Sustainability professor Alex Dehgan, who is CEO and co-founder of Conservation X Labs, was a panelist at the five-day State of the World 2021 conference hosted by Florida International University and ASU’s McCain Institute for International Leadership. The topic of the panel was the Paris Climate Agreement and what happens now that the U.S. has rejoined.
While rejoining the Paris climate agreement was an important and necessary step to reducing climate change’s effects in the United States, it was the first step on a long road toward ensuring a sustainable future.
The climate crisis is also, in many respects, intersecting with the growth of a new, prosperous global middle class and increasing demand for consumer goods, and governments will need to consider innovative policy solutions that preserve newfound wealth while also protecting the environment.
“For us to actually be successful in combating climate change, we need to fundamentally rethink the majority of our solutions. We need to think about how we are replacing and transforming technologies, products, supply chains and sectors,” said Dehgan. “That means, as we have a world that is growing warmer, we also have more people moving in middle class, who want cooling technology, protein, food, feed, fiberm and materials, and electronics that are driving the destruction of places like the Amazon. We need to think about what it means to create new economies for the future.”