The Power of Oceans: Safeguarding Earth's Aquatic Lifelines

Welcome to the unDavos Summit - A community-organized series of interactive panels, talks, and networking taking place in Davos, Switzerland - and online - in parallel to the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 20-24 Jan 2025. 

Our mission is threefold: 
• Democratizing Davos: We open the doors to diverse voices and ideas, breaking down traditional barriers to participation.
• Humanizing Davos: We foster genuine, relationship-driven connections that go beyond transactional networking.
• Bringing Action to Davos: We turn meaningful discussions into tangible, real-world solutions.

Join us for the compelling panel discussion titled "The Power of Oceans: Safeguarding Earth's Aquatic Lifelines," where we will delve into innovative conservation strategies that leverage cutting-edge technologies to protect our oceans, crucial for sustaining life on Earth. This session is especially valuable as we accelerate efforts to achieve the 30x30 goal—protecting 30% of our oceans by 2030. By exploring advancements such as AI-powered monitoring systems and ocean acidification sensors, we aim to inspire actionable change for future generations.

This engaging panel features a remarkable lineup of speakers:

- Dr. Mandeep Rai (Moderator) - BBC, Broadcast Journalist, Author of "The Values Compass," and recognized Top Thinker to Watch, brings her extensive experience in global values and leadership.

- Rakesh Chand - Ocean Exchange, Member of Advisory Committee, and Chairman of the Kaura Foundation, specializes in impact investing and is deeply passionate about ocean conservation.

- Josephine Graf - rrreefs, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, actively regenerates coral reefs through innovative approaches to climate action.

- D. Michael Adams - Ocean Assets Group, Founder & CEO, focuses on investment in the blue economy, with initiatives supporting marine plastic upcycling and financial strategies for sustainable growth.

- Christopher Oakes - Reefgen, Inc., CEO, a marine biologist dedicated to ecosystem restoration and advancing sustainable aquaculture technologies.

- Inna Braverman - Eco Wave Power, Founder & CEO, a trailblazer in wave energy solutions and recognized as a global leader in climate action.

Don't miss this opportunity to engage with experts who are leading the charge in environmental conservation. 

