The Tricky Task of Solving Global Challenges in an Hour

Appropriately for the 75^th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting celebrating interdisciplinarity, a new lecture format has been introduced that brings diverse expertise together for an hour: the Synergy Talk. A Synergy Talk is a small panel discussion drilling into an issue that requires multidisciplinary thinking. On Monday and Tuesday, two Synergy Talks focused on perhaps the greatest global challenges of our time: food insecurity, and climate change.

“How in the world, in today’s world, are so many people starving to death?,” challenged David Beasley, former Governor of South Carolina (1995–99) and Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP; 2017–23), and recipient of the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the latter.

Despite the fact that the world produces enough food to feed the entire population with plenty to spare, Beasley said that the problem today is not how much food is produced, but accessibility. Recently, human conflict, climate shocks and the COVID-19 pandemic have made this problem even worse, disrupting supply chains and causing other challenges such that the number of people starving to death each year has gone from 80 million when Beasley started the role, to 350 million today.

“It’s heartbreaking to think that every four seconds someone is dying from hunger,” he said. “Shame on humanity – we all share the blame, from political leaders to all of us, when any human being, any child dies from hunger.”

Beasley believes corruption and poor governance in the developing world are major factors in preventing access to adequate food and nutrition, and that those in the West need to start realizing that food insecurity in other parts of the world affects their own “financial and national security interests”.

He offered the example of Europe not dealing with the root cause of problems in Syria leading to a deluge of refugees to Germany. “You ended up with a million refugees… costing 70 Euros a day, $125 billion over a five-year period,” he explained. “I can feed a Syrian in Syria for 50 cents a day,… which would have freed up $120 billion for Germany alone in infrastructure, healthcare and education. But we don’t focus on the icebergs, we’re too busy rearranging the chairs on the Titanic.”

Are GMOs the Answer?

The two other panellists on the stage developed an interest and passion for solving global food insecurity long after their Nobel Prize-winning work, and they both had very different takes on how to tackle the problem. Sir Richard Roberts received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine alongside Philip Sharp “for their discoveries of split genes”. But more recently, Roberts has been laser-focused on promoting genetically modified organisms (GMOs), emphasising their benefits for providing nutritious food to developing countries across the globe. Essentially, Roberts believes food insecurity can be solved by improving the nutritional value, robustness and yields of foods through genetic modification.

In 2016, he launched a campaign to support GMOs and consider Greenpeace’s fervent rejection and other political resistance to GMOs as a potential “crime against humanity”. Though it faced opposition, not only from Greenpeace, the campaign garnered a lot of media attention and support from both the public and Laureates; there are now 184 Laureates and over 10,000 other signatories.

Fast forward a decade and although the campaign has not been a complete success, with many countries still banning or tightly regulating the use of GMOs, Roberts can see opinions shifting. “The regulations on GMOs are relaxing in Europe at the moment, and I’ve been talking with the Indian government, and Prime Minister Modi – together with his staff – are now pro-GMO,” he said.

His next task in two weeks’ time is to convince the Pope to support GMOs, whose opinion holds sway across many developing nations. “I’d spoken to the previous Pope, and there was one good sentence that came out in one of the encyclicals, saying that if the eucharistic matter is made from genetically modified food, it still works,” said Roberts. “I thought this was quite something.”

Moonshot Thinking to Solve Starvation

The final panellist on stage was 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics recipient Brian Schmidt. Once again, Schmidt’s Prize-winning work, the “discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae,” is literally worlds away from food insecurity. But having come from a farming family, Schmidt’s interest in this problem has always been there.

Schmidt is one of more than 150 Nobel and World Food Prize Laureates, including Robert Woodrow Wilson, Jennifer Doudna and the 14th Dalai Lama, to have signed an open letter in 2025 calling for financial and political backing to develop “moonshot” technologies with the greatest chance of averting a hunger catastrophe in the next 25 years.

