In his closing remarks at a Bühler‑organized event, Andrea Illy frames climate change and biodiversity loss as an existential threat, especially for coffee production, citing a 50% loss of suitable coffee land by 2050 and recent extreme weather in Brazil. He critiques the current extractive, linear economic model that depletes natural capital and generates waste, arguing that mitigation alone is insufficient and that adaptation must precede it. Illy stresses the need for a holistic, bottom‑up sustainability approach that integrates social, economic, and environmental dimensions, rejecting reductionist, siloed policies. He proposes a new regenerative model that invests roughly 2% of global GDP in nature conservation and ecosystem restoration, emphasizing the value of natural capital. To operationalize this, he calls for systemic, non‑linear thinking, massive clean‑tech investment, and leveraging artificial intelligence to scale problem‑solving. Illy announces the Agorai Innovation Hub in Trieste—a partnership with Generali, Google, Goldman Sachs, and Italian institutions—where he will lead the agri‑food component, inviting interested parties to contact him.
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TranscriptAuto-generated · 11 min
Good afternoon. Great to be here with you. Thank you so much to Bühler for not only for the invitation, for organizing such an amazing event. I wish there would be plenty organized by the, you know, public sector, no matter which government. I have the privilege to close the session today, so I will kind of make a few comments wrapping up also what we have heard this morning. And I would like just to stress how existential this issue is. Just to give you an example, 10 years ago, together with Jeffrey Sachs in Milan, we announced that up to 50% of the currently suitable land for coffee agriculture will be gone by 2050. This year, prices, as you have heard, all-time records. But I visited the plantations where the heart of coffee production in Minas Gerais, Brazil, where 20% of the coffee is grown. 7 consecutive months without a drop of rain. Peak temperatures 8 degrees above normal. In one year, just changed like this. So reality is becoming true. Can we adapt? We will see. I don't know. We don't know. In our euphoria for progress, more in general, humans forgot that we are part of nature and that we rely 100% upon nature for our living factors. From the air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat, the fabric you wear, the material you use, the environmental condition which allow us to live are all provided by the so-called ecosystem services, by the biosphere. And the biosphere perpetuates these ecosystem services by spontaneous regeneration. The problem is that our extractive linear model keeps depleting resources from natural capital like they were infinite, and they are not. And at the end of the linear process from cradle to grave, you have just waste pollution, another gigantic factor hindering spontaneous regeneration Of the biosphere. So this is the problem that can be addressed with secularity and beyond, as I will say. So second point, existential, how complex is this problem? First of all, I spoke about adaptation first. If I focus on mitigation, lowering emissions, more environmental-friendly packaging materials. We will run out of business. So we have to adapt first, mitigate later, do it at the same time, because otherwise mitigating will be too late. Can we adapt and mitigate at the same time? Maybe yes. Luckily, yes. And then you get— you take some initiative and you have a consumer pushback. Like, remember the Gilets Jaunes? Or look now, the politics. It's becoming politically incorrect to talk about sustainability. It's forbidden to talk in some administration about climate change. You have to talk about meteorological volatility. So we have to take in account of those factors, the social factors. You cannot make sustainability, circularity top-down, as demonstrated by the last evolution. So if it has to be bottom-up, then you have to promise something to people. So it's social, it's economical, it's environmental at the same time. It's a big wheel rotating. It's not about single little slices. We are adopting a reductionistic approach to sustainability, which is totally ineffective. Think about that. We have 2 COPs, one for climate, and one for biodiversity, but they come along. Climate is a consequence of the environmental crisis, it's not standalone. Biodiversity comes along with carbon sequestration because it's the biosphere, it's biodiversity and biomass, and so on. So it involves health, inclusion, happiness. It involves investments, jobs, profits. It involves, as far as the environment is concerned, the soil, biodiversity, water, pollution, emission. And of course, did I mention 5? So soil, biodiversity, water, emissions, and pollution. So enormously complex. So in order to do that, you cannot do it with one transition. To transition to what? We need an evolution. We need to change the model. This extractive linear model is completely destroyed. It's a model which destroys the same amount of natural capital in order to build monetary capital. And it can do that because the natural capital is not valued. Nobody speaks about the value of land, of water, etc. So imagine a new model which would be able to convert this vicious circle into a virtuous one in which you regenerate the biosphere as you grow the economy. Such an economy would promote, and such companies would promote, 3 things at the same time, as said by my colleague from Nestlé this morning: well-being, prosperity, and conservation. Why conservation? Professor Rockström told us something which is amazingly dangerous This we are talking about self-powered destruction. It's not the issue about conserving natural capital for protecting it about from the you know predatory behavior of human. No, no, no. The problem is self-destruction. The problem is the biodiversity loss. But the problem is the biomass loss. The problem is the water reserve loss. All these. which is reducing this resilience which has been our free lunch until now. So this is the new model, proactively investing 2% in nature conservation. Why 2%? There are 127 million square kilometers of natural ecosystem provided These ecosystem services. At least half of them needs to be proactively conserved. It costs more or less $300 per hectare. With a GDP of $110 trillion, it's 1.8%. And then you have also to restore most of the ecosystem that have been damaged from the past. So it's probably 2— More than that. More than 2%, but 2% would be a good start. So how to execute that? Just not philosophy. Circularity by design. We need a systemic approach because this complexity is not linear. Complex systems work in a completely different way. It's not linear, it's exponential. It's generating some emergencies like COVID or similar. We have to change the way we approach that systemic approach. We need to make gigantic investment of clean techs. So in promoting boiler, agri-food is number one, one, one, two, two priority in terms of impact. So this technology is the We are in the right room. And as said, investing in restoration and conservation. And last but not least, AI, artificial intelligence. If artificial intelligence is the capacity to solve problems, and God knows that we have a gigantic problem to solve now. And progress is the number of problems which have already been solved. AI exponentially increases our capacity to solve these problems. So we are now investing in a new platform, a new hub, innovation hub, together with Generali Insurances, together with Google, together with Goldman Sachs, together with Italian institutions in Trieste, which is called Agorai Innovation Hub. And I will have the privilege to lead the agri-food part. Just as an announcement, whoever is interested in the room to learn about that, please contact me. Thank you very much. Thank you.
