought to be impossible, managing a communal asset without government oversight, private ownership, or runaway overconsumption. If maintaining a commons can work in practice, it has to be able to work in theory, right? The next several decades of Ostrom's life were dedicated to examining how various communities around the world dealt with the supposedly inexorable tragedy of the commons in real life. She collected dozens of examples from all sorts of different cultures at all sorts of different scales, from tens to tens of thousands of people, all deciding how to share the resources they needed to survive. Spanish Huerta's and Philippine Zangera irrigation systems, Turkish inshore fishing grounds. For hundreds of years, some Swiss villages shared forests for timber and fuel and meadows for grazing their cattle. Pretty much exactly the scenario Hardin claimed was doomed to failure. She approached these case studies looking for some sort of game theory shaped answer, a simple rule or strategy that all these different societies implemented in one way or another that created a new set of payoffs with non-tragic results. But contrary to Hardin's assertion that there were only two possible answers, Ostrom found that every community had their own bespoke methods to ensure cooperation and fair dealing. And that those methods changed and developed over time, evolving in response to changing circumstances and new challenges. Some societies let entire families manage access to the resource. Others assign them on an individual basis. Some pass rights down as an inheritance between generations. Some assign them to whoever happened to own or lease land that granted access while others entered into complex conditional resource allocation contracts with their fellow community members. Sometimes the rules were written down. Sometimes they were unwritten cultural norms. Sometimes there were written rules that weren't enforced or enforced in particular ways according to the situation. The examples she recorded were a massive hodgepodge of complex multi-layered strategies as varied as the cultures they came from. The societies Ostrom decided to use as case studies for her book had maintained some community resource for at least a century without either centralized governance or privatization. Sometimes changing methods when it seemed like the current way of doing things wasn't working anymore, which just added to the tally of ways to manage a commons. Faced with such a diversity of tried and true institutions and the myriad failures of governance or privatization models, she concluded that trying to solve as complex a question as how can this group of people share resources fairly with a singular top down strategy for every possible context and culture was a fool's errand saying there are no institutional panaceas. That being said, she did notice some similarities among communities that successfully manage a common resource. Not hard and fast rules for how to do things but a set of eight design principles. Fuzzy criteria, which if you were going to set up such a society from scratch, you'd probably want to think about. First on the list was well-defined boundaries. In each successfully managed commons, it was clear who had the right to use the community resource, who didn't, and where the resources borders were. Establishing who was managing what for whom. It's hard to protect a region from over fishing if it's unclear what activity is impacting it or who's contributing to the depletion or maintenance of the fish supply. And it's hard to get a community to put time and effort into keeping it sustainable if there's no way to tell where that responsibility ends. Second, whatever community rules were in place were well adapted to the specific context in which they operated. This is Ostrom's no panaceas principle at large. The rules necessary to make a particular commons work probably won't work anywhere else. They can't be composed in the first place without a deep understanding of the people who will use them, their culture, their history, the peculiarities of the resource, all sorts of factors that can't be prescribed ahead of time. If you recall episode 235, this is one of the issues with central authorities like ISO composing standards for complex systems without consulting the people who are going to be using and maintaining them. If you're counting on a community to follow some procedure and manage a resource, you're going to want a really good understanding of what they care about and how the resource has historically responded to being managed. Asking someone to keep an accurate record of their water consumption to the gallon might sound totally reasonable until you've had to manage a 20-acre farm. The third design principle contains a related observation that really challenges some key assumptions built into game theory. In successful comments, the people who are subject to the rules, wait for it, can change them if they're not working well. The idea that people might recognize that a set of rules is causing bad outcomes and respond with modifications, amendments, or totally new rules that doesn't come up a lot in game theory. Ostrom found that successful comments had some fairly easy mechanism to lobby for and implement changes to the rules, which has two obvious upsides. Firstly, it allows rapid adaptation to changing circumstances, creating that highly contextual level of detail necessary for the second principle to work. If the forest suffers some catastrophe, a handshake agreement to hold off on the normal harvesting schedule and share reserves of lumber until it recovers is quick, easy, and responsive to the situation. Second, giving the actual people who are expected to follow the rules meaningful power to change them really reduces the inclination to cheat. Even if you can't get everything exactly the way you want, if you really feel some degree of authorship, something more than symbolic contribution to a process, it's less likely that you'll break the rules you helped write, just for the hell of