2040

My name is Damon.

And this is my daughter, velvet.

Are you trying to plant dad?

She's just turned four.

Her days are spent in a happy bubble,

created by my excellent wife, Zoe.

Yeah?

She's lucky enough that her major concerns right now

are numbers... Daddy. Mummy. Velly.

So how many pieces is that?

How to tell a knock knock joke...

- Knock, knock. - Who's there?

- Unicorn. - Unicorn who?

Unicorn jump over the rainbow.

Oh, that's who it is!

And the elusive art of sleep direction.

But soon she'll have to leave that happy bubble

and face a rapidly deteriorating environment.

faster than the scientists predicted.

We're seeing large waterfalls

pouring off the side of the ice.

It's an alarming acceleration.

The need to address this is so urgent...

That it often overwhelms me.

The simplest way I can explain our current predicament

is to briefly channel my year nine science teacher

and pretend our house is the planet.

Carbon is a miraculous building block

and for millions of years,

our planet has been part of a natural carbon cycle.

Some gets released, some gets stored,

and if these things are balanced,

then equilibrium is maintained.

But since the industrial revolution,

we've broken the balance

and have been dramatically increasing

the release of the earth's stored carbon

into our atmosphere.

For hundreds of thousands of years,

we've hovered between about 180 and 280 parts per million

of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

But since the industrial revolution,

that number has shot up over 40%

to more than 400 parts per million,

trapping heat in our atmosphere.

More than 90% of the excess heat being trapped

is absorbed by our oceans.

The oceans also absorb much of the extra carbon dioxide,

and so are now 30% more acidic than they were 150 years ago.

And this is impacting on biodiversity,

as many sea creatures, such as oysters or clams,

are struggling to make their shells.

But the increased heat and overall energy in the system

also leads to more intense weather events.

Hotter air can hold more moisture,

so rainfalls, storms, hurricanes, floods,

even snowfalls can become heavier.

It is true that the climate has always been changing.

It just hasn't changed this rapidly

in at least 50 million years.

Unfortunately, the increase in heat

also means that our polar caps and glaciers

are rapidly melting,

which causes sea level rise

that threatens hundreds of millions of people

The earth is our collective home,

but we're actually renting it from future generations.

So we need to not only rapidly reduce our emissions...

Oi! Righto!

But also find ways to sequester

or draw down the excess carbon dioxide

that has already been put into the system.

Many scientists believe that getting down to 350 ppm

would be a terrific goal.

So I think we're all pretty aware

that when it comes to predictions of the future,

they're almost entirely negative at the moment.

Any time you open your newsfeed or social media,

there's some kind of doom and gloom story

about the future of our environment.

And as a father, I...

I think there's room for a different story.

A story that focuses on the solutions

to some of these problems.

So my plan is to go out and find some of these solutions

and then create a vision of a different future

for our daughter.

What about...

I want to show her what the world would look like

if the solutions I find were implemented today.

So, what would the world look like in 2040

if we just embraced the best that already exists?

And that's my only rule.

Everything I show her in this 2040,

has to exist today, in some form.

I can't make it up.

See you, dadda. - See you, darling.

Have fun.

I'm calling it an exercise in

fact-based dreaming.

The first step in this exercise was to consult the generation

who'll be sharing the future with our daughter.

- Hi, everybody. Morning.

Morning. My name is Damon.

Now, do you guys know where we've come from today?

Do you know what country that I'm from?

No.

We have animals called platypus.

- Kangaroo. Australia!

Australia? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We've been going all around the world

and talking to lots of different children your age,

and so we're going to ask you what kind of things

you want to see in the future.

Well, what would make me happy in the world is...

Hmm.

I think we should get this invention

which sucks up all of the rubbish in the world

and puts it in a intergalactic dimension,

which is a rubbish dimension.

I'd like to see deforestation being stopped

because it's ruining the planet.

Animals are losing their homes.

Cleaner water. That would really make me happy.

Well, I would like for the government

to have done something on global warming and pollution,

as now, I think they're not really doing anything about it.

You know, just be respectful to earth.

It was sobering to learn how preoccupied the kids are

with the state of the planet,

and what a big job I had ahead of me.

So I began my search for solutions with energy.

I found myself in Bangladesh, where the roads are chaotic...

And people are openly peddling ice on the streets.

Currently, Bangladesh has one of the largest

solar home system markets in the world.

Over 5 million solar home systems.

So most households in every rural area in Bangladesh

actually has a solar home system,

and that's their primary source of energy.

Wow.

This charming 23-year-old is neel tamhane,

who has studied alternative energy technologies

and come home to help power his country.

Turns out I wasn't the only one who wanted to hear him talk.

So what we do is we interconnect solar home systems

and we enable energy sharing between them,

which is basically trading,

and the customer chooses when they want to trade

and when they don't.

Instead of building large grids,

we're proposing a decentralised structure

where we start building grids bottom up.

The setup is quite simple.

Any home that has solar panels and a battery...

Can buy this special box...

Which connects them to another house

with the same setup.

The box allows the buying or selling of energy

between the homes.

But it gets better.

There is still a segment of the population

that still can't afford to buy a solar home system.

So, instead of doing that,

if they can just buy a small solbox,

they can just buy energy when they need it.

You fill up your solbox with money.

As you keep using energy, it deducts money.

What this means

is that all the boxes can connect to each other

to form a microgrid.

It's like a water tank of community energy

that people can give to or take from.

The beauty is that this microgrid

can then connect to the adjacent village's microgrid

and the network becomes stronger and stronger.

There's a mimicking of nature here, isn't there?

Like, in the way that cells multiply

and form something and strengthen it.

Yeah, that's a great analogy.

You have one solar home system,

you interconnect with your neighbours, you make it 50.

Slowly, you interconnect villages.

Once you have collected hundreds,

you can hook it up to the grid, you can sell to the grid.

Forget buying from it -

you become the primary energy generation source

for the country.

So the idea is we are like a swarm of bees

or a swarm of fish that move together,

pool in all our energies together to run bigger loads.

This technology could revolutionise

the way we distribute energy worldwide.

From little things, big things grow.

When we have a decentralised mode of energy,

the same thing that happened with the web,

happens with information

where basically, it's Democratic.

Energy becomes Democratic.

But also it becomes very efficient.