TRANSCRIPT
Neil White:
Okay, welcome everyone, and thank you for being here. I'm Neil White, assistant professor of economics here at Amherst, and it's a tremendous honor to introduce this afternoon speaker, international business leader, author and trailblazing advocate for corporate responsibility, Paul Polman. During a career in corporate leadership, including a CEO of Unilever from 2009 to 2019, Mr. Polman has been an innovator in demonstrating that business can profit through purpose, and that responsible business models can go hand in hand with strong performance. During his years at Unilever, he raised top and bottom line growth and increased shareholder returns by 290%, while the company consistently ranked first in the world for sustainability and was recognized as one of the best places to work. Today, working at the intersection of global business, government and civil society across a range of organizations and initiatives, he's helping to define a new era of responsible capitalism dedicated to speeding global action toward a nature positive and net-zero future.
Focused on building coalitions within industries such as fashion and food, his efforts have included leading the UN global compact and serving as an ambassador for the Race to Zero and the Race to Resilience, two UN backed global campaigns for climate resilience and a healthy zero carbon future. A member of the World Economic Forum's International Business Council, Mr. Polman is committed to educating present and future leaders to take on the toughest challenges facing society today. He's co-author with sustainability expert Andrew Winston of Net Positive How courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More than They Take, named a Financial Time's Best Business Book of the year in 2001. Additionally, he actively campaigns on a wide range of human rights issues, including promoting disability inclusion through the Valuable 500, a global business collective, and the Kilimanjaro Blind Trust Africa, which he co-founded and leads.
For his outstanding contributions to the pursuit of responsible business, Mr. Polman has received numerous recognitions including the National Order of the Legion of Honor, the UN Foundation's Champion for Global Change Award, the Oslo Business for Peace Award, the UN Environmental Program's Champion of the Earth Award, and appointment as the knight of the Order of the British Empire. So for his talk entitled Net Positive and Why the World Needs Courageous Leadership, please join me in welcoming to Amherst, Paul Polman.
Paul Polman:
Thank you, Neil. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Thanks everybody. The only thing I have to correct, the book was not 2001, 2021. Sorry about that. It's a direct result of Covid. We had to do something to make use of our time. By the way, I never wanted to write a book. I always felt if you write a book, many of the CEOs that write their books, it's either to rewrite history or to stroke their image, and both of them were not very appealing to me. But I was finally talked into it. I'll talk about that in a minute. I'm actually from the Netherlands, so I hope you can understand my accent. But very happy to be here. It's a beautiful campus, obviously. Congratulations to all the parents or the students that are graduating. It's an incredible moment, but also a privilege to be able to go to an institution like this.
And if you do, it's important that you use it wisely because the world needs it. I was at three talks, because there are quite a lot of talks going on, and it's quite interesting, but I looked at Elizabeth's talk, which was actually here this morning, talking about the on Anthropo theme, which is really the, in simple terms, a term that is being used for, now for the first time, humans controlling the fate of the earth and deciding its destiny. We're basically at that point now. We've done so much to it, in some positive senses, but also in some negative senses, that we're now in charge of our own destiny. And then I went to a talk with Steven just now from Moderna, where if you face a crisis, in this case the Covid crisis, which frankly is a direct result of humans destroying biodiversity, it's so zoontic disease like SARS, Ebola, Zika or Asian Flu or many of the others.
It should not have been a surprise, by the way. The surprise perhaps was that it was particularly nasty or that we were paralyzed by helping each other as global citizens. But the fact that we had this pandemic should not have been a surprise. But we talked about that and that's how humans, when they are faced with an immediate crisis, how quickly we rally to the high level of delivery, how we get together, and when our lives are at stake, we get focused for one reason or another and find solutions and creativity beyond anything. And then there was an incredible talk of Olexandra from Ukraine. She's a human rights activist, and I had the honor to be there in Oslo when she got the Nobel Peace Prize with some other people together. But she talked about the human rights, too many people being left behind.
And I think these three things are very closely related. What we do with this planet, how quickly we can act if we are faced with a disaster, but also how important it is that we make sure that it works for everybody. That we cannot have a system where too many people are left behind. It's never going to work. I'll talk about that in a minute. But anyway, glad to be here, and I felt really at home coming here. First of all, my good friend DMac was who's in the board here, made the recommendation, and I certainly don't regret that. It's really an honor to see what you have created here over 200 years. But also the philosophy of how you educate in these liberal arts colleges. We've moved away from that in most education unfortunately. But being here and seeing the diversity and seeing your motto or your vision to do that in a more sustainable, more equitable, more inclusive way, and providing that in an education that really is accessible to all, is quite something unique.
It's not something that's given or that you will find in many places in the world. So it is no surprise to me to see so many great leaders coming out of this institution, and hopefully go on to greatness in terms of what you need in the world. I was also pleased to see what you did at the university itself and trying to become carbon-neutral, and having your wildlife reserve, and bringing in some of these courses in the center of your curriculum is the right way to do. I think one of the main challenges that we have, that we can talk a little bit later, is actually a challenge of leadership more than anything else. I was talking to [inaudible 00:06:47] who runs the Aspen Institute, and they had done a study of people going to college, and the most followed course at universities is actually the business course.
Even the people that study medicine or engineering or whatever, they'll take some business courses because they all want to be an entrepreneur or start for themselves. 70 million people a year take business courses. And he was interviewing the people going to college and why they were going to college and taking these business courses, and their answer was always universally aligned, "We want to change the world, we want to make a difference." And then they were interviewing the same people when they finished college and their answers were also more or less aligned, "We want to work for Goldman Sachs and we want to make a lot of money." So somehow in our educational program there's something that goes wrong. How we create from these wonderful human beings, little Milton Friedmans on steroids. And that's probably the simple but accurate description of what we're doing. So the need to change management education at scale is a very important thing.
One of the things we're doing with our book, Net Positive, is work with about 30 universities intensively to change some of the universities here in the US as well, and about 886 universities in a broader coalition. But we frankly, whilst that is needed and an absolute must, and you are probably more on the foreground of that than anything else, it's also unfortunately we don't have the luxury of time to wait that long for these leaders to get in the more senior levels of leadership in the world. I came from London yesterday and I was at the airport, and I saw three guys in the corner there talking and having an animated discussion. I know my mother always said, it's very unpolite to listen in, but I know you do so I don't have a problem sharing that with you. But I quickly found out that they were bragging, probably what three guys do when they are together anyway. And I found out that one of them was a doctor, the other one was an engineer and the other one was an economist and the doctor was bragging that they had the oldest profession.
