Meridian Goes to Climate Week 2024
3 October 2024
Last week, members of the Meridian team joined our partners and colleagues from around the world at Climate Week NYC. We had approximately 20 team members in attendance, and they had a busy week convening diverse stakeholders, facilitating meetings, hosting or speaking on panels, and enjoying some valuable in-person time.
Our team’s events at Climate Week represented many areas of our work, spanning food systems, technology and society, life on land, and more. Check out some of the highlights of our week below.
All Things Food at Climate Week
At Food Day, Meridian food systems experts Melissa Pinfield, Sareh Forouzesh, and Tara Shyam represented one of our larger Meridian projects, Regen10, in a meeting with global partners, World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the World Farmers Organization (WFO), at a joint Regen10-WBCSD event at “Regen House”.
Tara also moderated a fireside chat with Andrea Porro, Secretary General of WFO, and Laura Thomas, farmer support at GC Resolve. They spoke about driving farmer-centric food systems transformation.
Several Meridian team members facilitated an informal gathering of US and European funders to explore opportunities for collaboration on food and agriculture on both sides of the Atlantic.
Our CEO, Todd Barker, attended a dinner at the James Beard Foundation (JBF) House hosted by Meridian partner Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Each night, a new JBF award-winning chef prepares dinner at the House. For the Global Alliance for the Future of Food dinner, chef Grace Ramirez prepared a plant-forward meal with a focus on blue foods.
Designing Resilient Systems
Todd Barker, Sareh Forouzesh, and Anna Sophia Roberts were on hand to participate in a few events hosted by Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA), a Meridian project.
ASRA launched its latest report, “Facing Global Risks with Honest Hope: Transforming Multidimensional Challenges into Multidimensional Possibilities”, at a panel where Todd was the MC. The report offers bold, actionable strategies to strengthen how we assess and address systemic risks—essential for building a safer, more resilient future for people, the planet, and all living ecosystems.
At the report launch, Todd, along with ASRA’s Executive Director Ruth Richardson, had the opportunity to meet former President of Mongolia Elbegde Tsakhia and former President of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo.
ASRA also hosted a Next Gen workshop, where early- to mid-career risk professionals gathered to discuss ASRA’s systemic risk assessment and response frameworks, share learnings amongst peers, and join the wider ASRA network of systemic risk theorists and practitioners.
AI Technology for All
One of Meridian’s largest projects, Lacuna Fund, convened almost 30 of its grantees, including data scientists and social entrepreneurs from all over the world.
Lacuna Fund supports the creation of representative machine learning datasets that fill critical data gaps in the Global South, providing solutions and benefits to communities historically left behind in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning advancements.
This annual convening focused on Climate grantees, which are this year’s newest cohort. The grantees’ projects cover the intersections between climate and health, forests, and/or energy. The two-day event offered an opportunity for grantees to connect and learn from one another, attend workshops hosted by Lacuna Fund partners and AI experts, and foster collaboration across regions and disciplines.
Lacuna Fund’s Steering Commitee also met to discuss the future of Lacuna Fund and plan for opportunities on the horizon. For Meridian staff, it was a meaningful moment to meet many of these grantees for the first time after managing their proposals and applications since 2023.
“After planning the agenda for an event like this, it is always a relief to see it executed smoothly and provide a space for connections! The moment I enjoyed the most was witnessing the energy in the room as grantees connected during the “speed dating” networking activity that I facilitated.”
– Katrina Gehman, Mediator and Program Associate
Lacuna Fund team members present in New York included Project Director Jennifer Pratt Miles, Katrina Gehman, Juan Lazo Bautista, Yomi Ogedegbe, Haidee Clauer, and consultant Adela Briansó Junquera.
Nature Management & Scientific Innovation
Melissa Pinfield, Brad Spangler, Liz Duxbury, Todd Barker, Anna Sophia Roberts, and Katrina Gehman hosted a high-level dialogue involving environment ministers, business and Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities leaders at Rockefeller Foundation. This event, titled “High-Level Dialogue on Nature Management, Scientific Innovation, Benefit-Sharing and the Convention on Biological Diversity”, was tied to Meridian’s Digital Sequence Information (DSI) project.
We’ll See You Next Year, Climate Week!
Every event at Climate Week offered new insights and opportunities for connection with our partners, funders, and stakeholders. And, to cap it all off, we managed to squeeze in a little time to catch up with each other over happy hours, dinners, and even a Yankees baseball game!