Solve the problems you want to solve most: Bezos Earth Fund’s Andrew Steer

This transcript, generated from speech recognition technology, has been edited for web readers, condensed for clarity, and may differ slightly from the audio.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Welcome to Meet the Leader, a podcast where top leaders share how they're tackling the world's toughest challenges. Today's leader: Dr. Andrew Steer. He is the CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund and he'll talk about nature, why we need to protect it, why it's key to tackling climate change and what's needed to make that a reality.

Subscribe to Meet the Leader on Apple, Spotify and wherever you get your favourite podcasts and please take a moment to rate and review us. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum and this is Meet the Leader.

Andrew Steer, Bezos Earth Fund: And if we lose nature, we lose our futures.

Linda Lacina: Once upon a time, this world hosted 6 trillion trees. Now there are three. And the Amazon rainforest, according to experts, has entered into such a downward spiral that in 100 years it could become a savanna. It's clear nature is in peril. And if we want to tackle climate change, we must protect nature.

To find out what must be done, this week we talked to Dr. Andrew Steer. He is the CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, a philanthropic organization started with a $10 billion commitment from Amazon's Jeff Bezos, all to fund scientists, activists, NGOs and others to drive climate and nature action.

He will give us a better understanding of some of the risks we've been facing and how we can reverse course, including how philanthropy can play a surprising and untapped role and a new initiative that launched at Davos that can aid in exactly that.

He'll also tell us about what real change will really require from the many transitions that must happen simultaneously, and the mindset shift we'll need to make now.

He'll get into all of that, but first he'll get us started with an explanation of 30 by 30, an initiative where governments around the world designate a third of Earth's land and ocean as protected all by the year 2030. I'll let him get started.

Andrew Steer: Well, 30 by 30 is 30% of the land and the sea will be protected by 2030. And that's important because we currently are not protecting it. Maybe we're protecting about half that amount right now.

The problem with that is we are losing incredibly precious ecosystems, which is not only a tragedy in terms of losing species, and we're losing species at a rate over a thousand times as rapidly as would happen naturally if it weren't for humans, but it's also a tragedy for future generations, because 70% of the economy depends upon nature one way or the other. And if we lose nature, we lose our futures.

Linda Lacina: What does the before and after look like if we don't make that 2030 timeline?

Andrew Steer: It looks bad.

The thing about nature is that when you lose it, it's not a linear thing. So, you know, we've lost so far, you think about it, there used to be 6 trillion trees in the world. There now are 3 trillion trees.

Some say, well, a few billion here or there wouldn't make any difference.

Human beings are now using 70% of the land for their own economic purposes. Sounds good. Our economy is generally doing well. The problem is if you keep taking more and more natural ecosystems, you can get bad things happening unexpectedly.

So, for example, in the Amazon right now, scientific experts are deeply worried that we're starting to see the beginning of a negative spiral, which would mean that the Amazon, if we go much further, won't stay as it is. It will get into a downward spiral whereby a hundred years from now it could be savannah. Weather systems would be totally different, water flow would be totally different in a totally unpredictable way and almost certainly in a very bad way.

So, what one needs to do is to have some sense of responsibility, not to take too many risks.

Linda Lacina: To give people a sense of sort of what we can protect, you were recently in the Andes, in the national park. Tell us what you saw there and what it was like to be walking through it and what you were thinking about.

Andrew Steer: Well, as you fly- I mean, obviously, Colombia is one of the great biodiverse countries in the world. It has, you know, oceans on both sides the Pacific, the Atlantic. It's got incredible species richness.

As you fly from, let's say, Bogota, the capital, you fly in a plane or a helicopter to the southeast towards the Chiribiquete, which is where we went, which is one of the most untouched places on the planet, it has the most stunning features. You see this sort of, if you like, the frontier and you see just a total loss of forest. And looking down, you will see the occasional cattle.

What happens is that people go in and they cut the forests. The land tenure legal system is not entirely clear. They put a few cattle on to give themselves some legitimate ownership, even if they don't have any. The average cattle has more than one and a half hectares each. In fact, you could have four cattle on a hectare if you managed it well.

As a result, you've got this incredibly low productivity and an encroaching sort of forest frontier year after year after year. And we now have technologies in the World Resources Institute, which I used to be the president of, we had something called the Global Forest Watch, and it uses satellites and it can see trees falling. And the good news is those satellites have been up there for the last 20 years. So, you can reverse the clock and you can show from the year 2000, year by year forests falling further.

If you don't have 30 by 30, if you don't have rules, it will just keep going and unstoppable. Because however well-intentioned any government is, and a country like Colombia is full of very competent officials and politicians, they can't stop that. No country can.