He said, "If you look at the Book of Genesis, and Eve came out of the rib of Adam, both of the patients survived. That probably was the first successful operation. We have, the oldest profession." So the engineer said, "No, no, I don't think so. I think we have the oldest profession because there was chaos and we created the universe, everything turning around each other. So we made from chaos order, and that is what engineers do. So engineers probably have the oldest profession." The economist raise this hands and say, "I don't think so. I think we have the oldest profession because who created chaos in the first place?" And I think that's exactly a little bit where we are right now. It's not an easy time to be around, to borrow some words that are very actively used is poorly crisis and perma crisis.
A poorly crisis is when many things come together of magnitude that disturb, and the perma crisis is that they actually interact with each other and probably create a bigger crisis for an extended period of time. It's difficult to be a CEO. Anybody who is a CEO right now and DMac has been an amazing CEO, but if you talk to CEOs, there's more that is being thrown at you than at any time in the history. You think you're out of something and something else pops up, and at a time that frankly not many things seem to be functioning, and I personally believe it's all related. It's not a coincidence that is happening, and we're at the cusp, if you want to offer major change that requires us all to change. The biggest issues that we have in the world to face, in my opinion at least where I focus on all the time, first and foremost, is climate changes and inequality.
And they're both, again, closely related. I'll tell you in a minute. But on climate change now people have just published again reports and science has spoken again, and you might like it or not, but in this case about 97 or 98% of the scientists are aligned that we have a serious issue here, and in the next few years, most likely or not, will we pass the one and a half degrees warming in Celsius [inaudible 00:11:13] It's well known track to go to two and a half, three degrees. We're supposed to lower our carbon emissions by about 45% this decade if we want to have any chance to have a decent life on earth with some probability. But we're actually going up still 14%. So the data are not really our friend. The direction is not really very good. This morning I woke up at three in the morning because in Europe it's nine o'clock, so don't feel sorry for me.
I'm trying to stay at European time. But I was watching the news and flipping channels as you do, but All State came on, one of your insurance companies, they've just decided today was big enough to be on the news, not to insure any houses anymore in California. And with the fires you've had there, with the natural disasters, it's not worth it for them anymore. But think about a world and this is the beginning of something that will be much bigger and much faster than you think. Think About a world where you don't have insurance anymore.
It frankly doesn't function. Where the risks are not shared, then investments will not flow. You'll have ripple effects coming out of that much bigger than this little announcement that is there. And the same on inequality. Are not doing so much better. On inequality, we still have about, in this wonderful world of 8 billion people, we have over 4 billion people still living on less than $5.50 a day. And I don't know if you've ever tried to live on $5.50 a day, but it didn't buy me a muffin this morning at the local store around the corner.
So it's not that easy. And if you look at what happened since Covid, even. In the time since Covid, we've actually added 43 trillion to the global economy with all the spending that we pumped in again to save lives and livelihoods and all the other things. But actually if you look at that, two-thirds of that wealth that was created again since Covid went to less than 1% of the global population, so you still have the 1% having a wealth now that is more than the bottom 60%. So as I mentioned before, any system where too many people feel they're excluded or not fully participating will ultimately rebel against itself. And that's really what you're seeing happening in different manifestations of that. Obviously it undermines democracy. You've seen it in this country as well. It's a very difficult thing. Not only the money that has entered politics, but how politics is being manipulated.
You're not an exception. In fact, since Covid in the indexes that we run at the UN, about a hundred countries, over a hundred countries actually, have seen their democracy index decline. And most countries actually have seen their middle class being eroded. There is something of a strong middle class that guarantees democracies. If that gets eroded, your democracy most likely gets eroded as well. So it's a serious issue. Then on top of that, you get your social media, et cetera, which frankly helps, the more we understand it, despite it's positive benefits that some are eager to celebrate, it seems to have more negative consequences than really were intended, than we thought, and it's undermining even more so that social fabric of society. And again, I don't have to tell you that here, but it's estimates in different parts of, the rest of the countries that I deal with.
Now, most people actually say, also in this country, the current way of what you might call capitalism, if you just use it as a word without getting emotional, it's frankly not working anymore. When Franklin Roosevelt had the new deal, he bent it. You got wonderful things here like social security or healthcare and some other things, and you went into a wonderful period of economic growth. So not to get hang up on the word, but if the environment in which we live is changing so drastically, it's also important that we change and bend our economic systems and adapt it to the changing needs of the time. During the financial crisis, about 12 years ago, 13 years ago, we missed an enormous opportunity. We spent boatloads of money to rescue the banks, but we actually didn't spend any money on right-sizing our economies by making them more inclusive or making them greener.
In fact, people felt in those days that banks were too big to fail, but people were too small to matter. And the issues actually became bigger, and as these issues became bigger, you caught that polarization. In this country, very clearly manifested itself in politics, in this enormous bifurcation that we've never seen before. It's abdication of a global role, which was always very important. In the country where I live, you saw Brexit and many of the other symptoms, which we're just not in a very good state if you want to, but it's unfortunate that we missed that opportunity. 95% of CEOs now say, after Covid, "We certainly don't want to go back to where we came from." We really have to change the way we do business. We have to change the way that society is being run, recognizing the difficulties of change that need to happen, especially in the political process where it seems to be gridlocked.
I think there's a wonderful opportunity actually for business to step up and help derisk that political process to move things forward. And it would be in anybody's benefit. There are not going to be many jobs on the dead planet. In societies that suffer, businesses are not going to thrive either. So it's in all of our benefit, I believe personally, and I hope you agree with me, that it's in our benefit to make the system function. So there's a difference between uncertainty and change actually, and we're moving rapidly into a period of big change. And certainly we can deal with, we've all been trained on that. That's basically what we've done running these companies for decades. Uncertainty might be a financial crisis, might be Covid, might be a little political upset here or there, but we built that resilience into our companies to deal with that.
But when you deal with chains, it's very important that you adapt. You think about different business models, different ways of working together, different ways of creating economic systems that value what needs to be valued, or that includes what needs to be included. And we're in this period of rapid chains that is more important than ever. It can only work if there are some principles, I always believe, that guide me, and they're basically human principles, equity, compassion, dignity and respect for everybody. That should be global principles, and they actually permeate the wealth. In my job I just stopped, we were in about 190 countries and I would visit easily 40, 50 of them over a two or three year period, and a hundred of them during my tenure. But these principles are valid everywhere. They're not just American principles. Just believe me that despite some idiots running some of these countries doesn't mean that people don't want democracy or freedom or participation. Despite having an idiot in Russia, if I may use the word, doesn't mean that Russians are bad.