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Transcript

(00:01) [Music] nobody knows what happened last night especially me and uh yeah that's all I want to say about it first of all thank you all for coming because I know what happened last night and where you guys were doing I hope you had fun it's always a crazy Wednesday in Devas secondly I want to thank the organizers around the tech side to get all this thing done and then more importantly I want to thank these amazing people that responded to an email saying you like to commit your time in a very crazy crazy schedule to come and speak on an oceans
(00:35) panel and we're going to combine it with an oceans and conservation panel 185 people signed up for this thing at some point they'll be around here somewhere I'm sure they're probably sleeping or getting up or trying to work out where this is I'm going to be downstairs trying to find that the important part is 189 people have committed to something this will be filmed and taped and it will be going out to them as well my name is rakish Chand various hats in this room today at this moment I'm representing the oceans exchange which
(01:04) is now 12 years in running we have some previous winners here we've had some previous winners in past as well it's one of the biggest oceans projects there is now I don't have any slides the only thing we've announced at the board meeting in November which is now public we've made over three billion in terms of the money in our oceans related work and that's now the updated figure from November's board meeting that's the only thing I want to say you can go online and find Ocean o exchange.
(01:32) org you can communicate with them send a message say you're at the oceans panel in Davos say to Millie I would like to have a conversation with you if it interests any of you and then come in October to Oceans exchange which is the largest oceans event in the world right now okay it's 13 years in the number is over three billion and that's it I want to thank all of you for coming I will chase the other people up I'm going to hand you over to our amazing moderator Mandy who's back again to do all this and sincerely big thanks to all our par
(02:01) as well the conservation panel will be in the same room afterwards as well please stay if you need to leave you can leave it's no issue we're know scheduling it being what it is so for now I hand it over to mandip thank you very much sincerely thank you Rakesh literally handed over the microphone um Rakesh is the advisor and board member of oceans exchange and oceans as you know are basically our Lifeline hence the title of the panel can I ask how many of you actually work in this space all right so a third if that so with
(02:35) that in mind could I have each of you please you know starting with you to introduce yourself in the best way you wish I'm Ena Braverman I'm the founder and CE of eave power our company developed a unique Innovative technology for generation of clean electricity from ocean and sea waves and what's unique about the technology is that we basically did it in a very different way 19 9% of the developers of wave energy went to the offshore which means four five kilometers into the sea and we basically attached to existent man-made
(03:10) structures like Pierce breakwaters Jerry Jerry is making it much easier simpler and more cost efficient so I want this to be an interactive session thank you if there's anything we don't need comments necessarily but if there's anything you don't know about or would like more information about feel free we can make it as interactive as we can until the end which obviously will always come very fast so without further Ado Chris thank you for running over running across to us he made it just in the neck of time and I think that's po
(03:40) possibly because of the scale of what you do please introduce yourself hi everybody I'm Chris Oaks I'm the CEO U of reef gen I'm a marine biologist by training and what we're really focused on at Reef gen is massively scaling nature-based Solutions with technology so we make underwater robots that plant coral reefs and seagrass Meadows and we can do it for a 30th to a 70th of the cost if you're sending divers down so that's how we're we're driving ocean restoration so I know this is just an introduction however I just want you to
(04:14) picture ena's working on waves Chris has just said robots are regenerating the reefs right and see c not SE sea grass I always want to say seaweed but seagrass may I take a moment yes so so just to clarify there's seaweed seaweeds are are kelp those are algae sea grasses are amazing they're flowering plants that once lived on land and went back into the ocean so they flower every year and they drop seeds and they have root structures that store 20% of the carbon that the ocean absorbs seagrass Meadows are responsible for
(04:48) that because of those roots those Ry ons so if anyone Dives um anyone go SCBA right so I dive also and in certain parts of the world where it's quite shallow you actually can see this seagrass but mostly you don't right it's very thick and if you dive in coral reefs you will also see seagrass a healthy coral reef is healthy because of The seagrass Meadows that are going to butt right up against the reef if you don't have seagrass then you don't have healthy coral reefs thank you speaking of coral reefs yeah Josephine
(05:18) please um thank you I'm Josephine I'm co- phone and co-o of reefs we are Swiss startup based in z a spin-off of the eth and U we are restoring degraded Cor structure so we developed a novel um Reef artificial Reef made out of clay which is 3D printed and the idea is where cores has one been flourishing but has been destroyed through to Dynamite fishing or climate change that we restore the structure um as sustainably and as complex as well as natural re as possible thank you very very much yeah oh I'm sorry yeah if we do have a fifth
