We’re recapping our time at the TED Countdown Summit 2025 in Nairobi, Kenya + exploring wins and setbacks across the ten objectives in our climate action plan.

NOTES FROM NAIROBI: We’re just back from Nairobi, Kenya, and the TED Countdown Summit 2025, which brought together impassioned innovators, scientists, and advocates from around the globe. At a time when the fight against climate change feels stymied in the U.S. (see OKR 7: Win Politics and Policy), it was energizing and motivating to hear from leaders who are doubling down on climate action—acting locally and thinking globally.

We were inspired by Josephine Waweru, a Kenyan coffee and vegetable farmer and clean energy mentor, who made the plunge to install a transformational solar-powered water pump. Josephine cut her irrigation costs and radically improved her crops’ yield. We heard from Lei Xhang, a Chinese entrepreneur tapping unrivaled wind and solar opportunities in Mongolia to build out clean industries at scale. And we were enraptured by Tasso Aszvedo, a Brazilian scientist whose technology for tracking land use change has armed his government with a tool to target some of the worst culprits of deforestation.

Countdown gave us and hundreds of other attendees a renewed confidence that the transition to a clean-energy future is both well underway and abundant in opportunity. The event’s forward-looking tone was captured perfectly by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who brought the audience to its feet with a rousing affirmation of climate ambition.

– Anjali and Ryan

For a shot in the arm on climate, check out:

• Inspiring Talks: In the weeks ahead, we’ll highlight more talks from Nairobi as they’re released.

• Climate Reality Project: In the runup to TED Countdown, Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project held an amazing training session in Nairobi. Its next training session for aspiring climate advocates is slated for August 15-17 in Rio de Janeiro. You can apply for the training here.

OKRs in the News

🚗 1.0 – Electrify Transportation

• Charging Forward: The EV charging experience is finally leveling up as new station options, such as Ionna’s “Rechargeries,” offer faster, more reliable plug-ins with more amenities. At the same time, access to Tesla’s vast charging network is expanding to more non-Tesla models just as charging failures decline, speeds improve, and automakers embrace universal plug standards (New York Times).

• Diesel’s Last Gasp?: Thanks to government incentives, battery-powered trucks are gaining serious traction in China, where electric models now constitute 22 percent of light-duty commercial sales and 15 percent of heavy-duty trucks. Meanwhile, China’s diesel consumption is predicted to drop by 26 percent by 2030, signaling a seismic shift in the world’s largest oil importer (Bloomberg).

HOLIDAY HIGHLIGHT 🎆

This July 4th, Speed & Scale encourages Americans to celebrate sustainably at their backyard barbecues by planning portion sizes, saving leftovers, and composting scraps. On a typical Independence Day, an estimated 126 million pounds of food go uneaten, roughly 20 percent of what’s prepared. The problem isn’t confined to food; this wastes roughly $398 million and enough water to supply every home in California for two weeks.

Beef, the most popular, costly, and climate-damaging item on the grill, will account for more than half the methane emissions from holiday food waste, the equivalent of emissions from powering 50,000 homes for a year. While this is not a call to cancel cookout celebrations, it’s a reminder that climate solutions can start with smart planning at the grill.

🐄 3.0 – Fix Food

• Big Food’s Big Methane Problem: Despite pledges to publish emissions data and methane reduction plans by the end of 2024, only seven Dairy Methane Action Alliance members have partially reported their dairy methane emissions.. Even with the rise of innovations such as Bovaer, a feed additive that reduces methane from cow belches by 30 percent, industry progress is lagging (Bloomberg).

• Throwing Out the Bin: Baldío, a Mexico City eatery with no waste bins, is part of a growing revolution to eliminate restaurant food waste. By working with local farmers and using ancient methods of food preservation, Baldío is a model for how restaurants can operate with zero waste (The Guardian).

KNOWLEDGE HUB 🧠

Curious where water stress is surging? The World Water Map, produced by National Geographic, Utrecht University, and Esri, lets you visualize and download water shortage data by country, province, or watershed. It reveals how climate change, agriculture, and various industries are deepening global “water gaps.”

Dive into case studies and explore future scenarios with the interactive Data Explorer.

🌳 4.0 – Protect Nature

• Forests as Friends, With Limits: A new study found that fully reforesting Earth, while not fully feasible, could cool global temperatures by more than 0.3°C. Tree-emitted compounds enhance cloud coverage, which helps cool the Earth’s surface by reflecting sunlight. But without deep emissions cuts, even total reforestation wouldn’t be enough to limit post-industrial warming (Washington Post).

• Oceans on the Line: At the third UN Ocean Conference in Nice, France, leaders urged swift ratification of the High Seas Treaty. Their hope is to turn decades of mostly empty pledges into enforceable protections, particularly for the two thirds of global waters that remain largely unregulated. With just 3 percent of the oceans fully shielded from harmful activity, advocates warn that these vast carbon sinks and heat absorbers are at serious risk (Associated Press).