They have the same aspirations as you have here, and that's the same for Chinese and China or for any other country in the world. So these values permeate globally. And these are important. The other thing that is important, as we try to think of working it back, is that we see, first and foremost as citizens of planet earth, the challenges that we now face of climate change or cybersecurity or pandemics, and many of the other things, food insecurity. These are challenges that have become global and they need increasingly global solutions. They cannot be done in isolation, nor can anyone be denied, denying these challenges or feel themselves be excluded from that. In this country you have as many issues on poverty or inequality or lack of access to education as many developing countries now in the world. In fact, I had the pleasure to help develop the sustainable development goals, which very much go to the motto of your university.
These goals were developed and signed in 2015 in the UN, not far from here, in New York by 193 countries. And they basically have as a simple objective to irreversibly eradicate poverty and doing that in a more sustainable and equitable way. Not actually different than your motto here, as I said at the university. But unfortunately, although we had this wonderful plan that we all signed up to over a 15-year period between 2015 and 2030, as some of you might know, only 12% of these goals are on track. Most of them are actually falling behind. We're increasing poverty, we're increasing food insecurity, we're increasing actually inequality, also gender inequality and many other things. Very few of these numbers are actually going in the right direction. So how long can we go on before it explodes in our face? I think it would be a shame to wait for that, but the signs are already there. And we've always looked at planetary boundaries.
Johan Rockström, with the Stockholm Resilience Institute defined nine boundaries of our planet, for the health of our planet, but we never really married that with humanitarian boundaries. And these humanitarian boundaries are actually much more fragile than the planetary boundaries. This wonderful world is 4.3 billion years old. If I put it at a scale of 43 years, just to keep it simple, human beings have only been around for four hours. The industrial revolution only started one minute ago. And in that one minute we cut down half the world's forests. In the last 50 years we've lost about 70% of the world's species, mammals, birds, vertebrates. When is it our turn? Last year, world overshoot day was July 28th, which is the day that we use more resources than the world can replenish. I will personally argue that every day after that we're actually stealing from future generations.
We're living well beyond our planetary boundaries. And you are setting the example, but the rest of the world aspires to do what you're doing. It just doesn't add up. Hubert Reeves, who is a Canadian, not far from here, across the border, said it very well when he said, "Man is the most insane species, he worships an invisible God and destroys the visible nature, not realizing that the visible nature he destroys is the invisible God he worships in the first place." Gandhi said, "What we do to the forest of this wealth is a mere reflection of what we do to ourselves." It comes from this notion that there is no separation between nature and humans. In fact, the soil or hummus has the same derivation as humans itself. We are part of the soil. If we see ourselves separate from nature and think we have that dominion and the right to destroy, in that process, we're actually destroying ourselves.
That probably is one of the biggest challenges that we have, that realization that needs to happen, that we are actually not just connected, we are actually the same. Unfortunately living more and more in cities, 70% of the world population now basically encircled by concrete, makes us father removed from nature, and every kid in school will not know the difference any more between a cucumber and an aubergine, if you ask them. Don't even know where apples come from. From factories, they'll probably answer. Then we think we're more connected, and that we like each other more, and we have a thousand likes or a hundred followers. But you know, the average American has only one real friend they can talk to. You've just declared loneliness, one of the biggest pandemics that that needs to be attacked. In the UK, they actually appointed a minister of loneliness. Whilst we think we are more connected with farther removed from each other and from nature, and that's the essence of the challenge that we need to overcome, not the technologies, et cetera.
Some people think technology will solve everything. Bill Gates writes wonderful books that if there's a problem, we'll throw technology on it and a little bit of money, and lo and behold we solve it. But I don't buy that anymore. Because if technology was that simple a solution to all of these problems, and lo and behold we need it, but if that was that simple solution, why do we have now nearly a billion people going to bed hungry not knowing if they wake up the next day? Why do we see homeless going up? Why do we have such a destruction of biodiversity to produce our food which is totally not needed? Why do we have so many, one and a half billion people, still open defecating. We know how to make a toilet. It's a simple technology. So it's not really technology that gives the answer to these problems.
It's the way we are connecting to each other, the way we connect to nature and what we want it to be. Do we want it to be a me world? Do we want it to be a we world? Do we want it to be an our world? Our including future generations? It's basically a choice, some mindset thing more than anything else. It's not technology. So anyway, it's very clear that our linear extractive production model has come to an end. So people are starting to understand that, as I say, and there are a lot of good things happening. We shouldn't get too despaired. The governments are actually moving. In this country despite this paralysis with the infrastructure act, the chip act, the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, there are actually quite some good pieces of legislation to accelerate the chains to a more greener, more sustainable environment.
In fact, they are game changers. Even in the states that are very Republican where some of the governors or senators are attacking woke, wokeism, or where they believe a term like ESG, which is just three words should be banned from any decisions and in investments, et cetera. They were the ones most actively running around Davos trying to attract European businesses to set up in their states the battery factories or solar capacity, because they see where it is going. Manchin from, where is he from? Virginia, he's from Virginia, state of Virginia. He signed the IRA because he could see the investments that were coming into his state for alternative energy. If you're not on that wave right now and positioning your company for that better greener future, you are increasingly positioning yourself of being out of business. So more companies are moving than you think.
In Europe we have the European green deal, we have the European taxonomy. China's five-year plan, they work in five year plans, is actually very progressive. When people say China doesn't do anything or they build a coal plant, don't go by the sound bites. 99% of the electric buses are in China. 60% of the solar panels that are being produced. They have actually more technology in this area than other countries combined. These people are moving very fast. They're more driven actually by the scarce resources than they have, than the mentality that has crept into our Western way of thinking. So the world is moving. In fact, 91% of carbon emissions is with governments that have made net-zero commitments. So they've made commitments. If they do it as a different thing, but they have made commitments to decarbonize their global economies, and that is really what was the agreement in the Paris Accord.
Companies are moving. In fact, we were in Glasgow at the COP 26 two years ago and we had about a thousand companies signing up to what is called science-based targets for climate where they committed to decarbonize in line again with the one and a half degrees, which means a reduction by half between now and 2030 and a full reduction between 2030 and 2050. That was a thousand companies, many big companies. Microsoft even went further. Microsoft said, were not only going to decarbonize moving forward, we're actually going to take carbon out of the air since we started the company in 1976. So they're actually going, what I would call, carbon positive. We take out more than we put in. So that was a thousand companies then, that has moved to 4,000 companies now. 38 trillion dollars of capital. So companies are moving, there's no question about that.
