“We need to be speaking the same language across all the different disciplines who are involved in creating these catalytic structures — the infrastructure that we're building, and the capital that we're trying to mobilize.”

Louis Downing CEO, Global Infrastructure Basel (GIB) Foundation

“I used to be an investment banker, and then I moved to the United Nations. It took me one meeting to realize that we need to translate [better]. The private sector was talking about the subordinated position of a capital stack, and the others were like, 'We're all created equal.' Let's make sure that we are connecting those worlds.”

Mariana Silva Head, Global Infrastructure Facility

“[We're] targeting what I call micro decision-makers — people who are on nature's front lines, who are deciding whether to cut down a hectare of mangroves or to plant trees, or to do a temporary fisheries closure. These people often operate in information deserts, they may not speak Bahasa Indonesia or Spanish or Hindi, they may have limited access to the internet. So how do you actually reach these people with information that's useful to them?”

Rhett Butler CEO and Founder, Mongabay

“We're not defining the language of climate change or even trying to record it. We're acknowledging that there are multiple layers of meaning within each word. [...] And yet all of our international agreements are words put together in some sort of order – What we're trying to do is bring awareness to the words.”

Valentin Abend Project Director, Climate Words

“We go and talk to communities, and try understand their visions, but especially their fears, because that's what is blocking the project. It's not a lack of data. It's not a lack of funding even. It's not a lack of talented scientists, architect, designers, engineers. It's very often lack of a common vision and narrative.”

Haris Piplas Director of Integrated Urban Solutions, Drees & Sommer
Docent in Spatial Development, ETH Zurich

“I noticed that [environmental] science is not something that is easily accessible to a lot of young people in Singapore. There weren't enough people talking about the local context and what our local environments were actually dealing with, so I started [using] illustrations to talk about climate change[...]. You need to find alternative ways through culture to get people engaged in policy, in politics, especially in the climate.”

Qiyun Woo Founder, The Weird and Wild
Senior Communications Manager, IPCC

“In the NGO space, there's a trifecta, a holy grail, for a climate solution. It's one that actually addresses the carbon or methane challenge, it actually helps people on the ground in some tangible way that they can see and understand for real, and it's scalable. Those are the three things that [we] look for[...]: people, the planet, and scale.”

Andrew Fishbein Lead, Government Affairs North America, Climeworks

“Conversations need to be had with your neighbors and your social infrastructure network, the coffee shops that you go to, the libraries [...]. [We] don’t define resilience as bouncing back to normal, but as bouncing back stronger, wiser, and smarter, [...] and communities that know each other will bounce back stronger and faster than other communities.”

Judy Huynh Data and GIS Analyst, Rebuild by Design

“In my practice, our research starts at the ecological level, at the cultural level. We learn everything we can about the site and the systems around Jamaica about the coffee, the pay that the farmers were getting, about the [waste] and what they do with it. [...] 80% of this coffee goes to Japan, and they make the pickers do one extra step to ensure quality. They submerge the coffee in water, and the [beans] that float to the top, they have to discard. [...] All this waste decays, and it turns into this black sludge.”

Christopher Latouche Founding Principal, Research Gallery

"Between food, water, and energy, each one has a scale of optimal effectiveness. [...] But they’re not all at the same scale, and they’re certainly not hyperlocal. They’re sometimes regional, sometimes city scale, sometimes neighborhood scale; it depends on which resource you’re looking at. [Community] has to be part of the equation, [...] but it can’t always be the essence of the solution.”

John E. Fernandez Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and Building Technology, MIT
Co-founder, MIT Environmental Research and Action

“My call to action is for community engagement to be fundamentally part of our investment process, especially for infrastructure. We've seen how things go when you don't include the community, and I think the community should be included for us to understand what is really needed, what is the solution that they want, what is the actual problem, instead of deciding for them.”

Adriana Becerra Cid Lead, Sustainable Private Credit Fund, Lombard Odier

“I think it can be much simpler than we might sometimes think [it is]. We've been modeling the impact of building trail bridges so communities can reach essential services — kids can get to schools, pregnant women can get to healthcare facilities, and farmers can get to markets. If you look at the time it takes to walk to school, you can see the impact of future climate change on heat stress, [but] that distribution can shift just by building bridges today. Simple pedestrian footbridges can solve this climate problem in these places."

Zia Mehrabi Director, Better Planet Laboratory, University of Colorado Boulder

"It [creates] a lot of work for these small organizations when you're asking them to constantly prove their worth through the term of that grant. [...] The impact can take time — something that's reported one year may not have impact for a couple years down the road. You have to trust that just having more reliable news and information on climate related issues is generally good for our society.”

Sean Harder Senior Communications Officer, MacArthur Foundation

“Shifting from fossil fuel to biomass means [...] paying attention to more than just the source of the carbon. This requires lifecycle assessment to evaluate benefits and challenges across the entire process, from biomass to the final product [...]. And along with that, real-world biodegradation and ecotoxicity testing. Without that scrutiny, we risk relocating harm rather than removing it.”

