ad-free
Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-08-25
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcEsfXDUdew
right I Ryan I don't okay fee for it's out he'll come up here will be okay I think you very much Sir one I can tell you how inspiring us to the last three intentions of Ben and I'm really here to talk about how China has inspired me to see things differently %HESITATION be through technology education design %HESITATION I'm here to talk about redefining sustainability in
China and I can't tell you a better place to talk about how you know the the framework around the future which we've seen here is being defined here and for me the last fifteen years that I've spent here you know and sustainability you're probably thinking okay he's environmentalists you can tell me to plant trees and stop using paper and plastic that carbon is evil that we
need to be worried about the global warming up global warming and that we have to save the polar bears now this is a narrative that I'm sure that all you've heard you've read you been told is important but I know it's probably not your highest priority and honestly after fifteen years of living in Shanghai I get it I understand why the global narrative around sustainability isn't
what it should be and I also understand how the context of China is actually going to be the future of sustainability much like what we saw the future of the attack and the future of kind of what we've been learning in the past so for me this is my experiment this is my playground this my laboratory where every day I get to go outside and really
watched the city hall bars and I don't know how many of you have you to stand outside I kind of watched the city move the lights people the activity that's all going on here what makes this place grates and it doesn't really matter if it's day or night I'm in this place is on fire but what you're seeing here systems you know the urban system energy
water consumption education health care how people live and work this is what sustainability has become for me but what's interesting is after twenty five years of Asia is that this is not just a China story this is a story about urbanization it's a story about economic development it's a story about progress and does it matter if you're in Shanghai Hong Kong or Singapore this is something
that we're seeing over and over again buddy come sustainability not just redefining it but the solutions and who's to be driving the solutions it's also here and this is what excites me as well it excites me because at the end of the day it's about people cities are here for people every day your every move year thirty million Chinese are moving from the countryside from villages
from farms into cities it was in Shanghai you know the east coast was a bright red for twenty five years everyone moved here but as we've been seeing that's changing China's redefining itself as you heard the first presentation the economy's changing the expectations are changing and how people move around are changing but the systems are the same and the systems this is worthy to be challenged
to grow in a different way and so we talk about sustainability I'm not here to talk about Corbin global warming polar bears and the answer being electric cars and solar panels we're talking about fixing the systems that are underneath all of our cities the system that the systems that deliver food energy what is the future of labor look like these are all really big questions that
the west has been talking about but China soaring to really start to solve and we go back to this picture I mean if I talk about Harbin most you go okay maybe mostly important but if I think air pollution it's a whole different thing but it's really the same system that's failing it's our energy systems it's how we deliver power to our cities it's our manufacturing
and how we deliver an economy to our countries it's how we consume it's all in front of us and this is why sustainability in China from being an emotional polar bear to a tangible air pollution for our children is really changing how the Chinese context around solutions and solution providers is happening the thing that scares me about China sometimes it's a scale and speed by which
this country is growing and the size of the challenges that it faces so I show you this picture of air pollution in Shanghai for any view from Beijing you'll probably recognize this if you know doc foods that was up here as well but this is the China map you know this is twenty fourteen the air pollution averages for a hundred and forty cities in China find
the green dot is only one right so the country the way that is developed the the challenge that faces the size scale and speed is at a rate we've never seen before but the solutions are also right in front of us where we go forward from here it's gonna be really interesting and it's gonna be a place that China for sits front center at why I
say that is if you look at urbanization in China and the year two thousand four hundred and fifty million people lived in Chinese cities in India through eighty eight men Brazil is one forty one by twenty thirty this country will double an urban population and I'll talk about why that's important in a second it's inspiring and I'm not saying that we should stop this train because
energy coming in it's feeding off of this trend many worker for consumer brands are be to be it's because of this trend real estate is coming up because of this trend the question isn't stopping the positive it's mitigating the negative the question becomes a twenty fifty one my little guy hears about thirty five years old you have a billion people living in your cities India's got
eight hundred thirty five million and whole little have seven billion people living in cities so how will the systems grow where would they feel where they fail and how will they have to adapt to allow us to be able to live the quality life that we want these are the big questions all the questions actually China is already asking an already started answer for me if
I look at this consumers ation a sub that we death we have to talk about and in China this is been the hottest market for ten years if you look at the you know the Ali Baba singles day right how many do you see in this out in front of your office buildings or on your streets billions of packages every day that our city consume but
you know it goes we've taken out a pair of shoes that new hat your new laptop where is the packaging go packaging is a resource its trees its water its biodiversity as places where animals and big we've we've all come out of the space but now we package it up we use that box for maybe fifteen minutes or maybe from chunks out here and transportation well
we've been studying this and we'd love to study kind of where the things go the last six months we've been looking at you know when you take that box and you throw it out your IE sells it you know to the guy on the street the peddler where does it go because the places like this which aren't too far from Shanghai and what's amazing is that
that reach that that paper packaging that you throw away becomes resource very quickly feeds into an economy that China has developed in the west we're told you should reduce reuse recycle throw your paper into this been the city will take away the city pays for that to happen but what we found on the financial crisis is when you have that kind of a model people stop
recycling city stops recycling the distinct the landfill it's no longer resource it's a complete waste but in China the go from your house through the recyclers through this process it takes three to five days before it ends up here and I apologize for the quality but this is a paper and packaging plants not too far from Shanghai I actually threw a piece of paper into the