(05:56) mic gentleman at the back do you no we don't okay thank you thank you both for sharing thank you so yeah hello good morning Michael Adams I founded ocean Assets Group um eight years ago and we do two things maybe to simplify we advise multilateral Banks like the World Bank Asian development Bank European Investment Bank on strategies to finance their enormous uh ocean and Coastal assets and to help the maritime Industries in regions around the world uh become more sustainable and that supports everything that my co-panelists
(06:30) are are doing in their focused way and the second thing is we run a platform called Blue deals which uh lists um projects in the developing countries that are in the blue economy as we say that have a good business model and are raising Capital that could be grants uh debt or equity and we screen them and present them to investors uh and we're also creating from that a um a facility to finance the zero emission shipping and ports around the world thank you so very much it's really interesting because rakes said oh man Deep's back
(07:04) again I am a BBC foreign correspondent but I'm also the author of the values compass and the reason I'm back again is because when we're thinking about climate when we're thinking about our planet when we're thinking about the fact that the temperatures are warmer now and the uh the snow is melting all of this is actually so connected to the oceans you almost can't have any conversation regarding climate if you don't think of the oceans and in fact when we're breathing every second breath the oxygen we're getting is because of
(07:32) the oceans so I don't think there's a more fundamental conversation we could be having that's why I'm back again and I think if we think about the values like why are these people they've left whatever they're doing started four years ago five years ago 11 I mean it's not a very new it's a very new uh subject area and they've pivoted their lives for it tell us what's driving you what's the ultimate aim thank you Ena I think uh what driven me to establish e wave power is my personal story H I live in Israel but I
(08:06) wasn't born there I was actually born in Ukraine in 1986 and two weeks after I was born the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded which was the one of which was the largest nuclear disaster in history and I was one of the babies that got hurt from the negative effects of the explosion H I actually got a respiratory arrest and a clinical death so my mom approached my crib she looked down I was pale and blue and not breathing and she ran to my dad and she was like my baby is dead my baby's dead like what do I do and she
(08:38) was so shocked she forgot she's a nurse my dad reminded her she's a nurse and then she gave me a mouth to mouth resuscitation and actually saved my life so I don't remember any of that obviously I was a baby but growing up my parents and my family would always say wow it's so cool you got a second chance in life you should really do something good with it and uh you know growing up when I discover covered about wave energy which according to the world energy Council can produce twice the amount of electricity that the world
(09:06) produces now I understood now that's a great thing to do with my second chance in life and that's really been my passion since I established e Co power in 2011 fantastic if there's one story I'm going to take back home it's this and that's actually a good point after you're leaving here you're going to hear so much during this week if you just make one or two Mentor notes of what you've taken away this will serve you as opposed to become part of the milu Chris I'm actually tough question right no no no it's it's wonderful I'm reflecting on
(09:37) your story because that is that is there's a parallel ah we cannot accept just like your mother didn't accept the death of our habitats I do not accept that we're going to lose 90% of our coral reefs by 2050 I do not accept that we are losing up to 7% of our seagrass Meadows every year we can't we can't live in a world where these shifting baselines are acceptable but we have to figure out how to make it financially viable and if we're planting with our fingers because right now that's how most people are restoring coral reefs and SE grass
(10:12) Meadows with their fingers oh yes I guess you dive down and you that's how you divers divers are going down and planting with their fingers I I did this for a long time W as a scientific diver okay and we will never meet the scale of the problem if we're planting with our fingers and so the way I see it is we've mechanized agriculture as everywhere on the planet except underwater and so what I'm doing is making underwater tractors they're just not to make crops although you can eat sea grass they to restore
(10:38) our habitats first so that's the motivation for me I've seen the shifting baselines over my lifetime I've seen reefs go from vibrant colorful reefs to nothing I've seen seagrass Meadows be there and then go away but I've also seen them come back the little Bay that I grew up um diving on as a kid got dredged all the SE Dr is wiped out no more fish were being caught off the pier but over my lifetime I have seen it come back but it took 30 years why wait we could accelerate that if we actually deployed tractors to start planting day
(11:11) and night and we have the technology today this is so visual if you think that 70% of our planet is Oceans it and I'm just a simple person and I'm sure you have all seen the oceans like the sea the reefs change right hands up if you have seen this if you know exactly what he's talking about EX exactly we've all witnessed this and it's a little bit like oh well you just think you just think oh I'm not going to go there anymore but actually how much is going to become inhabitable so thank you for what you're doing