The financial market is moving. The financial market now has about half of their assets on the management, have made commitments to decarbonize their portfolios. You might hear less from Larry Fink right now in the US on BlackRock because of the attacks from the political side, and it's better to stay quiet is his strategy. But in essence, what they are doing and where they're putting their money, they're deploying it now quite significantly differently than they were four or five years ago. In fact, this is the first year, the data just came out this morning, that investments in green energy that has been heavily supported by the financial market obviously, is 1.7 times the investment in fossil fuel. For the first time the investments in this country that have been made in solar panels, IRA, having something to do with it, but the investment has surpassed the investments that you make in fossil.
We still invest too much in fossil. There's no excuse. We still have to find compromises sometimes to get the political parties to move forward like you just did in Alaska by allowing drilling. It's all regrettable, but I understand the realities of the political process to make things happen. But on an aggregate basis you have started to see a shift. And people are moving. The is a clear difference between the baby boomers or the millennial or the GenZ generations in terms of what they buy and why they buy and how they spend their money. You see it especially in their choice on for which companies they want to work with.
With one of my foundations, we ran a study a few weeks ago amongst 4,000 people in the US and in the UK. We just wanted to limit it there, partly because I only had limited funds to do it, but I thought it was enough to get the database. And what we found out was the numbers go up for millennials and Gen Z and Gen Y, but what we found out was that 75% of people now looking for jobs want to only work for companies that are aligned with their own values.
They expect companies to be part of the solutions to these challenges in society, not to hide behind whatever excuse to not be part. But here is the crunch. Half of them think that the CEOs are not seriously committed. They say the things but they don't do the things. 30% have deliberately left the company because of that and 50% is considering doing that. So we called it conscious quitting. It's probably the biggest ticking time bomb that CEOs are sitting on. We did that study because we wanted to galvanize CEOs in a little bit faster action, but it was the most trending study on LinkedIn when that came out. And the discussions were this enormous where everybody chipped in. LinkedIn is obviously being an employment side, sort of, of how many people actually shared their stories of conscious quitting. So if you don't adapt as a company, if you don't start to change your business models, I think you're really playing with fire.
You put your business models at serious risks of survival. In fact, I would argue you are already heading for the graveyard of dinosaurs. So the main reason that we see this moving is not only all these policies or some responsible companies that have seen the light on the road to Damascus, but it's actually because the economics are starting to work for us. By not having attacked these issues at the speed that was really required by having taken the lazy route versus the proactive route. The easy road to walk fast is the little bit more difficult route to discover. We are actually at a point now that the cost of not acting is becoming significantly higher than the cost of acting. And that's true for everything. Our food system, which leads on the one hand to deforestation keeping farmers poor, stunted children, 30, 40% food waste, obesity on the other side.
In fact, half of our world population is either undernourished or over nourished, and yet we waste 30, 40% of the food. We keep farmers very poor. Even in my own native country, the average salary of a farmer, average income of farmer is 30,000 euros, $30,000. We can't [inaudible 00:32:22] with that in the Netherlands anymore. Most of the people that have subsistence are actually mono crop farmers. So that cost to our economic system is $12 trillion. 12 trillion dollars because of not getting the air that we need, the water that we need, the nutrients that we want, the cost to our healthcare systems, people dying prematurely as a result of that. Life expectancy is actually going down increasingly because of also the obesity, diabetes too, and all these related issues. The cost of that to society is 12 trillion dollars. Yet you only have to spend 150 billion a year, which used to be a lot, but you only have to send 150 billion to move that around and move to regenerative agriculture.
There are leaders and companies that do that like Cargill and others, but we need to do that at scale for the world to get there. If we make our agricultural system regenerative and convert that, then we have a 4 trillion positive benefit. I have a farm myself, my wife is there now. That's why she isn't coming because the 300 cows don't let her disappear, but we're moving to regenerative agriculture quite fast. That's why we wanted to buy it. It just really goes to that experience and see it. But it really results. If you overcome these initial investments, your soil is healthier, the crop is more weather resistant with these changing weather patterns, the yield is higher. You have to put less input into your land, no more herbicides or pesticides. So it makes sense. But who's going to pay for that transition? Who's taking that risk in as you go through that process?
The average age of a farmer now, in most places in the world, is 57 years old. He only has about five or 10 seasons left. He's not going to take the risk himself if we don't help. But the cost of not acting is higher than the cost of acting. And that is true for all of the development goals, the sustainable development goals. It takes 240 years across the world to give women the same rights as men at the current pace that we're going. If women would have the same access to financing education and land rights, just to take those three, we would unlock the global economy by over $25 trillion. Especially in places like Africa, it would actually solve the food security issue just by giving women the opportunities to be the farmers. The cost of not acting is higher than the cost of acting.
So that makes it an enormously attractive opportunity. And what I say to everybody is, also the business community, if you see that and if you start to understand that, internalize these issues, and put them at the center of your business plans, you are probably sitting on the biggest business opportunity that we've had in the history of mankind. I don't like to talk about Unilever, which I ran for 10 years. It's about a 55 billion company and, as I said, 190 countries, we had millions of people working for us mostly in the food and brands like Ben and Jerry's or Lipton and all that, but also in the personal care brands like Dove or [inaudible 00:35:38] and all the other products that you have. But we started to put these sustainable development goals at the core of our strategy. It required us to move to a longer term model to stop this nonsense of quarterly reporting and the rat race of Wall Street.
And to think about a multi-stakeholder model. And doing that is not easy to do, there's no question about it, but it certainly helped us build a growing business and a shareholder return for the longer term shareholders that was much bigger than they otherwise would have gotten. We became the number two company, looked up on LinkedIn for employment after, sorry, number three company after Google and Apple. We couldn't understand that because we were not an individual brand name, but it got over 2 million people applying to us every year. So we didn't have a problem on the scarcity of talent. We saw the engagement scores going up to the top [inaudible 00:36:30] of people working in the company. Because they want to work on something that is bigger than just making money. And I, a hundred percent convinced that all that added up, not only in lower costs, not only in better relationships in our value chains, or with our communities, or the more motivated employees just to feel good about it, but ultimately that all added up in drivers for the better results of the company.
So it is a value driver. There's some great work that not far from here at Harvard, George Sarasan has done, which he calls the weighted impact accounts. He's looked at 5,000 companies, many of them in the US, because it's easier to have the data and the availability of data. And he looked at companies and he ranked them by industry to make them comparable. Think about shipping or airlines or food or fashion. And within that he checked which companies were more aggressively reducing their negative externalities versus other companies. And what he found in sector by sector, by sector that the companies as a sector, there are always exceptions, but the companies as a sector that more aggressively were fighting climate change, that were ensuring there were human rights in their value chains, that paid their people decent wages. All the things that shareholder primacy might say, don't take the initiative on that, wait for the laws to change.