And so, you need just a really disciplined approach where you have regulations, you have indigenous people on board, you have NGOs on board, you have scientists monitoring, you have satellites creating accountability and so on. So, it's a complicated process, but a very, very exciting time right now.

Linda Lacina: What needs to happen to make nature a bigger part of the climate crisis conversation and so it doesn't get drowned out?

Andrew Steer: There's very good news on that. And by the way, the World Economic Forum here has played a very important role over the last four or five years.

I mean, five years ago it was all climate, nobody really- there was a feeling, well, nature is important, but there wasn't this recognition that actually if you want to solve climate, you've got to protect nature. Basically, protecting nature will address one-third of everything we need to do on climate. If the other two thirds is sort of energy transition and so on and cities.

But what's happened in the last five years is the sort of the coming together, and COP26 in Glasgow really sort of brought those two together. And then of course in Montreal last November when they had the Conference of the Parties to the Biodiversity Convention, that's when the world agreed to 30 by 30.

And that was a very, very hard-fought battle. It wss a high ambition group. A year earlier, there were only 50 members, 50 countries that were signed up. We then sponsored it in a big way to support. So did others. And then you got up to 120 countries. And then in the negotiations, they managed to take, you know, be persuasive to the others. So, it's really impressive.

And what we had to do was demonstrate that if a country does commit to this, there will be resources to help them do it, because sometimes there's a real trade off.

I mean, if you are running the Democratic Republic of Congo or you're running Ecuador, there are mining interests. There are oil and gas interests that want to go into your pristine forests and they want to take it out. And certainly, in the short term, that's very beneficial for the economy of a country. And so, we need to demonstrate that we are going to be supportive.

So, what we did last year, at the Bezos Earth Fund, we worked with ten other philanthropies, so we were able to make a commitment of $5 billion to support countries that are willing to implement 30 by 30, and that, together with, you know, other processes, led to a sort of an openness to change, because it's not right for environmentalists simply to preach at countries and tell them, you must do this or that. You've got to go the extra mile and demonstrate that we're there to help. And that often means money.

Linda Lacina: That kind of leads me to that climate philanthropy initiative that is launching this week at Davos, the GAEA (Giving to Amplify Earth Action). How important is climate philanthropy to make sure that we're tapping every resource we can to fund solutions?

Andrew Steer: Well, I think philanthropy has risen to the occasion much more recently compared to earlier days. I mean, still only 2% of all philanthropy goes to climate mitigation and maybe an equivalent amount to nature. So, at one level it is small, but on another level it is, you know, billions of dollars a year. So, you actually can do quite a lot with that.

And so, what the World Economic Forum is doing together with some of us is creating this network, if you like, where we ask the question, how can philanthropy not only be increased, but how can it be used in a really disciplined forensic sort of way that will lead to real leverage?

So, most philanthropy has been sort of dollar in on a good dollar of output out. So, you build a school or you build a clinic. That's really good. You don't change the system.

And so, we spend a lot of our time at the Bezos Earth Fund thinking about how do we inject funds and our influence and our convening ability, how do we do that in a way that actually unlocks a lot more resources.

So, you can get leverage through obviously helping to de-risk private investment. You can get leverage by persuading governments to change policies. You can get leverage through political pressure. You can get leverage through monitoring and accountability systems or through research. So, there's a whole range of sort of interventions.

And what we do at the Bezos Earth Fund is ask the question: What are the big transitions that are required this decade? And there are about 50 of them actually, you know, getting rid of the internal combustion engine, protecting 30% of the land, reducing food loss and waste by half this decade. About 70 of those, 50 to 70 of those, if you add them all together, we monitor those using something called the Systems Change Lab, and we try and monitor how close are those transitions to a positive tipping point, after which change becomes sort of irresistible and unstoppable.

And then we ask, what are the barriers that are preventing whatever transition it is getting to the tipping point? And that's what the GAEA is going to try and do. It's going to try and bring philanthropies to the table, relevant ones, bring governments to the table, bring corporates and scientists to the table. Look at the various transitions that are required. Bring decision makers who can play their part of the jigsaw puzzle, if you like.

So that's the idea and we're quite hopeful that it might work. We're going to experiment, we hope, with some real problems in the coming year.

Linda Lacina: Tell me a little bit about the Energy Transition Accelerator and the new methodologies that are going to go forth with the carbon credits.

Andrew Steer: Potentially exciting, potentially risky.

Carbon markets have had had a checkered history, especially when it comes, for example, to nature. 15 years ago, there was the great hope, the so-called REDD+, which was about protecting forests that rich companies that were finding it too hard to decarbonise within their own companies, they would pay for the protection of forests. Didn't work. It didn't work for two reasons.