Bhawani Venkataraman Vice President for Climate and Environmental Justice &
Associate Professor of Chemistry, The New School

“A lot of [climate news] organizations tell you, "We surveyed people, and we changed their minds." [...] Funders love that, but they're always like, "Well, what changed?" They want that $1 million fine. In a lot of journalism, it's very difficult to track — you don't know if your work was the thing that actually caused something to change.”

Emily Holden Founder and Executive Director, Floodlight
Co-Chair, Climate News Task Force

“You have a lot of successful stories here and there, a few available data on expected impact, expected returns, but very little on realized outcomes, realized impact, realized financial returns [...]. And that creates an issue, especially around additionality. [...] Public finances or philanthropic finances — they are scarce, so we need to do the most with what we have available.”

Thomas Giroux Professor of Sustainable Finance, ETH Zurich

“Very often what [city agencies] really want to have is a justification. If they built a new bike lane, how many people would change from the car to a bicycle? [...] What's the impact on people, on mobility? [It's there that] we can help, and there we can not only measure it with data, but try to make better predictions, to make better recommendations of where to target certain interventions.”

Markus Schläpfer Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Columbia University

"What about qualitative data? [...] We work on [projects] that are co-funding urban regeneration, and they have an indicator saying citizen satisfaction has to be increased by 25%. It sounds funny, but we somehow have to increase life quality. That's the $1 million question, how we do that.”

Haris Piplas Director of Integrated Urban Solutions, Drees & Sommer
Docent in Spatial Development, ETH Zurich

“There's a question that I always ask my students about any given project: What is there? When you start with that question, you come up with really novel assemblies, solutions, and processes that might be quite radical and unknown. They've been before you this whole time, but you just have to reframe the way that you think about the assemblages of those things.”

Leeland McPhail Principal and Founder, Here & Here

“[Excavation material from construction sites] is the biggest waste stream in every economy. In Switzerland, an estimated 60 million is spent every year for disposal fees. I'm talking with the biggest excavation companies in Switzerland, and they tell me, 'I can deliver it for you for zero.'"

Götz Hilber Co-Founder & CEO, Rematter

"[We] should legislate a certain percentage of reclaimed materials in new buildings. [...] Require deconstruction over demolition, invest in material passports to create indexes of what's going in and out of our buildings, because no building is permanent, even though we might think it is.”

Emma Jurczynski Architectural Designer

"If you want to change a building, you [need to be able] take out the floor and repurpose it, which isn’t really possible with a flat slab [construction]. Retail buildings [...] have a lifetime of only 20 years, so they’re interested in working with us because they can reuse the same floor at a different site.”

Carmen Sprus CEO, VAULTED

“Right now, there are a 159,000 tons of this type of non-woven textile imported into the US. [...] Meanwhile, there's about 500,000 tons of wind turbine blades being buried in the desert in Texas. We want to take this material, remake it locally, and sell it back into the value chain.”

Mitchell Anderson CEO and Co-Founder, Verretex

"We use a lot of machine learning because it's super powerful. It's an extraordinary thing. We train these models to be able to analyze enormous amounts of very disparate kinds of datasets. But I want to say that anybody that tells you that we need AI to solve climate change is talking nonsense. We know what decarbonization looks like, and the hard trade-offs that we have to make are trade-offs in our values."

John E. Fernandez Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and Building Technology, MIT
Co-founder, MIT Environmental Research and Action

“[We're] creating a network of local editors around the world who leverage LLMs to transform articles into their local languages and formats. Imagine taking a 1,500-word story on best practices for increasing tree survival rates or the livelihood benefits of a temporary fisheries closure, and having it transformed into a series of 90-second audio messages in Nigerian Pidgin, or radio scripts in Tagalog.”

Rhett Butler Founder and CEO, Mongabay

“A lot of the delays in infrastructure projects are linked to processes that are still paper-based and fragmented, and you have to deliver that to all these different authorities. [...] How wonderful would it be to have a one-stop shop? How wonderful would it be if they transferred all this information amongst each other? So I see a lot of promise in the rollout of AI, a lot of promise in the rollout of automation.”

Annika Brack Head of Global Political Affairs, Hitachi Energy

“We often talk about AI as if it exists somewhere in the cloud, but the cloud is very physical. Every AI model, including data centers, use electricity, water, land, physical infrastructure, and so on. The question is not really how do we stop AI, because it has a lot of potential benefits, but it's about responsible stewardship. Can we design the growth of AI so that digital progress does not come at the expense of basic resources that people need?”

Sheila Jagannathan Senior Advisor on Skilling, World Bank and African Development Bank

“We need all of the technology [to be] easy to understand and to use for the incident commander so they can take decisions. Nowadays, there is so much information that these people that are in charge of leading the fire response are being mentally overloaded. [...] We use satellites, we use cameras, we use drones, and combine all of that with AI so we can give an easier solution to the problem. [...] But there is nothing without the response.”

Franco Rodríguez Viau CEO, Satellites on Fire