it. The fourth principle follows pretty closely from that premise. Successful comments were monitored and the people monitoring them were meaningfully accountable to the folks who used them, sometimes by virtue of being the same people, as in the users for the ones keeping an eye on things. Similarly, the fifth principle describes a general policy of gradually stricter sanctions for anyone who broke the rules, punishments of scaling severity chosen by other resource users, generally starting with a teensy slap on the wrist. Principles four and five both seem to contradict some widespread assumptions about the economics of monitoring and enforcement. It's usually thought to be time consuming and expensive to keep an eye on your fellow community members or punish rule breakers yourself instead of delegating those tasks to some authority figure. Also, if the punishment for cheating isn't devastating, even for the first infraction, why wouldn't everyone cheat just a little bit? Ostrom suggests that because it occurs in every case of successful comments, sharing enforcement duties must have some hidden benefits that more than make up for that supposed inefficiency. And he floats some ideas about what they might be. It reassures everyone who relies on the resource that they're not getting screwed because they're constantly watching other people follow the rules. Conversely, if someone gets caught cheating, it reassures them that cheaters will be caught, which also increases confidence that they're not getting screwed. It creates pressure to write rules that are easy to enforce. It puts the enforcers in the same boat as rule breakers, which tends to limit the usually high cost of punishment. If you know how tempting it is to grab a little more than your fair share, you probably won't throw the whole book at someone who usually follows the rules and messed up this one time because, hey, that might be you next week. Also, if you think back to principle two, it's likely that the people who rely on the resource and know the situation best are going to be better equipped to fit a proper punishment to that situation. If times are tough and someone gets desperate or if they break a rule by accident, man, I get it. Just don't do it again, yeah? OK, we're down to the last three and they're pretty quick. For principle six, Ostrom notes that trying to wheel out a game theory matrix to analyze the real life costs and benefits of following the rules or cheating assumes a perfect system of bureaucratic oversight, a completely unambiguous and all-encompassing set of algorithmic responses enforced by an omniscient machine God. In reality, people inevitably disagree about how the rules should be interpreted, what counts as violating the letter or spirit of the law, all sorts of stuff. In each functional commons, Ostrom observed some quick and easy mechanism for resolving conflicts and grievances between resource users, sometimes formal, like a court proceeding, sometimes informal, like let's just run this by old alley. She'll decide who's right. Of course, a conflict resolution mechanism doesn't mean anything if someone can go crying to some bigger authority if they don't get their way. Commons design principle seven is that the people using the commons were relatively certain that they had the right to organize themselves however they saw fit to make and enforce their own rules and standards without interference from other rule-making bodies that might roll in and append everything. That doesn't mean the force commons consortium is the only legitimate authority in the entire universe. There could be other levels of organization, nested or overlapping spheres of autonomy that enacted different scales of management and solved different problems. That's principle eight. But it seems to be important that the rulings of the conflict resolution body felt binding and final. So we've got these eight, what would you call guidelines than actual rules? You'll notice that they all leave a lot of wheel room. You could come up with hundreds of theoretical institutions that would satisfy these criteria. Again, Ostrom was deeply critical of approaches like hardens that prescribed a singular solution to solve all the problems of maintaining a commons. Trying to dictate the specifics of how everyone should go about creating their own institutions was exactly the sort of thing she was railing against. Of course, there are also communities that ticked all these boxes and still failed to manage their shared resources effectively. And there are some situations where communal ownership doesn't benefit anyone. If the resources being distributed aren't renewable or if the harms produced by overconsumption are outsourced to people who aren't using them, it's hard to see an upside. The factory pollution problem Harden highlights in his original paper is a great example of an externalized harm that calls for some other solution, like government regulation. And his warnings about infinite growth on a finite planet, while they lead him to some weird and unfounded conclusions, aren't without their merits. Unfortunately, despite Ostrom's work, the tragedy of the commons has become one of those cultural reference points that has shaped discourse and thought since its inception. It's routinely trotted out to silence anyone naive enough to imagine commonly held resources will end in anything but disaster. But as Ostrom's investigation show, Harden only describes a tiny slice of the astounding variety of solutions humans have developed and redeveloped over centuries to achieve what he ruled an impossible fantasy. If you're curious, I highly recommend going to your local library and asking for a copy of her book. Can you think of a shared resource that might benefit from Ostrom's design principles? Please, leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. And thank you for your patience. I know that this one was a long time in coming and if you look at the length, you can probably understand why. Don't forget to share and don't stop thunking.