<aside> <img src="https://prod-files-secure.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/5cc00d5b-5af2-4de2-b814-63a43a9ba3c6/1246a6cd-64e5-4838-82ad-838e1891019b/RE_Icons_Small_Black_ArrowRight.png" alt="https://prod-files-secure.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/5cc00d5b-5af2-4de2-b814-63a43a9ba3c6/1246a6cd-64e5-4838-82ad-838e1891019b/RE_Icons_Small_Black_ArrowRight.png" width="40px" /> Find out more about our three focus topics for 2024, as we are looking for solutions that
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With the clock ticking on many of our most pressing environmental challenges, it’s all hands on deck to keep humanity in the ‘safe operating space’. Embracing innovation will be crucial.
The RESPOND Accelerator helps accelerate this transition to a regenerative future by strategically addressing critical leverage points in the system for ambitious impact-driven entrepreneurs to scale and succeed.
For 2024, we’ve defined three Areas of Actions to accelerate the transformation of our economic system. Throughout the RESPOND Accelerator program – starting with the startup scouting and selection, all the way to the delivery of our journeys and sessions – we’ll align our efforts with the Areas of Action to make sure we focus on the most important levers for change:
The paradigms that we’ve adopted to govern our economies and run our businesses have in recent decades put us on a path of accelerated degeneration. They’ve led us to a point where we’re now facing multiple planetary and social crises, including climate breakdown, pollution, and biodiversity loss, while also fueling deep social inequality. We’ll have to invest in a positive relationship with our planetary ecosystems – a relationship in which the goal of net-zero becomes a stop-off on the longer journey to co-evolve with our changing climate and create the conditions for life to flourish, thrive, and renew into perpetuity.
We’re looking for innovations across three strategic focus areas:
A fair and inclusive economy within planetary boundaries. An economy that thrives on regeneration rather than exploitation and prioritizes human well-being.
To us, this is not just the next buzzword that reads well in combination with economy: A regenerative economy doesn’t produce greenhouse gas emissions, it doesn’t know waste but only resources that are re-used in circular systems, and it doesn’t destroy natural habitats or the livelihoods of communities. Beyond that, it even creates new resources that benefit people, planet, and profit alike. In doing so, it enhances the natural environment, the built environment, and the social environment.
Complicated? Ambitious? Absolutely.