2021 Bloomberg New Economy Catalyst Agenda

Overview: Climate change, environmental degradation, and poverty are global challenges in need of global solutions. But in much of the world, and especially in the world’s developing countries, these challenges are perceived as a tradeoff: preserve the natural environment and help the climate or grow the economy and create jobs and livelihoods. But does green technology offer the promise of a third way? Can more investment in green technology reduce emissions and also promote growth and human development in the emerging world? In this discussion, we’ll meet the entrepreneurs — from places ranging from Sierra Leone to Finland — creating the emerging green tech that can help protect the planet while creating jobs and prosperity.

Hydrogen is touted either as an environmental savior or a massively over-hyped solution. It’s likely neither. Energy systems are complex: Hydrogen is destined to be one part of the 21st century energy mix —and technologies to realize its potential are rapidly emerging.

In Africa, where half the population lacks access to power, inexpensive solar-powered microgrids offer the promise of development while reducing greenhouse gas emissions from burning wood and crop waste. Easy Solar makes solar energy accessible and available in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Plastic waste is choking our waterways and harbors. Eight million tons end up in our oceans each year, killing wildlife and poisoning the food supply. A lasting solution will require bold policy innovations, industrial curbs and lifestyle changes. Meanwhile, there’s an urgent need for clean-up efforts. BluePhin Technologies developed six prototype robots that, when deployed, pull plastic waste out of the ocean.  Now, founder Simran Chowdhry is adapting the robots’ waste-detection algorithm to be able to filter out liquid waste like oil and algae.

What if…we could remove a gigaton of carbon from the atmosphere by 2030?

Overview: How will the world feed nine billion mouths by 2050 without hastening climate catastrophe? Plant-based dairy and meat alternatives are part of the answer. Gene-editing has the potential to improve crop quality and yields. But farming practices must also be made more sustainable. Technology is the key. Just as cloud-based agricultural data has revolutionized industrial farming in the developed world, it must be made to work for smallholders in Africa, China and elsewhere.

Can we develop and scale technologies to grow and distribute nutritious food in the right places, using the right methods, while minimizing the enormous impact of food production on the environment? How should farmers be incentivized to adopt sustainable practices?

A food revolution is under way. A sign of the times: The new menu at the Michelin-starred restaurant Eleven Madison Park in Manhattan is meatless. Switching to a plant-based diet is a powerful step that individuals can take to save the planet; it would reduce emissions, save water, relieve pressure on the land and cut pollutants. NotCo uses AI to reverse engineer animal products and recreate them using a combination of plant-based ingredients. The goal is to produce a lineup of plant-based dairy and meat alternatives that taste closer to the real thing.

Agricultural best practices in advanced economies revolve around big data, genomics and AI.  Our catalysts are deploying these technologies in emerging markets, with the aim to make farming in the developing world more productive, competitive and sustainable. The goal: to turn smallholder farmers into tech entrepreneurs.

What if…cell-based crab meat, grown in a lab, could sustainably source enough protein to satisfy the world’s growing demand for seafood?

Overview: From Latin America to Asia, innovators are challenging the financial status quo. Cryptocurrencies aim to rival the dollar and other “fiat” currencies. Smartphones and apps are offering services to customers that banks too often neglect. The entrepreneurs scaling these innovations are offering financial inclusions to the under-banked and the un-banked, the poor and the disenfranchised. In the digital age there’s both profit and purpose in reaching the masses at the bottom of the financial pyramid. Are digital currencies the future of money — or better yet, a means to achieve greater financial inclusion? At the heart of the debate around the future of crypto and digital currencies is a question of who controls the future of money: private actors and individuals, or governments and central banks.

Ride-hailing firms are pivoting into all-in-one super-apps, leveraging their seamless payments systems. Nowhere are the opportunities greater than in Southeast Asia, which has a population of 600 million — many of them unbanked. Singapore-based Grab has expanded from its delivery and ride-hailing origins, into a fintech company, with a range of consumer financial, payments and microlending services. Could this expansion into financial services fuel faster growth in Southeast Asia’s red-hot digital commerce sector?

Sam Bankman-Fried is a billionaire, but he shares a Hong Kong apartment with roommates – and occasionally sleeps on a beanbag in his office. The Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange that he founded, FTX, has already had a very big year processing digital currency and crypto derivative trades. Its next frontier: tokenized stocks.