But all those companies that took that initiative themselves, and were on the foreground of reducing these negative externalities, also had a higher market value. So it tells you that even though the accounting systems are not quite adjusted to this yet, that there are enough elements in the financial market that are smart enough to start factoring that in already. It really is good business. So why we wrote this book in fact, is to really change the mindset. So it's not really a book for me, it's really a movement of mindset change and that is also what we are doing. It was the second bestselling book in Harvard last year and it's translated already in 14 languages. And it certainly came at the right time. It's a very simple how book, because most of the CEOs know the whys, but they struggle with the hows. And the how is as much about leadership as what you do within your company, what you do collectively in your industry, and what you do to drive the broader systems changes.
It's also about some of these tougher calls. How do you deal with CEO salaries, with money and politics, with corruption, with human rights, with trade association sometimes advocating different things than you stand for as a company. So we don't shy away from trying to cover all of this to create a higher level of awareness, not giving answers to all of that, but sensitizing the CEOs to the important roles that they have to play and trying to help move to this more inclusive, more sustainable system. We ask ourselves a very simple question in the book, which is, "How can companies profit from solving the world's problems not creating them? And is the world better off because your company is in it? Yes or no?" The premise being very simple, if your company makes this a better world, then people will let you be around. If you solve more issues than you create them, then people will embrace you.
Not different from friendships at a human level. But most companies are not there, even in their thinking. Most companies, if you look at their sustainability reports, 95% of the companies issue their sustainability reports now. They will talk about less plastics in the ocean, a little bit less carbon emission, a little bit less deforestation in my value chain. But it's all about being less bad. When world overshoot day is July 28th, as I mentioned, when we are already living well beyond these planetary boundaries, less bad is simply not good enough anymore. I apologize for the example if it offends you, but I used to murder 10 people, now I only murder five people. I'm not a better murderer. It just doesn't work that way. Unless we change our mindsets from starting to think less bad to starting to think regenerative, restorative, reparative, we won't get there.
We have to make that mindset change. And that is what we're trying to do with that book Net Positive. How to create these restorative companies, companies that move to regenerative agriculture, that take more carbon out of the air. Companies like Pepsi that want to be net positive on water or agriculture by the way. So it's a mindset shift that needs to happen. It's not easy. For us a net positive company is a company that, first and foremost, takes responsibilities of its total impact in the world. Many companies still think that they can outsource their value chain and also outsource their responsibilities. That doesn't work anymore. I work now with 76 companies in fashion to create a coalition of fashion companies together, and they very much still think that whatever happens in the value chain or in Bangladesh or in Vietnam is not their problem. As long as they can buy a shirt one penny cheaper here than there, they'll move it around, partly because many of these factories produce 10 brands in the same factory and they don't want you to know about it. But it doesn't work anymore.
Net positive companies take responsibility for their total impact. I've always felt that. But that needs to get through at the highest level in these companies. Net positive companies work for all of the stakeholders. If you want to solve these issues of significance, you cannot solve that in the rat race of quarterly profits. These issues will take time to solve. And the beauty if you run a long-term business model is that you can also better balance the interest of all of your stakeholders. And all of your stakeholders are not only your employees or your suppliers or your communities in which you work or your shareholders, but they're also planet earth. And actually the most important stakeholder, that never gets a voice, is never present in the meeting, is actually the future generations. So that's how you have to run your business. I bought a company here once in the US without doing much due diligence.
It's called Seventh Generation. They're in Burlington for [inaudible 00:42:35] not far from here, next to Ben and Jerry's, actually. The reason I bought them was I wanted to get associated with them was is... In fact we called them and said, we want to help you because the more successful you are, the tougher time you will give to P&G, which we didn't like. So it was a little bit the enemy of the enemy is your friend type thing. So we are competitive, don't miss under estimate that. But we said, tell us how we can help you be more successful. And they came back and said, the best way you can help us is make us part of Unilever. So they were actually asking us to buy them. And all the decisions they take in that company is that they think seven generations ahead. Would this decision make sense for seven generations ahead?
So think about it. I thought it was so powerful. That alone to me was enough. And that brand is doing extremely well and is very well positioned for what we need in the world. But anyway, a net positive company, not only total impact, not only all stakeholders, but also sees the shareholder results as a result of what they do, not as a myopic objective obviously. And and last but not least, and more importantly, these are companies that actually understand that they have to work on something bigger than their own self-interest. They're actively involved in driving the broader system change that society needs. The challenges that we now try to solve within a system that is not designed to deliver anymore is lunacy. The reason that you see that we're feeling that we're running faster and harder and harder, yet the numbers are slipping away from us, is that we're trying to optimize within a system that is not designed to deliver anymore.
What will it take to move financial markets to the longer term? What will it take to make our multilateral institutions work again? What will it take to not only measure the success on financial capital, but also the success on human, social or environmental capital? These are major systems changes that need to happen in society. Take a price on carbon. We don't treasure what we don't measure. That's one of the reasons we just squander it as if we don't care. It doesn't work anymore. Some people call that the tragedies of the commons. But to address those, you need to have these major systems changes in society. And they come at a time, frankly, when politicians are not equipped, not talk to each other, and have a horizon of thinking that is probably less long than their nose, going from election cycle to election cycle. So my argument is very simple.
You don't need to change the whole world. You don't need to convince the whole world. Like on anything, you need to put the right people together to drive tipping points. So the whole strategy becomes who are those right people and how can we drive tipping points? When I entered Unilever, I had been the CFO of a company called Nestle, and I was running the Americas at the same time because I liked that. And they were in the ice cream business. They still are. Then I came to Unilever and I discovered the ice cream business. By the way, both of them didn't know how to run an ice cream business. That was a different thing. But then it dawned on me, they have these ice cream cabinets, and then I called Indra Nooyi from Pepsi and Muhtar Kent, at that time, from Coke, because they had the beverage cabinets.
So the four of us were sitting in a room and we said, "Wouldn't it be nice if we would change all the engines that keep these cabinets cool to natural refrigerants? Instead of HFC and CFC and creating global warming, why not work together and create a new engine that is made of natural refrigerators and doesn't have emissions?" We did, and they've changed these cabinets a bit by bit. You don't have to do it overnight because that's financially not possible, but over a 10-year period you can change it. That's 3% of global warming that you just saved. But it's four people. Doesn't take that much. In my opinion, if you take State Street or Fidelity or BlackRock or the Japanese Investment Fund and one or two others together, you probably have capital in the room that represents seven to 10% of every company on earth that is publicly traded.