🧱 5.0 – Clean Up Industry

• Mine Over Matter: The EU unveiled 13 new projects abroad to meet the Critical Raw Material Act targets and reduce reliance on China, which controls over 90 percent of global processing capacity for magnets. Amid tightening Chinese export rules, the projects aim to safeguard Europe’s clean energy and defense sectors with €5.5 billion in planned investment (Reuters).

• Heavy Metal Makeover: To decarbonize steel and align with 1.5°C climate goals, researchers are advancing a multifaceted strategy to increase energy efficiency, switch to low-carbon fuels and technologies, use more scrap steel, and reduce demand. Researchers estimate that slashing the cost of low-carbon technologies offers the potential to reduce emissions from iron and steel production by up to 75 percent (MIT).

🧹 6.0 – Remove Carbon

• Carbon Removal Left And Right: By building its first commercial-scale carbon removal plant in Louisiana, Heirloom Carbon may help carbon capture credits survive the Trump administration. The company is pursuing a two-pronged strategy: appealing to the right with promises of jobs and heavy industry, and to the left with the potential to tackle climate change. Such projects may be our best bet to sustain climate progress despite the impending loss of many environmentally focused tax credits (Politico).

➡️ WHAT’S UP IN WASHINGTON?

There’s been lots of back and forth on the treatment of clean energy incentives in the tax-and-spending legislation known as “One Big Beautiful Bill.” House Republicans sent their version of the “OBBB” to the Senate, severely limiting certain incentives for clean energy. Then Senate Republicans released an updated version that added a punitive excise tax on clean technologies.

What did the Senate actually end up passing on July 1? The excise tax was removed, and some incentives were slightly improved—but not made whole.  Learn more about the Senate language here in E&E News.

At Press Time: House Republicans will need to overcome objections from fiscal hawks within their own party to pass the Senate version and send it to the president’s desk by his deadline of July 4.

🏛️ 7.0 – Win Politics And Policy

• Hydro on Hold: In 2024, to escape soaring diesel costs and transition to hydropower, the Alaska Native community of Port Heiden secured a $300,000 grant from Climate United, a tiny slice of the coalition’s $7 billion in IRA funding. The funds are now frozen by Trump’s EPA, stalling critical decarbonization projects nationwide (Grist).

• EU Rewrites the ESG Rulebook: Under pressure from Germany and France to address concerns over competitiveness, European lawmakers are revising ESG regulations to ease burdens on businesses. One proposal would raise the threshold for mandatory climate and sustainability disclosures from companies with 250 employees to those with more than 3,000 (Bloomberg).

🏃 8.0 – Turn Movements Into Action

• Don’t Feed the Fire: Power utilities in potentially high-risk areas remain underprepared for the growing threat of U.S. wildfires. Many utilities in the Southeast, Gulf Coast, and Upper Midwest lack public mitigation plans, partly due to regulatory barriers. As the recent Los Angeles wildfires revealed, many existing plans overlook higher-voltage transmission lines and deactivated infrastructure (Stanford Report).

• End of an ESG Era: Institutional asset owners in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific say they are moving away from ESG as a single strategy, instead treating it as three distinct elements, with the “E” (environment) as their top priority. With ESG now seen as polarizing, many investors prefer alternative terms, such as “sustainable” or “responsible” investing (Bloomberg).

• Pilgrimage Under Pressure: As climate change pushes temperatures above 100°F, the sacred pilgrimage of Hajj has become a life-threatening journey, especially for unregistered pilgrims lacking access to official cooling shelters. Saudi authorities are racing to expand heat protections, enforce permit regulations, and adapt infrastructure to the extreme desert heat (New York Times).

⚡ 9.0 – Innovate!

• Sucking Up The Trash: Bergen, a 955-year-old Norwegian city, has reduced diesel emissions from waste collection by 90 percent with a citywide pneumatic system—a high-powered underground vacuum network that sucks garbage through tubes beneath the streets—and the infrastructure isn’t even finished yet. As users of one of about 200 such systems in the world, Bergen’s 300,000 inhabitants dump their trash and recycling into tubes that suck the waste out of the city at speeds of 40 miles per hour (The Washington Post).

• From Sewer to Sink: By investing heavily in wastewater reuse and water conservation initiatives, Las Vegas has succeeded in cutting its total water consumption even as the metropolitan area has more than doubled its population over the last two decades, to nearly 2.4 million people. For smaller boomtowns in the Southwest, such as St. George, Utah, sewage recycling presents the most promising solution to ever-increasing water scarcity in the region (NPR).

OKR Highlight

Global public investment in sustainability research and development rose by 1 percent in 2024, to $26.8 billion, the eighth consecutive annual increase.

While this progress signals sustained funding commitments by countries around the world, we still have far to go to reach the target set by OKR 10.2, which calls for investment in basic and applied energy research to rise to $120 billion per year.

This early funding is essential to seed technologies of the future—and to forge breakthroughs in clean technology.

💰 10.0 – Invest!

• Next Up in Nuclear: In a move to address surging energy demand, the World Bank lifted a longstanding ban on funding nuclear power projects. Along with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Bank aims to extend the lifespans of existing reactors, support grid upgrades, and develop new small modular reactors (Bloomberg).

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