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The Resilience Imperative
The Resilience Imperative
Thursday, June 30, 2022
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM
The Resilience Imperative: Innovating and Investing Like Our Future Depends on It
Today, there are many important global issues, including the ongoing war in Ukraine and COVID, which vie for our attention. But we cannot afford to take our eyes off the threat of global warming. Everything that we know and love depends on collective climate action.
Climate-related disasters, spurred on by rising emissions, are growing in frequency, severity, and scale, reaching ominous and unprecedented proportions around the world. Epic disasters, damages, and losses will define the 21st century unless we invest in climate resilience – now. Yet, one of the biggest challenges we face is how to make our communities more resilient. Real resilience is based in coordinated community action that is backed by data and analytics. To get there, we need investment in climate resilience efforts that will prepare society and the economy to respond and recover from the effects of climate change.
Today, efforts to increase resilience in communities are fragmented, especially so in frontline communities and contested environments. This lack of integration and information coordination across the various actors and agents necessary to stabilize communities is exacerbated by 1) a failure to address the communities’ inability to properly absorb capital (both human and financial), and 2) by a lack of innovation in exploring ways to invest more appropriately in the vanguard communities that bear the first and worst of climate change.
In this live webinar and audience Q&A, Impact Entrepreneur’s Laurie Lane-Zucker welcomes Green Jobs Machine co-founder & CEO Sharron McPherson to discuss the resilience imperative and how impact investors and entrepreneurs can effectively tackle the biggest social and environmental challenge of the century.
Featured Guest
Sharron McPherson
A reformed investment banker and Wall Street attorney, Sharron McPherson is the Co-Founder and CEO of The Green Jobs Machine, a resilience tech company committed to helping communities globally thrive in adverse climate conditions. She is a leading expert on the impact of advancing technologies that drive sustainable growth and development. Sharron is co-founder and Former CEO of one of Africa’s largest women’s infrastructure investment groups, the WINDE Consortium (Women in Infrastructure Development & Energy). She is a founding director of Singularity University South Africa and is a former Executive Director of the Centre for Disruptive Technologies, a “think & do” tank based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her life’s passion is to measurably help improve the lives of a billion people by reimaging how we leverage advancing technologies to unlock a better world.
An accomplished public speaker, moderator, and published author with a lifetime interest in building better communities through social impact investing, Sharron has addressed a wide range of audiences, including TED and the World Economic Forum.
Host
Laurie Lane-Zucker
Laurie Lane-Zucker is Founder and CEO of Impact Entrepreneur, PBC, an impact economy business that hosts the Impact Entrepreneur Network — a large, global network of “systems-minded” entrepreneurs, investors, and scholars of social and environmental innovation — and editor and publisher of Impact Entrepreneur, a digital magazine covering the emerging Impact Economy. For over 30 years, Laurie has been a “pioneer” (Forbes) and recognized leader in sustainability, social enterprise, and impact investing. Laurie was the founding Executive Director of the international environmental organization, Orion Society, which publishes the celebrated Orion Magazine, as well as the founder of a global sustainability think-tank, the Triad Institute, and Hotfrog, a Founding B Corporation, GIIRS Pioneer Company, and the first company ever to complete an equity transaction on an impact investment exchange. Laurie is the bestselling and multiple award-winning publisher and editor of books and magazines on sustainability and social impact — having worked with such acclaimed authors as Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, and David James Duncan — and the author of numerous articles on entrepreneurship and impact investing. Laurie is contributing author to the recently published academic textbook from World Scientific, Sustainability: Business and Investment Implications (2023).