One, the quality of the projects was very variable and there was no accountability. There was no monitoring.

And number two, it became clear that a company can't simply say, I'm not going to work on my own problems at home. I'm simply going to pay, you know, $3 a tonne to Indonesia to protect.

So, it failed. And carbon markets went into a slump for a decade, really. In that same time, domestic carbon markets, even in states in the United States and certainly in Europe, were doing okay.

What the story now is that there is a real willingness on the part of companies to come to the table with real money. But here's the thing: they don't bring real money in order to compensate for their own failure. In other words, they're not allowed to bring money to the table because they have no interest in addressing their own carbon emissions. They have to get their own carbon emissions in sync first with what's called science-based targets.

So that's what we call the demand side has to be right.

But then on the supply side, you've got to make sure that the quality is high.

So, what the Energy Transitions Accelerator tries to do is ask the question: Isn't it interesting that really nobody is working on using some of this high-quality carbon, voluntary carbon credit money to address very difficult issues In energy.

For example, we need to close down 925 coal-powered electricity generating plants every year between now and 2030. The money for that simply doesn't exist. But if we don't do that, we won't be able to get the 1.5 that we need to get.

So, Secretary Kerry of the United States and the Bezos Earth Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation agreed that we would we would coordinate a movement bringing the very best experts from carbon markets all around. And there are there are a lot of them - there are a lot of institutions that are working on this - to the table and try and set standards that are high by the middle of next year and then start mobilising some funding to address some of these very difficult energy projects. The reason it's risky is that those standards need to be high. But if we don't try this, it's even more risky because then there will be simply no money.

I mean, at the moment, as you probably know, there's something called the JETP, the Just Energy Transition Partnerships. South Africa started one. Indonesia. Now, Indonesia’s you know, received commitments of $20 billion. South Africa got 8.5 billion.

Actually, that money, number one, needs to be mobilised. And number two. is not enough. So, we need to think much more ambitiously and we need to do it quickly.

Linda Lacina: You've had many roles in your career. How have you changed, you think, from the beginning to now?

Andrew Steer: I think I started very much as a technocrat. You know, I did a Ph.D. in economics, and in those days — luckily, economics is changing — in those days, we believed that human beings were rational and could have their behaviour influenced pretty dramatically by economic policies. We believed that free markets on their own were pretty good. They certainly needed to be tweaked for various reasons. But we didn't really understand the human side of things.

So, I guess I've changed in the sense that at the end of the day, future progress will depend as much on the things of the heart as the things of the sharp pencil head analysis, so to speak.

So, I think that would be one. I think I'd become what perhaps in earlier eras I would have called more fuzzy in my thinking. I now call it just much more thoughtful, more realistic, recognising politics, recognising power struggles, recognising the massive imbalances in the world, the unfairness and injustices that unless we address, we will not be able to solve the problems that I want to devote my life to solving.

Linda Lacina: In a year with so many crises happening simultaneously, what should leaders prioritise?

Andrew Steer: Delivering what they promised.

So, we're now actually in a good position. On the nature side we've got commitments of 30 by 30. That's going to be very hard work. Keep your eye on that.

On the climate side, it's remarkable. Most countries now, most of the economy of the world, is committed to net-zero by 2050. $130 trillion of financial assets under management have committed to get to net-zero.

These were wild commitments, I mean, unbelievable commitments. And COP26, if you like, codified them. We now need to deliver them. We don't need a whole lot more conferences. We need a whole lot more accountability.

And it's very tempting to say, my goodness me, this is a dreadful time for the world. Criminal invasion of Ukraine surely should deflect us from the nice to do things of climate change and nature. No, Ukraine illustrates the dependence on Russia that Europe had. Illustrates why we were so foolish in the first place be to be dependant upon fossil fuels that have sat under the ground for billions and billions of years, in foreign countries that are not very reliable, totally untrustworthy.

Why should we do it? Why not generate the electricity on your own land for free? You know, you think about it. All energy comes from the sun. There are two ways of getting it from the sun. You can have the sun create biomass that then goes underground for 3 million years. And then you go down there and bring it up in the form of coal or oil and gas, or you can have it directly today from the sun today, which makes more sense. There are more jobs in the latter. It’s cheaper in the latter, it's much healthier.

So, what we need to do is deliver. That's the story, I believe.

Linda Lacina: That was Andrew Steer. Thanks so much to him. And thanks so much to you for listening. A transcript of this episode and my colleagues’ episodes. Radio Davos and the Book Club Podcast is available at wef.ch/podcasts.

This episode of Meet the Leader was presented and produced by me with Juan Toran as studio engineer, Jere Johannson as editor and Gareth Nolan driving studio production.

That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina with the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.