Last week (October 25-27), approximately 4,000 business, government, and entrepreneurial leaders convened in-person—for the first time since 2019!—in San Jose, CA for VERGE 22, a GreenBiz climate tech event focused on accelerating solutions for today’s most pressing sustainability challenges. If you weren’t there to experience the planet-positive buzz in-person, here’s a recap of The Climate Pledge’s programing at the conference.

Future Forward Film Premieres

Lights, camera, (climate) action! It's not often you see heart-warming, inspiring stories of corporate climate action, but VERGE22 attendees had the opportunity to screen five of them. Over the course of two days, event goers gathered in the San Jose McEnery Convention Center Expo Hall at The Climate Pledge stage to watch short films from our upcoming documentary series, Future Forward, followed by Q&A panels with the climate leaders featured on-screen, as described below.

The Future of Flight film & panel discussion

In keeping with the film’s focus on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), Sara Bogdan, Head of Sustainability & ESG at JetBlue, and Chris Cooper, President of Neste USA, discussed the benefits of implementing a carbon solution that integrates into an airline’s existing infrastructure. According to Bogdan: “Customers can fly out of SFO and have no idea they’re flying on SAF.”

The Future of Buildings film & panel discussion

Julia Raish, Global Lead of Sustainable Buildings at Amazon, announced the opening of Amazon’s first operations building to be net-zero carbon. While some of the building’s sustainability optimizations can be visually missed, Raish notes: “It's a great example of how you can maintain core business operations in a much lower carbon world and often at cost parity.” Robert Niven, CEO of CarbonCure Technologies, stressed the importance of demand signals from leading businesses like Amazon in order to influence industry-wide decarbonization.

The Future of Farming film & panel discussion

Stefani Millie Grant, Senior Manager of External Affairs and Sustainability at Unilever, and Sarah Carlson, Senior Programs and Member Engagement Director at Practical Farmers of Iowa, shared the key to getting farmers to adopt regenerative farming practices: trust. “It’s not so much talking,” says Millie Grant. “It’s understanding their concerns and co-developing a solution. If they help develop it, they’ll want to participate in it.”

The Future of Water film & panel discussion

Jan-Willem Vosmeer, Manager of Sustainable Development and Stakeholder Engagement at The HEINEKEN Company led this panel discussion with a bold statement: “We hear a lot about climate change but we don’t hear a lot about the water crisis.” He was joined on-stage by Nicole Terrizzi, Senior Strategic Development Executive at Water.org, who also urged more businesses to tackle the issue of water scarcity and inaccessibility because: “It’s not all doom and gloom; it’s a solvable issue.”

The Future of Transport film & panel discussion

Anders Thulin, Business Development Manager at Siemens, Ramya Winstead, Electric Vehicle Charging and Infrastructure Lead at Amazon, and Dagan Mishoulam, VP of Strategy & Go to Market at Rivian were instrumental in bringing Amazon’s electric delivery vehicle fleet to fruition, and while it may have seemed like a wild idea at first, their dedication to the project never wavered. Winstead remarked: “Throughout this process we never thought ‘We’ll wait for someone else to do it.’ We had to figure it out, that’s the way to learn.”

The Climate Pledge Fund: Meet the Innovators

From e-fuels, to sustainable agriculture, Amazon’s $2B Climate Pledge Fund—launched only two years ago—has invested in 20 companies with a wide-range of climate-flighting solutions.

Climate Pledge Fund recipients Seonghoon Woo, CEO & Co-Founder at Amogy, Ivonna Dumanyan, Chief Business Officer at Hippo Harvest, Alexander Meek, Co-founder and President at Moxion Power Co., and Robert Schuetzle, CEO at Infinium, took the stage to talk about how they’re revolutionizing their respective industries.