Nexus Conference Wrap-Up, Day 2: Getting down to business

Hello again,

It's Grace Tatter from Campus BluePrint.

Today, conference attendees learned how businesses and entrepreneurs can contribute, and will be impacted, by the Nexus.

• Cole Wilhelmi writes about today's opening remarks by Paula Gomez, the Director of the Directorate for Economic, Social and Environmental Affairs for the government of Colombia. Gomez described Colombia's innovative approaches for encouraging the collaborative interventions the Nexus Conference is based upon. She calls the approaches the "dashboard" approach and the "integrative" approach, and said they've been remarkably successful, although budgetary constraints have limited the government's capacity for change. Read more here.

• Lindsey Kellogg writes about the first plenary: “Natural Resource Security for People: Water, Food and Energy," and highlights two basic takeaways. Again, different industries and sectors must collaborate with each other, as well as understand the intersections of the world's greatest challenges. And she poses the question posed by the Global Water Foundation: Is water the nexus's weak link? To read more, and find out what the movie Lincoln has to do with any of this, read here.

• I covered the second plenary, in which panelists from multinational corporations explained why they're stakeholders in sustainable situations. You can read more about that here. 

• The second plenary dovetailed nicely with the lunch session I attended in between plenaries, "Empowering Social and Environmentalism Entrepreneurs for Nexus Solutions." During that session, David Rothschild of the Skoll Foundation explained how increasing data transparency is helping corporations ensure their business practices are sustainable all the way down the supply chain, as well as help keep those same corporations accountable to their sustainability goals. Earlier in the day, Anders Berntell, the executive director 2030 Water Resources Group, said that if different sectors and agencies work together, they can arrive at "win-win-win" water use situations. Rothschild echoed Berntell's optimism about such multidimensional approaches almost verbatim while detailing the Skoll Foundation's collaboration with the USAID in the Amazon."That's the big goal," he said. "It's to modernize. It's to increase agricultural production, but at the same time, increase sustainable. It can be a win-win-win situation."

Today there was optimism about topics that normally inspire cynicism: multinational, for-profit corporations, and the future of human rights and the environment. Presenters fortified that optimism by pairing it with supporting evidence. We're interested to see if the optimism results in more ambitious Nexus goals in the Declaration, and if it's sustained during the remainder of the conference.

Stay warm and safe!

Until tomorrow,

Grace