Recapping VoLo Foundation’s 2022 Climate Correction Conference

From March 17-18th, I attended the VoLo Foundation’s 2022 Climate Correction Conference in Orlando, which was called Sustaining Food: Powered by Climate Smart Solutions. As that title suggests, key speakers included researchers, academics, and change agents enacting climate action in the field of sustainable agriculture.

In the opening keynote, VoLo co-founder Thais Vogel-Lopez offered a resonant remark that climate action starts by working from the heart. We have to work together, we must have care and passion for the work we carry out, and as the adage goes:

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Several panelists shared a recurring theme that “you can’t go green when you’re in the red.” In order to scale and replace the status quo, climate action, philanthropy, and social giving must be strategic, profitable, and impactful, as shared by Thais Vogel-Lopez. Like all landholders and business managers, farmers are under considerable economic pressure, and some of that pressure can get in the way of providing ecosystem services. Simply put, staying sustainable means staying profitable when it comes to agriculture and golf, and that means creating solutions that align the needs of economy, ecology, and society, thus being truly regenerative.

Toward the end of the conference, I also had the chance to share about our work at Driving the Green through an open mic session. In my discussion of how golf might fit into the picture of climate action, I left attendees with the motif that thinking about scale requires thinking about connection. While golf takes up roughly 5 million acres, these pale in comparison to the 4 billion acres of agriculture! However, considering that the participants and sponsors of golf include the world’s most wealthy and powerful players, this sport begins to look like an ideal vehicle for championing awareness of regenerative solutions.

Below, I share my key facts and key takeaways from the conference. Enjoy!

Key Facts

• Food yield/production must increase 70-100% to avoid mass starvation by 2050 (given that 11.5B people must be fed to also avoid malnutrition) (shared by J. Scott Angle, UF)

• 73% of Floridians believe that global warming is real, and yet fewer than half believe it will harm them personally. 100% of Floridians are affected! (shared by Dr. Katherine Kayhoe of Nature Conservancy)

• When one considers the “food mile” and entire value chain, every calorie of food takes about ten calories of energy to produce (shared by Chris Castro)

• Premiums for crop insurance have increase roughly 400% over the last two decades for drought-related insurance alone (shared by US Rep. Kathy Castor)

• The City of Orlando hosts 18 community gardens and 700+ garden plots (shared by Chris Castro)

Key Learnings

#1 – Culture scales climate action.

Conference attendees heard from Chris Castro, Director of Sustainability and Resiliency for the City of Orlando and co-founder of IDEAS for Us. Chris shared about the City of Orlando’s success with changing city ordinances such that neighborhoods could be converted to “agrihoods”. Orlando is now host to 18 community gardens and 700+ garden plots, many of which are on formerly vacant home lots.

Orlando sees 75+ million visitors per year from around the US and the rest of the world due to its local attractions and theme parks. Many of these visitors can see Orlando’s efforts with urban agriculture, community gardening, and hydroponic shipping containers. The city is also getting creative with sports partnerships (including the NFL and FIFA) while using events like music block parties to celebrate urban agriculture and local food. Using the visibility of culture can help inspire hope that then encourages continued waves of climate action. Driving the Green was founded with this same intent for golf, so it was exciting to see it in practice in a different context!

#2 – The newest tech meets the oldest solutions of nature.

One surprising theme from the conference was the continued integration of technology and AI to address the challenges of sustainable agriculture. Presenters from the University of Florida shared about how the world’s fastest supercomputer is being used to address the most pressing questions about regenerative agriculture and carbon sequestration. AI is also learning how to properly value ecosystem services so that farmers can be paid for their services to the public good. Such incentives could allow regenerative land management practices to be more widely and rapidly adopted at scale, by helping farmers stay in business. The findings of these presentations and panels have much direct relevance to golf, which is a sport of new-age equipment and tech meeting age-old tradition and nature. While AI supports precision management in agriculture, similar tools are helping golf conserve resources.

#3 – Climate action requires an orchestration of many solutions.

Systemic and interconnected challenges require systemic and interconnected solutions. Golf is just one lever, or one instrument in the orchestra of needed solutions for the climate crisis. Attending the conference was a humbling reminder of scale and scope. Climate change is an amalgamation of many global challenges, including atmospheric imbalances, biodiversity loss, social inequity, human rights violations, extreme weather events, and resource depletion, among others. These myriad issues are also caused by many sectors and sources of pollution or “ecosystem dis-services”. As such, the true “solution” to climate change is an orchestration of many climate actions, which include culture, technology, people, processes, tools, and policies. As Dr. Katharine Kayhoe of The Nature Conservancy poignantly put it, “there’s no silver bullet, but there’s a lot of silver buckshot”.

There are many possibilities for rethinking existing resources and connections to address systemic issues. Each individual finds his or her place in the orchestra by asking: what does the world most need that I am uniquely positioned to provide?

Our individual responsibility fits into the symphony of collective responsibility through the callings of our heart. At Driving the Green, this means re-envisioning the world of golf as an ideal intersection of fun, inclusivity, well-being, and climate action.