garbage and I watched it go and end up with this complex and about twelve hours it went from the stack up at the top which is all paper packaging that's being recycled and what's interesting is you can't see it this is the size of a normal truck so talking kilometers of paper that's coming out the city but ends up in the White pile which is new
paper and packaging another two days so you throw that box out after singles day within three days it's a new box biggest Shanhai can't keep up with your waist there's five official landfills to will be close to the next six months that leaves three this economic value to the resource there's an economic value to being so stable in China that doesn't exist other places and this
is fascinating because what I tried to drive innovation it tries entrepreneurship it tries everything but let's talk about food because I'm sure most of you are little bit more interested in food than you are maybe about packaging so we will probably go through and go wow okay if does a great meal is obviously true NJ right because of the home bow %HESITATION what is your food
come from what happens to it when you've stopped eating this is something we look at the same time that we're keenly worried about because if the food water energy nexus over last forty years China's food patterns have changed dramatically when you move from the farm into the city the way that you eat complete it's completely shifts you start from a basic diet and you move to
a high protein diet this red line is Prue kilo per year per person of pork in nineteen seventy nine the average Chinese individual eight ten kilos of pork per year now at twenty five you know sixteen twenty seventeen the average rule Chinese still the eight fourteen kilos not a big difference you needed on special occasions on and you know of price inflation goes up if you
don't matter you still buy it because you're raising it but in the city it's gone from pen at the bottom left to sixty eight kilos per year now that sounds like a lot we ogle a bit heavier rightly that's a problem obesity we talk about but you talk about the water to make this work China now has to import about seventy percent of its soy meal
might soybeans soybeans feed cattle feed pig feed our our protein sources are animal based protein sources China's ability to to produce its own soy has capped at about fourteen to sixteen million tons a year but to make sure that our plates are affordable you now have to import ninety million tons and words that come from it doesn't come from your backyard it comes from around the
world the US alone thirty million tons of soy Brazil thirty two million Australia's another thirty million but what it's really fun as we start looking at the water footprint of these crops just soil loan from America is sixty trillion litres of water that you're importing every year and while you're doing that well China's a very dry country so again how we gonna feed your cities with
food when you need this water for the city's now if you look at this chart I apologize a little bit where the green would highlight agriculture the use of water for agriculture Shanghai doesn't really produces much agriculture is that you still use actually set ice to be within about a hundred kilometers pretty self sufficient eighty five ninety percent of its food will come from the surrounding
territories you wouldn't go past high school to feed your car feed the city the problem is if you look at Shanghai and Chong Chang that blew the gross and that's our light bulbs fifty five percent of our energy use Justin Shanghai alone the types of our water is used for the energy production process that's not you brush your teeth that's not you watering your lawn that's
just turning on these light bulbs Shanghai troll chaining Beijing they compete against the agricultural areas for water and what's happening is China's developing out as Chung do war Han she on as all the cities grow farm areas they have to compete or the price Waterhouse to come up this is a huge challenge in your RD importing so much of your food so let's talk about what
a little bit more global fisheries the main protein of the world comes out of our water the stocks are collapsing but what's fascinating is how quickly we're adapting technologically we don't need the oceans as much anymore because reading half of our protein source other farms China has seventy percent of the world's fish farms they're also the largest consumer of fish but look at that chart it
looks just like your GDP it looks like a consumer rates it looks like everything that just follows in China it's a hockey stick it's inspiring no I want you to believe that this is where your fish comes from China this is more like it right this is your fish supplies in this up this is enough Fujin province near shaman oysters mussels you know different different types
of fish now we all know about food safety we all have questions about food safety in China obviously but this is where entrepreneurs in China have become so fascinating he was up here to holy happy about the brain and getting a sense of the cloud I'm just trying to make sure that were well fed and we don't lose water right because that's even more important to
get us to where we become a computer this is on the fifteenth story of a high rise building in Hong Kong there's ten tanks here and this becomes the cleanest seafood in the world in two days they can take it from here to hear and it's perfectly clean they can also now raise seafood in these tanks in ten years of operation they've only lost one percent
of their water but we can do with that thing about the water footprint of China how difficult going to be to feed people feed cities you know how the perfectly secure water source for different types of food and I just want to go back to this chart for one minute because what we're talking about the challenges that China will face and the solutions that will bring
and twenty fifty China's struggles are largely going to be capping off the solutions are largely be hopefully in place but this is where the opportunity for Chinese Chinese companies in Chinese innovators it's fascinating because this will not be the only country the world the only market world for the solutions they will scale out to India to Africa to South America to other parts of the world
and anyone who's been the legos Kathmandu Dhaka any these countries any the city's problems that are being faced there are more severe than here so for me sustainability has really been redefined in China not just because it's not about carbon and polar bears it's about people it's not about government saving us and telling us what to do it's about the entrepreneurial spirit being innovative and actually
I have to say really quickly after eight years of teaching here my students are now coming back to me with their business ideas the best and the brightest of China are now so to build businesses office furniture to be good people they're not try to be environmentalists they see the balance between business environment and society and that's where I think China no matter the challenges that
are faced we should see them as opportunities we had syllabus challenges to be climbed and that I hope inspires you because I can tell you every day inspires me if it doesn't I just look at his face the wonder whether we could be in thirty five years and how can I make sure that he has food water healthcare education all affordable accessible and ready for him
