The ChangeNOW team, led by Santiago and Rama, asked Matthew to MC and keynote the International Summit for Change at Station F in Paris, the world's largest start-up campus. Over two days, thousands of visitors and hundreds of entrepreneurs and investors joined more than a hundred speakers from over 20 countries to showcase "Innovations for good", loosely aligned to the United Nations' seventeen Sustainable Development Goals.
Matthew opened the summit with his keynote on the "Future of Sustainable Cities". He used his own journey to the event as a case study: a taxi that went to the wrong address at 4am, a delayed train into London, a late Eurostar and a Paris taxi driver who had no idea where he was going. Each failure, he argued, could be solved with a simple app or smart, blockchain based infrastructure, at a time when Hyperloop systems promise to make even the Eurostar look last century.
"The effect that climate change and pollution is having on our society and wellbeing is well documented, but for every problem we face there are hundreds of innovative solutions."Matthew Griffin, Paris, November 2017
The keynote set out the community, political and technological solutions available to build ecologically sensitive, sustainable and vibrant cities: distributed, renewable and smart energy grids and grid scale storage, chemical free vertical farming, clean meat and zero chemical fish farming, fluid autonomous multi-modal transport and electric vehicles, smart homes and fridges that cut energy use and waste, and urban farming.
He then hosted panels on new methods of farming, with the founders of Agriloops, Agropolis and Ynsect, and on sustainable cities, with PLP Architecture, Woodoo and Pavegen. The closing theme was a city where an on demand autonomous pod collects you from home, joins a Hyperloop and takes you the last mile without any fuss.