(11:43) Joseph um I can just Echo what what my co-panelist said um we are a four female Founders in our team and we are all passionate divers so unusual for unusual and also very different background so we have two marine biologists I have a business background and one artist so we really combine different um perspectives to this topic but we are all diverse and we all saw with our own eyes how cor re look like now and that's why we started re as well because we um because there's no there's time is running out to do
(12:14) something and we have to do something now even it's like small steps um small startups but I think that really motivated us to to take action now and to um and cor Rees are so important for for us and many people don't realize it it's a beautiful e system but they're also um the most vierse ecosystem we have on this planet on a on a um area based so more than 25% of all marine life depend on them and it's what you said I think we we can't just lose them because we don't know what the effects are there's so much consequences which
(12:46) we can't even uh understand now so yeah because it's so important is that why it's called r r reefs what's the logic between it's rethinking rebuilding regenerating but yeah there's much confusion sometimes on how to pronounce it also in different languages we yeah appreciate it's complicated thank you thank you okay um well uh first of all I'm so enjoying Mand Deep's book the audio version I highly recommend it the values Compass anyway it's very s that's very uh I haven't paid like my my friends here I'm a diver and a sailor
(13:22) and lived on an island for quite a while but uh so that started it but I'm very much in the impact investing space and this this is where things have been happening in The Last 5 Years that are quite exciting and interesting where we are valuing all the stories that we're telling and all the data that we have we have massive amounts of data to prove everything that we're talking about here but how can let's monetize that because you know we need what is it 2.
(13:47) 7 let's round it off three trillion at least dollars per year to accomplish the SGS of which sg14 the blue one is uh you know gets less than 1% of the funding but 90% of that money needs to come from private markets it's not going to move there unless we monetize uh these positive impacts that we're having and we're working with projects like blue Alliance that manages 120 mpas around the world and uh enormous impacts million hectares that they're protecting of biodiversity for instance um 15,000 you know that they're of of livelihoods
(14:24) that they're improving and they have a blended Finance facility where they're paying variable interest rate every year depending on how well they do against their benchmarks which the investors agree with how many he mangroves have you restored uh Fisheries improved uh jobs created the social and environmental ones and so their interest rate goes down could go to zero if they really do a super job which they're doing each year or it could rise if they're falling short of agreed impacts and this needs to be in everything this
(14:55) is intuitively we all know that we should be rewarded for these things not just have a store story but and on the equity side as well your companies should be valued not based on the capital asset pricing model alone but on impact data right so this is what we're trying to do and um more and more of that is happening and and Happening Here in Davos um and for me a nerdy Financial person that's passionate about the ocean that's what's quite exciting for me to see I love this because we have the entire ecosystem Michael's just
(15:24) described like the trillions of dollars and then you have startups and you have Automation and Robotics and you have waves as well as you know so the top and the bottom of the ocean the whole thing here the whole ecosystem is on this panel well put together raes thank you I think that as we're wrapping up because this is short sharp sweet can we leave these people each one of them with a mic drop moment of what what's the vision what can we help you with what's the thing that you really want to say to us this is your
(15:57) moment no pressure not at all she's like suddenly I can't breathe okay yeah you have like one second to give your no no not one second I didn't say that one minute is good right is perfect yeah so a lot of people don't know that wave energy even exists uh most people know about wind and solar energy but actually wave energy is the least intermittent source of uh renewable energy H and two-thirds of the world population are living on the coastline so with this type of population distribution people can get two we that's a might drop moment 2/3 of
(16:31) the Planet live on the coastline oh yeah I guess if you think about how many cities are on the coastline how many that alone is phenomenal the fact that we have wave okay so that's that's something to write home about so our company right now is the first company that's actually commercializing wave energy so we just uh finished the construction of our and the first in history grid connected the wave energy power station in Israel in collaboration with EDF electric the France in March we're opening the first US project in
(17:00) the port of LA in collaboration with chel to be followed by our first Asian project in Taiwan and then also in Portugal so we're kind of going to many different places in the same time H in the effort to really commercialize the power of the waves and one more thing two years ago our company became publicly traded on NASDAQ many congratulations thank you H thank you so much thank you under the stock symbol wave and uh you mentioned it little bit and you mentioned that it's very rare to see women so in the energy industry
(17:33) according to Ernest young only 5% of the executive are women so unfortunately we don't have a lot of women in the energy industry or on NASDAQ so I'm very very proud of that and thank you everybody for May you may you inspire or both of you inspire and be role models for many other you know for the rest the other 50% of the planet to join you thank you so much thank you Chris so many things to say so little time 60 seconds it's good punch I'll I'll I'll offer one other thing so there is an ETF that's available on the
