Few issues are as complex and multifaceted as climate change. Meeting the many pressing challenges that climate change presents, and is forecast to present, is an urgent, global priority. According to the Yale Center for Business and the Environment, “the world needs leaders in all sectors who can connect the massive economic opportunity of clean energy to the moral imperatives of addressing climate change and protecting all communities and ecosystems.”
And this is where you come in. The Youth Assembly Climate Entrepreneurship Academy will help emerging leaders address and connect the moral imperative and opportunity. For a young entrepreneur, it is a once-in-a-generation calling.
Breakthrough Energy, a venture founded by Bill Gates to invest in startup companies accelerating innovation in sustainable energy, identify “five grand challenges” that will need to be tackled to mitigate or prevent the worst-case scenario impacts of climate change: how we plug in, make things, grow things, get around, keep cool and stay warm. They note that tackling these will require, “unprecedented technological transformations in almost every sector of modern life”. The undertaking is both critical and massive, but if done right, “also a major economic opportunity that can promote growth, create jobs, and accelerate the transition to low-carbon development in a wide range of sectors,” according to the International Finance Corporation.
We need climate entrepreneurs. By responding to specific problems, demands, or gaps in the market, climate entrepreneurs help identify and pursue opportunities that deliver environmental benefits for the communities they serve and the world.