About half the population of Latin America has no access to financial products, according to the World Bank. Its traditional banking system is associated with high fees and difficult-to-obtain lines of credit. Sao Paulo-based Nubank has spent eight years challenging those banks, and now offers banking and financial services to more than 25 million users.

Covid-19 has led to historic portfolio outflows from emerging and frontier markets. Pushing in the other direction is Kenya-based AZA, which facilitates low-cost, digital currency trading solutions using blockchain. AZA hopes to make it easier to do business in Africa and other frontier markets.

What if…you could build an entirely crypto-based economy in Venezuela, where Stablecoins replaced the volatile bolivar, becoming the primary form of payment for consumers, merchants, and suppliers?

The pandemic isn’t over anywhere until it’s over everywhere. Rich countries have an overwhelming interest in ensuring the world’s poorest countries get fully vaccinated. Yet they’ve hogged the global supply. Is equitable access to vaccines an impossible dream? What could we do differently next time?

What if we could arm cells with the tools they need to eliminate certain types of cancer? That is the ultimate end goal for Caribou Biosciences, a Berkeley, California-based genome-editing biopharmaceutical company.

54gene wants to take on inequality in precision medicine, by building a genomic dataset across Africa. The company hopes to uncover some of the factors driving disease across the continent’s genetically diverse population.

After her mother died of cancer, Shamim Nabuuma Kaliisa vowed to bring better early screening and detection capabilities to remote areas in her native Uganda. The result has been Chil Lab, which uses drones and mobile technology to transport patient samples to the hospital for testing.

Now that mRNA is helping to end the Covid-19 pandemic, it is ready to take on other diseases, including cancer, HIV and influenza. Beyond that, will the revolutionary technology change the way we manage healthcare? Perhaps we should look at disease not as an enemy to be attacked once we’re sick, but like Covid as a risk to be averted.

Overview: Covid-19 has supercharged a transition to e-commerce, with profound implications for the future of cities, labor practices, business competition, and the environment. How will e-commerce giants use their digital power to reshape the global economy? Will the winner-take-all model collide with a growing grass-root movement around the world for economic justice and social equity? How can governments and regulators ensure that in a digital future, all citizens are winners?

The fashion industry is a notorious polluter. Will transparent supply chains finally force it to confront its social and environmental responsibilities?

What’s the fastest way to grow e-commerce in developing countries? Increase the number of women selling on online platforms. To do that, platforms must offer women training and financial support, according to a World Bank study. Covid-19 has made that mission more urgent: In some countries, women-owned online businesses are declining even as men-owned businesses boom.

Their parents got into themselves into trouble by racking up debt before the 2008 great financial crisis. Gen Z consumers learnt from those mistakes. They are savvy shoppers — and financially prudent, shunning credit cards. How will this generation shape the future of commerce? What are their values? What can brands do to earn their trust?

What if…we could all live in one-minute cities, with access to everything we need on our doorstep?

Overview: Some of the world’s leading entrepreneurs are conquering space. Soon, they will offer the thrill of “space tourism’, and in the more distant future even the prospect of colonies on Mars. Meanwhile, low-cost rocket launches are enabling a host of technologies to improve life on earth, from monitoring the effects of climate change, to predicting disease hot-spots, and combating hunger through precision agriculture. The next breakthroughs may come in space-based manufacturing and orbiting solar power stations. Which vision of space will prevail? Is it an escape from earth’s existential problem, or the solution?

After leading the UAE’s Mars Mission early this year, HE Sarah Al Amiri is turning her attention to building a collaborative ecosystem for space research and development, and looking into how space-enabled technologies can be applied to real-world challenges.

The application of space technology could have widespread benefits for emerging economies. Danielle Wood is focused on using space technologies to support the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Swarm Technologies offers internet of things satellite service for as little as $5 a month, and the application of its IoT-enabled ‘Swarm tiles’ offers a multitude of uses, including water and crop yield monitoring, emergency response services and whale tracking.

As private space companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic work to bring down the cost of launching rockets, one German startup is looking to take that mission further. Isar Aerospace aims to create a “fast taxi” for smaller satellite launches, by adding capacity, efficiency and sustainability to the business of rocket launching.

How far away was your last work trip? For NASA Astronaut Megan McArthur, the sky is nowhere near the limit. She’s spending six months about 260 miles above Earth, piloting NASA’s SpaceX Crew-2 mission to the International Space Station. McArthur says from her perspective in orbit, she’s struck by the beauty–and fragility–of our planet.