(18:04) New York Stock Exchange called the tickers aoy a friend of mine started the first ocean ETF and I would just recommend everyone look at it it's uh it rewards the big companies that are actually doing good things for the ocean so that's a plug for for a friend okay but the question is how do we pay for these things right and so I just want to share I'm not sure how many people are from an EU member state but I'm really happy to share that the EU last July ratified the law for the restoration of Nature and it mandates that every member
(18:35) state in the EU restore 20% of their seagrass Meadows by 2030 and right now they're going to have to plant with their fingers and so if and that's never going to happen right and so understanding that there are Technologies like Reef Jens that can help scale this up is really important I'll be launching a crowdfunding philanthropic campaign to help build more grasshoppers that's what my seagrass planting robot is called um so just check out the website we just need to get these hand these robots into the hands of practitioners because seeing is
(19:07) believing and it makes many many many hands good very good thank you Joseph um maybe yeah there are so many things to say but maybe one thing is um that we are often asked does it make any sense for you to to operate because chies are dying by 2050 as he said H we expecting more than 90% to be dead so it's one of the most vulnerable ex we have on our planet and what we see I mean we're still at quite early stage we have five projects across five different countries ac across very different ocean basins but what we see from the data we get
(19:42) that actually um we see after three months uh the first cor recruits settling on our reefs and also in areas like the Caribbean where there have been um huge heat waves also in the past years and they are surviving so more than 90% survived the devastating heat way from last year in in Colombia where we um where we have our first reef and I think this gives me hope and our team that corals one of the oldest animals we have uh actually very resilient um so regenerates really fast yeah and if we have Innovations uh different approaches
(20:14) also combined like reef genen and and us and and the whole ecosystem like focusing on sustainable energy because it's all depending on climate change um as well to to stop that I think we can be optimistic to give ecosystems like cor a bit more time to adapt well I'm really encouraged by even how the ecosystem that you're even if I just look at this panel is creating and you're right it regenerates fast so it doesn't take long this is worth getting involved now finally all right Michael um what how can I wrap up well um we we
(20:48) noticed that uh nothing really moves unless you connect uh the whole value chain so as consumers understand where the fish came from maybe that you're eating look at Al um and uh same with your energy supplies uh same with shipping drives 80% of global trade it's an extremely dirty industry we're trying to move towards we have all the technology to move to zero zero ghg emissions and that policy is in place from the international Maritime organization $ trillion dollar is needed to move that hugely profitable
(21:22) opportunity but it's not happening yet because we're not being squeaky enough as consumer and as investors uh so we connect um with the local communities in developing countries that are really on the front lines of climate change Coastal resilience it's existential for them many of these countries whole countries will be underwater um with the big regulations and the big money the money connection is is the one that's been slowest people get it on the coastlines the major policy bodies and science that are science-driven get it
(21:54) too and the money Gap in the middle is why I mentioned earlier Blended Finance and these monetizing the impacts so that you are rewarded as an investor for protecting reefs we have and um we have 18,000 Marine protected areas around the world but 75% of them aren't protected they're distressed assets and that is a a Monet that is a a financial proposition that has enormous impact that's what I want to see happen and uh that's the missing link that maybe is underway right now thank you I think it's true that without obviously without
(22:27) finances nothing can happen but without you're being incentivized to invest in it which is what you're doing nothing could happen and I guess the biggest missing piece is just us knowing about it and being educated about it so hands up if you've learned something that you didn't know before okay fantastic so with that that's the point of this right that's the whole point that you're here I have to say that I'm glad that I did last year's and this year's because the room is very different firstly much greater uh out many more people and I
(22:55) think that's partly because this is important and we're grow it's growing in you're growing the awareness and so with that I just would like us to all if you're open to it turn around we're making history we're putting it oceans on the map and we'll take one picture together yes Rakesh is like really well you could be in at Rakesh actually you could be in it yeah it's up to you that's a creative photo yeah but this is a moment I mean I'm I'm seeing the interest grow and it's fantastic thank you yeah he's not French so all I wanted
(23:34) to say was that you being here really means a lot to us and we have another brilliant panel right after this so if you're able to stay we're talking about space we're talking about you know this is this is where history is made so it will be lovely to have have you stay feel free to network with each other and we're going to turn the room around within five minutes thank you thank you good [Music]