Conference Presentation, Panel, Fireside Chat, Roundtable
Agent of Change: The California-Israel Global Innovation Partnership
Milken InstituteProfessor Itzik-Peterborg, Jay Keesling, Uri, Nati, Mark Gold, Yoram Cohen, Clive Kabat-Zinnick, David Blumberg
- The Milken Innovation Center intends to launch impact investments and establish financial innovation labs to apply Israeli technologies to global challenges in water, food, health, and energy, with plans to replicate California-Israel IT success, create dashboards for water resilience, and scale solutions globally to Africa and Latin America.
- The consortium aims to decouple natural resource use from global growth, deploy fellows to address the "how" of the Memorandum of Understanding, and utilize an energy services model to fund water technologies via future savings without cash down payments.
- Professor Itzik Peterborg predicts a disruptive healthcare transformation driven by tech giants (Amazon, Google, Apple, Samsung) and financial pressures, expecting a "next Uber Health" entity to emerge and companies to avoid commoditization by innovating closer to the patient.
- Professor Peterborg notes the FDA recently approved the first 3-D printed drug and plans to form new California-Israel partnerships to explore digital health solutions, leveraging Israel as an innovation hub.
- Professor Jay Keeling projects synthetic biology will replace petroleum-derived products with renewable alternatives, targeting a "foundry for biology" by 2030 that reduces microbial engineering time from 150 person-years to 1.5.
- The UC Berkeley-Israel collaboration on biological foundries seeks to engineer microbes for large-scale fuel production to compete with petroleum, with biofuel commercialization expected to occur when oil prices reach $100 to $150 per barrel or a carbon price is implemented.
- Keeling anticipates jet fuels will be the first biofuel category to compete with fossil fuels due to aviation's energy density requirements, with end-products potentially being carbon neutral or negative depending on storage versus combustion.
- Professor Uri Goren predicts a 50% increase in global food demand over coming decades driven by population shifts out of subsistence living and plans to extend produce shelf life via warm-washing to address the 50% loss from spoilage.
- Nati Karni expects drip irrigation in California's commodity crops to save significant water, noting a shift of 30% of rice cultivation from flood to drip could equate to removing 130,000 trucks from roads regarding emissions, with a commercial plot planned for this year.
- The California-Israel project team plans to deploy water technology via an energy services corporation model to avoid upfront costs, while the Volcani Institute intends to extend produce shelf life to reduce storage spoilage.
- UCLA projects the average temperature in Los Angeles will rise four to five degrees by 2050, with extreme heat days increasing three to five-fold, as the state pursues 100% local water and renewable energy goals.
- Mark Gold predicts a "new normal" for California featuring a 70% reduction in snowpack and anticipates the California Water Action Plan will drive behavioral change through mandatory conservation, fines, and tiered pricing.
- Gold states California must urgently manage groundwater due to catastrophic overdrafts and advocates for moving from flood to precision irrigation in the Imperial Valley as a transformation not yet realized in the state.
- The initiative relies on public-private partnerships, technology guarantees, and co-development, while utilizing California's carbon offset platform to trade projects and developing green bond subordinated debt programs to finance the transition.
- The UCLA Sustainable LA Grand Challenge plans to release a roadmap for true urban sustainability across Los Angeles County by 2020 to address the projected climate and resource challenges.