If these people go to the toilet, the rest will notice. If they say we're going to the longer term, we're going to change the incentive system, the changes will happen. So you need to focus on tipping points. And that's probably the most important thing that we are currently working on. As a CEO, what I felt after 10 years as well, it was time to move on because I discovered more and more that although we were using Unilever to drive some of these transformative changes like these ice cream cabinets, or deforestation on palm oil in Indonesia, or some of the other areas, I still felt the limitations of the time you invest, your competitors that don't want to participate, the lack of trust that is there towards companies that show up. And that's obviously your currency. You need to work together. So we created a new organization, foundation structures that entirely work on bringing these industry collectives together, in fashion, in food, in tourist and travel, in the built environment, in the energy transition. Because these are the major elements actually that are influencing the sustainable development goals.
Now we've talked, I'll wrap up here because for the interest of time, but we've talked about climate change or food insecurity or inequality, but frankly I believe, and what I'm trying to tell you is that these are actually systems failures. These are signs of a deeper issue that we have. These are symptoms. These are not the real issue. Many people would argue that the real issue is greed, is apathy, it's selfishness, that we just don't have the right leaders in the world anymore. They're exceptions, but we don't have them anymore at critical mass to take the courage to [inaudible 00:48:41] these things. That's why we call the book How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take. I like the word courageous, because courageous companies, by the way, are made up of courageous leaders. You cannot be a sustainable company if you're not sustainable yourself.
You cannot be a purpose driven company if you don't have a purpose yourself. Likewise, you cannot love someone else really, truly if you don't love yourself. So you have to, if you want to have the systems change and you want to have these courageous companies that set the tone, if you want to, you need to have the leaders be courageous. And for us, I like the word courageous because it comes from the French word [foreign language 00:49:21] which is the heart. We basically have lost humanity in business. Everything is spreadsheets, win lose, computers, and now with AI it's going to get worse, it's not going to get better. But that's how we run the world now. We've lost humanity. We've lost actually what this is all about. I've been now for the last 30 years, I was in Rio, in Rio plus 20.
With the UN, I still chair the UN Global Compact, and we talk climate change now for, this is the COP 28 starting to happen in the Middle East and in the UAE, but we've been at it for 30 years. We still don't have an agreement that we need to get out of fossil fuel. And it's because we talk all these technicalities, we talk all these things in abstract. People just can't follow it. It doesn't relate to them. But if we would bring the humanity back into all of this, it probably will resonate with people. The beauty of you are [inaudible 00:50:18] and [inaudible 00:50:18] anything that goes through the heart will stick to the brain. Anything that just goes in the brain goes straight out again. That's the problem also with our ability to act. When we have an urgent crisis, it affects us. When it is a little bit away, our brain works differently.
We understand the issue, but it's somehow we see it in third person. It's not me anymore, it's someone else. It's farther removed. But so we have to bring that back to the human side of all of these things. It's not about food security, it's about people going to bed hungry. Could have been you, could have been me. So courageous leaders for us are the ones that take that responsibility, are actually leaders that set targets in line with science. Many of the businesses set targets they can get away with. But I always felt if this is what science tells you what you need, set those targets. But people feel very uncomfortable to set targets for which they don't have the answers. I'm actually of the opposite opinion. If you have the answers already, or if you don't feel uncomfortable, your targets are not aggressive enough. At a time that we need aggressive targets, they should make you feel uncomfortable.
Most likely you won't have all the answers. That's the leadership we need. You need to feel comfortable with that. It also means that you have to embrace partnerships. Many of the CEOs have a problem with that, because if you embrace partnerships, and we've done many of them, you have to sometimes listen to the inconvenient truth. You have to compromise. You have to be sure that others are represented. I can only tell you that the end product is much more robust, it's much better over time, and it's much more ingrained than in society or even in your companies if you get to these points. And obviously it needs trust. Trust is probably the biggest currency that we're after here. That comes from that honesty, that humility, that humanity, that comes from that transparency. So that's the leaders we need. We call them courageous leaders. What we've seen in Covid is interesting.
We've seen a bifurcation of companies, where companies that were multi-stakeholder, longer term, purpose driven, actually tended to do better than companies that were not. Then we also saw a bifurcation on leadership. All of a sudden we saw that some of these leadership skills, obviously you always need some leadership skills of hard work, a certain level of integrity and smartness. I don't think they will ever go away. But there is another leadership skill that came to the foreground. All of a sudden you saw people with a higher level of humility, humanity, empathy, compassion, more purpose-driven, embracing these partnerships, thinking multi-generational. These people actually came to the foreground. Because in a time of enormous angst and mental issues, stress, we've never been at such high levels. And Covid was obviously at a boiling level, if you want to. They were the ones that instilled that level of trust or confidence.
They were the ones you wanted to follow if you were in these companies, and unlocked that hidden potential that makes companies ultimately successful. So that bifurcation of leadership came very much through for the first time as well. That's why I am not so worried. I wish it would go faster that you will see more women in senior leadership positions. It's actually starting to happen in the US now. Takes a little bit of time because there was a big vacuum, but you now actually see more CEOs, more of the major companies and role models for others coming in.
And that's the same in Europe as well. Because many of these skill sets, people like Peter [inaudible 00:53:47] at MIT, et cetera, would argue are more conducive to women than they would be to men. And I tend to believe that. One of my conditions when I came into Unilever where our board was six white men, and six white men from the Netherlands and six white men from the UK, because we were an Anglo Dutch company, and they were trying to convince me that this was very diverse because they could could never agree.
They could never agree. So that was the definition of diversity. But my only condition coming into that wonderful company was to be sure that we had 50% women and 50% men on the board, and that there was diversity. I had the first black woman from Harvard [inaudible 00:54:27] on the board, two from Africa, three from the far east, in fact one Chinese. And that was probably the best thing that happened to me to get that support, but also that diversity and these insights as we were going onto this direction that nobody else had walked. So that's basically what I would call the courageous leadership that I wanted to talk about. I think I'm going to stop here, and I think my point is here is a little bit what [inaudible 00:55:07] said. He was a Nobel Prize winner from Africa, from Kenya actually.
And Kenyata. I just came from Kenya last week and I saw the former president. Actually, he did his studies at Amherst as well. I didn't know that, but he was very proud to be there. I said, "Come along if you're so proud." But clearly he wasn't as proud as I was because I'm here now and he isn't. But anyway, [inaudible 00:55:30] comes from the same country. He said it very well when he said that, "There comes a time in history when man is called upon to drive to a higher level of consciousness, a higher moral ground." And I hope from what we've talked today, that that time is now. So I'll end here and open it up for questions. Thank you. Go ahead.
Neil White:
I think real quick, we want to let people go if you need to go to other events, because we're over time, but we'll stick around and still ask questions informally. But I think some of the staff might need to go as well. Go ahead.