He did so because he has projected food production up to 2045 and seen what is potentially coming. According to Schmidt, our current increase in rate of food production of 1.1% is less than the 1.8% expected to be needed which, although not huge, could have a compound effect over the years. “It means you end up with the potential of a world in 2045 where we don’t have the luxury of having overproduction and the challenge is getting it to people, but where we actually have underproduction… which would be catastrophic.”

Schmidt would like to see a portfolio of technologies developed that focus on growing foods and meeting nutritional needs where they are needed. “It might be you need millet research rather than corn research, for example,” he says. “But it might be that we also have to do more pragmatic things to do with building water supplies and wells and vegetable production locally and cost effectively.” He hopes this new way of thinking will lead to more rounded and local research and solutions with lasting impact.

Though fascinating and refreshing to hear potential concrete solutions from experts, the Talk garnered some criticism, as it only featured panellists from the West. Surely representatives from countries facing food insecurity should be included in the debate, suggested one young researcher, echoing the opinion of other audience members.

Call to Action on Climate Change

Tuesday’s Synergy Talk similarly only featured panellists from the West, but focused heavily on inspiring young researchers to find practical solutions to climate change. The panel included Steven Chu (1997 Nobel Prize in Physics), Morten Meldal (2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), Ben Feringa (2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), and Schmidt once again.

A former US Secretary of Energy in the Obama administration, Chu kicked things off with some sobering home truths, pointing out that humanity is passing the UN target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels as we speak and is headed past 2°C. “The World Bank is estimating 200 million climate refugees by 2050,” Chu warned bluntly. “We saw what tens of millions of refugees did to the politics of Europe… 200 million is going to be a different world.”

Yet he grounded his bleak assessment with economic optimism. China, in particular, is leading the charge on clean energy, he said, and is witnessing costs plummet as a result. Using this as an example, Chu urged Young Scientists to focus on building affordable technologies that solve other climate challenges, such as fertilizer emissions and carbon capture. “People of my generation have really messed up the world,” said Chu. “We’ll do our best but, unfortunately, we’re giving it to you and you’re going to have to figure out how to fix it.”.

This rather bleak assessment of the situation was counterposed by Feringa, whose enthusiasm and energy for inspiring the next generation to tackle these problems was infectious. “Be an optimist,” he demanded. “It was Einstein, I think, who said that the only thing that is sustainable in this world is creativity and imagination. Please, use your creativity and imagination to shape our future.”

In particular, Feringa was keen to see Young Scientists apply this creativity and imagination to artificial photosynthesis. “With all respect to my physics colleagues, why do we spend billions and billions on neutrino detectors? […] Why don’t we have a worldwide programme of several billions to convert CO₂ in artificial photosynthesis?,” he asked. “We can do efficient photosynthesis 10 times better than Mother Nature.”

While Feringa focused on high-tech artificial photosynthesis, Meldal pointed to a highly sustainable factory that already blankets the planet: nature itself. “There’s a huge future in making really sustainable materials out of what we can get from the sunshine by just growing plants here on Earth,” Meldal insisted. “How do we transform cellulose into all sorts of different, very nice plastic materials? I think that is one of the main tasks that we are facing.”

Schmidt, meanwhile, was keen to focus young minds on developing strategies and technologies that enable us to adapt to a warmer climate because “there’s no amount of damage we’re going to do to Earth where Mars is a better place to live”.

“How are we going to engineer coastlines against probably many metres of sea level rise over the next 50 years? How are we going to extract greenhouse gases from the atmosphere? How are we going to manage agriculture? How are we going to deal with electricity?,” he asked the audience.

As this discussion reflects, the sheer number of problems relating to climate change and scale of transformation required can be hard to picture, and somewhat overwhelming. And despite every one of these problems being huge in their own right, they each only make up a tiny part of the ‘meta-effort’ required to deal with climate change.

It will take many revolutionary ideas to solve this particular puzzle. But Schmidt summed up the overriding sentiment from the panellists that it can be done. “Have confidence that you may have the ability to make profound change… and be open any time of your career, whether it’s now or 15 years from now,” concluded Schmidt. “We don’t know who it’s going to be… who changes the world profoundly and makes the whole thing work… But you’re probably about as likely a group of people in the world as we’re going to find who can.”