Speaker 3:
So my question is thinking about say Jane Frazier, Citibank and net-zero carbon emissions by 2020. Think about the rise of ESG, especially in Europe and KPIs. What is being done, if anything, to monitor these companies progress towards these initiatives, the performance indicators and everything else, so that we can measure either that they're holding up to their objectives-
Paul Polman:
Absolutely.
Speaker 3:
... or they're actually slipping.
Paul Polman:
Absolutely. And obviously you've heard about Green washing, you've heard about Green hushing, you've heard about the wokeism and all that. And there's probably some truth in all of it. In fact, the more we say things and don't do things, we give ammunition to people that have a self-interest to keep the status quo. So it's not a black and white story. But what I remind people of is that about 10 years ago, the word ESG didn't even exist. People didn't know what we were talking about. When there are a thousand flowers blooming, there are also different debates of how do you measure things. We're talking about some of the things that are difficult to measure, that are probably not totally transparent. And so how do you measure human rights? And we can have discussions about that. I think a lot of it can be measured, but there might be difference of opinion on how you do it that slow us down.
So this is not easy what we're doing. But what we have seen now is increasingly so is with technology, we have much more transparency. We can now see with all the satellites where the methane is and the methane emission, we can see deforestation on the square meter in the world now. We can overlap that with concessions, and we know exactly what is happening where. So we've seen technology give us far more. We can take soil samples and know what the biodiversity of the region is now. We've invested in some companies with that. And so it's all possible now so. Far more is possible than people make you believe. But I think the legislators are moving in as well. And increasingly you see Europe actually becoming the standard setter, also for the US because Europe is simply saying, if you want to do business in Europe and you are above a certain size, that's the standard you need to have.
Europe is now doing a border adjustment on carbon as well. So you get a price. So the US doesn't want a price on carbon. I went to the US with Ted Halberstadt, had the Baker Schultz proposition. I've been to Washington many times to convince them that this was a right thing to do. In fact, they were very close to doing it just before Obama got elected. But then it became political, and unfortunately climate change should never have been political, like inequality. I'm not Democrat or Republican, I'm a Dutchman. So everybody thinks all we do is smoke dope and dream.
So I never take a political side, because what I'm trying to do is depoliticize those issues that are really issues that concern us all, where the science should talk. Once you undermine the science, which is starting to happen here and in many other places, then nothing works anymore, in fact. So fortunately we can mesh a lot of things, and Europe is becoming the standard center. There's an important piece of legislation in Europe now, which is called the Corporate Sustainable Reporting Directive. There's some work with the sustainable standard board from the [inaudible 00:59:19]That's what the SCC, where some people complain, but that's where the SCC is now getting the disclosure standards. So I think these standards will go up. And where the standards are still missing, and they're going up very fast. And where these standards of reporting are still missing, I always advise to companies for the more obvious things, it's better to do it than not to do it.
Some companies say there's so much legislation I always run behind, I can't keep up. My answer to them is try to just be thinking like you do on business also. What is happening? It's so transparent. Run ahead. Microbeads were bad. So we all had microbeads in our products. When I came into Unilever, they said, "Well, I can't get out of microbeads because they're cheap. The consumer likes it. If we get out and competition doesn't, then we're toast," type thing. I said, "Well, sorry, we're going out of microbeads because we know they're bad." So we went out of microbes before the politicians could move. And then we said to the politicians, well stop listening to all these guys that say you can't move because we've done it. So we were getting the credit for it. And by the way, R and D came up with a solution fairly quickly when we told them it's either that or I don't need R and D.
Because for R and D to tell me what we can do is a very expensive discussion. So it's amazing. The same thing on the ingredient transparency, et cetera, "Oh, you can't do that because then everybody knows your formulas." Well, you want to know what's in your formula. That's why I think some of the products where you don't know what's in there are not very well placed for the future. And so that transparency you can see coming. You see the issues of plastic, grossly underestimated now, even the whole industry. Unfortunately, the fossil fuel industry sees that they can't tell us much anymore, but goes into your cars. Now, 20% of car sales, by the way, is electric vehicles, clearly getting to a tipping point. Like solar panels up against 60% last year, or heat pumps outs selling gas pumps now.
So there are tipping points happening, but on cars, we are really close to a tipping point also in this country. It's an infrastructure question and announcing some tipping. But they will sell less gasoline. So what are they now doing, they're going down their value chain and starting to push plastics. But already all of us are eating probably the equivalent of one credit card of plastics a week, WWF is saying now. Issues like autism and others are directly related to that now. Plastics are made of 12,000 chemicals. Most of them are not tested for safety. Burning it and dealing with that and in the recycling system is even worse, because a lot of these chemicals come free. Forever chemicals people call that. We have to ask ourselves some questions. Rachel Carlson did that in 1967 when she wrote Silent Spring. But it's time to update that book right now because we've become very good at it and tell stories around it, but it doesn't add up anymore.
But yet many companies will still say the solution is in recycling. I did the same when I was running Unilever. We set up enormous recycling systems. We took 25% recycled plastic in. We said, we'll take more plastic out of the oceans than we use, so we'll be good citizens. But the reality is, in the 10 years, the amount of plastic has tripled in the world, and recycling rates have all gone up. Every company writes about that, but it's still at 9%. We have now more plastics in the world than twice the mass of all the mammals in this world. So how much do we want it to go on? And you make that projection until 2050, it doesn't work anymore. Already in 2040, you will have more plastic in the oceans than fish. And it's not only in the plastic bottles that you see.
In fact the most toxic ones are from your garments, the polyesters, the microfibers, that enter low into the value chain, that get into the food chain very quickly. In fact, 46% of plastic in the oceans comes from our clothes. And it's stupid because with a little filter on your washing machine, you can solve it. But because we all want the lowest washing machine cost or we all want, we don't do it. Or we don't have a global agreement, we don't do it. Some of these things can be solved within a nanosecond. So that's why you need to bring them together and say, guys, because mainly guys still unfortunately, but if you don't do it or I go and call you out if you don't think it's important. There are many of them that say, honestly, now let someone else solve it. I say to them, "Fine, if that's what you believe, I respect you as a human being, but you don't mind me talking about it now."
That's the freedom I wanted to have. I've moved from what I call bought or formal authority being CEOs of these big companies to the moral authority. And I've discovered actually it's much better space to be in. To also call out the ones that don't have the courage to even say, how often have we been in the toilet sitting next to someone who makes a joke about gender equality, and that they don't care about it, and then they go out and give the most wonderful speech. We all start crying. But there's no progress. So it's time that we call these people out. It's time that we bring that transparency. And so I think it's coming, it's coming very fast actually, but my point is stay ahead of it. One of my slogans in life is it's better to make the dust than eat the dust. It really is.
Neil White:
Okay, I think we have to stop it there.
Paul Polman:
Just one question, take one the student.
Neil White:
Yeah [inaudible 01:04:39] go for it.
Speaker 4:
All right. I was hoping to get the mic just because you got to hear my singing voice.
Neil White:
Last one.
Speaker 4:
That's okay. All right. Well, That's working now. You don't want to hear me sing. Trust me. So seriously though, a two-parter, and I'll try and make it quick. What tangible operationalizable action items do you want to see political leaders make at COP 28 to help stanch the collective action problem that is carbon neutrality? Achieving it. And secondly, if there are no items, what do you hope to see as far as change on the international political front to put the right courageous leaders in place to make the change that we need for multi-generational thinking?
Paul Polman:
Yeah. So at the COP is very simple. There is something that is what is realistically possible versus what would be ideal. If you go with the ideal, I'll just talk to you, but it would not be very actionable, unfortunately right now. But at least there should be an agreement. And this is very difficult now in the UAE because we're talking the gamekeeper and the poacher there together. And there will be more fossil fuel people at this COP than non fossil fuel people at this COP. So unfortunately, I'll let this cop. So unfortunately with this process of moving from place to place, it has also been hijacked by an agenda that is not unfortunately very conducive. But having said that, any COP should have a finite timeline on getting out of fossil fuel. Any COP should have a clear commitment of not making more investments.
Any COP should have a clear commitment to attack the most burning issues of coal and methane. Any COP should have the clear targets on the energy transition that is underlining that. Because that is not all feasible at that absolute level, we could just go for progress the whole time and move to think very practically. But what we've brought in is people have now started to discover two things. The first one is that you cannot solve the climate crisis if you don't include the food and land use crisis food. Our food systems is 30% of global warming. It's actually becoming a bigger emitter than the fossil industry. And it's also 30% of the solution if we would restore. So we have the COP 15 on biodiversity restoration in Canada, where actually many countries signed up to. So we need to have the biodiversity discussions in parallel.
That is starting to happen now. Food, the main driver for them. The third thing we need to do, and the final thing, is we need to be sure that we have global solidarity. This morning, one of the winners was talking about the emerging markets becoming bigger emitters. Doesn't have to be. It's just that the emerging markets don't have any help from us. We haven't given them anything for loss and damages. We don't help them on lower financing. We don't bring them technology. And that was true with Covid when we don't give them the vaccines. So they happen to be 80% of the world's population. They also happen to be human beings. They also happen to pay an enormous price for our irresponsible behavior when it gets to climate change. And we refuse to help. So the third thing that needs to happen is that global solidarity, where we need to create that trust, but also the funding.
So one of the mechanisms to do that, because the US will not put any funding out for foreign countries. It's very unpopular. Americans think they pay a lot of overseas, but you are actually the lowest in the world. Politically, you won't get there anymore because people say, "It's my own country, why should you pay for someone in Africa?" Very small thinking, but it's the reality. So again, you have to be realistic. But what you can do is change the multilateral financing system. So there is an initiative now around the IMF, the World Bank, which is called the Bridgetown Initiative, which really looks at how can we accelerate financing to these emerging markets? Because I was in Kenya exactly for that, or in Nigeria last week and other places. But we go to African leaders and we say to African leaders, "Don't deal with China because China is bad."
That's a great discussion. I don't want to go into that now, but we don't have money for you. So if China offers you how to build these roads, et cetera, don't go because they're bad. So then they say, "Okay, what do you want me to do?" You don't have any money because we haven't invested anything in Africa ourselves. Not Europe, not America, no. So now we say, "Ah, okay, climate change. So you have gas, you have oil. No, they'll get to it because we can't afford to have more. So leave it in the ground." But we don't give them help on green energy. Then Ukraine comes, the tragedy of the Ukraine. Europe is short of oil or gas. What do we do? We go to Africa and tell them literally, "Yeah, no, no, take this gas, but ship it to us in Europe." That's how we treat them.
It's amazing to me. It's mind-boggling. And then we think it's normal. So if we cannot provide them the tools or the funds, the technologies, we have to be responsible for that, because ultimately we are the ones that pay that price. So I'm on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation. We've now created a fund, which is a 10 billion fund. This is where billionaires are wonderful, because you can get Bezos, you can get Ikea, you can get Rockefeller, and we got 10 billion dollars of what is called blended financing, concessionary financing, takes the risks away so that it attracts private money.
The reason private money doesn't flow in, it's always because of risk. It's a risk return our economies. So if you can take the risk away, blend it in, or take first loss, et cetera, you can attract capital. So we have 10 billion dollars now of risk capital, willing to take the risk like Bezos's money. And that can attract about a hundred billion. Of that, we can solve energy poverty for 800 million people in the emerging markets. So you see new mechanisms of financing coming in that try to overcome these things.
Speaker 4:
How do you... Well, nevermind. I guess. Sorry to interrupt.
Paul Polman:
No, no, it's fine.
Speaker 4:
I was going to ask you about the fund, expected investment thesis and ROI on that, but that's not so relevant. I was more curious, I know you mentioned cybersecurity and the propagation of AI. Do you envision any sort of use cases of artificial intelligence in helping developing emerging countries and emerging markets maybe access consulting services to better enable them to attract sustainability oriented [inaudible 01:11:23] and renewable energy technology to supplement or stanch their use of fossil fuels and help alleviate the issue of carbon, essentially carbon emissions?
Paul Polman:
Those markets will be better placed. It's a little bit like China going to the mobile phone and never having had landlines. So these markets will be better placed to design a better economy, to design better cities. For example. We are going to build, in the next 30 years, the same amount of cities in the world that are currently in the world. Every eight weeks we are building a new New York in the world. That's population growth and urbanization. So how we build it, most of it in the emerging markets. So how we build it is going to decide actually if we're going to live or not. So we need to build sustainably. We need to think about urban living differently than we do now. These countries need to have help. If you don't give them help, their alternative is not doing it. Their alternative is you did it, so we do it.
So it's stupid actually. It's absolutely stupid for us not to be an active part of that. So people are starting to understand that. And I think increasingly the politicians, or at least these multilateral institutions is probably the first step to come to it. AI or ChatGPT and all that stuff, they always have good sides to that that we need to leverage. And then obviously the other sides we need to watch. But about 40% of the climate solutions, people have calculated, 40% of the climate solutions can be solved with technology. Let's take a precision agriculture or in fact, electric vehicles is all driven by AI and technology. So it's a big part.
Speaker 4:
Didn't mean to hog the mic.
Paul Polman:
No, that's good.
Neil White:
All right. Join me in thanking Paul Polman.
Paul Polman:
Thank you.
