How the fridge changed food | Nicola Twilley
Food researcher Nicola Twilley explains how the global cold chain underpins modern diets by keeping food fresh and enabling long-distance transport of meat and produce, while forming an enormous artificial cryosphere. Using examples such as Kenyan avocado exports and the absence of marula fruit in U.S. supermarkets, she shows how refrigeration creates both benefits and inequities, shifts where food waste occurs, and significantly contributes to global emissions. Twilley argues that as many countries are only now building their cold chains, this is a critical moment to rethink freshness, develop lower-emission refrigeration, and explore non-cold preservation methods and system-wide redesigns of how we store and move food.
4 hard truths about capitalism and climate | Steve Howard
Sustainability investor Steve Howard outlines four hard truths about capitalism and climate change, arguing that businesses, financial markets, and policies must be rewired to enable large-scale decarbonization. He explains how companies are structurally resistant to change, how short-term profit focus and unpriced environmental externalities distort markets, and why long, loud, legal climate policies are essential to drive investment into cleaner technologies. Drawing on examples from Temasek, IKEA, Singapore, and emerging climate-tech firms, he shows how better (cleaner, cheaper, higher-performing) solutions can scale quickly and calls on policymakers, asset owners, businesses, and individuals to actively redirect capital toward climate solutions.
The army of autonomous robots restoring nature | Tom Chi
Impact investor Tom Chi challenges the popular belief that economic growth must come at the expense of nature, arguing instead that the economy is physically a subset of the ecology because everything is ultimately mined or grown. He quantifies the scale of current extraction and describes how outdated industrial processes damage ecosystems, then presents three key shifts: closing material loops through advanced recycling, transforming agriculture with regenerative practices and AI-guided breeding, and using robotics for large-scale restoration on land and underwater. Through concrete examples-from battery recycling and adaptive crops to mangrove-planting drones and a low-cost coral and seagrass-planting robot-he illustrates how modern technology can actively repair ecosystems while supporting a resilient future economy.
My journey to thank all the people responsible for my morning coffee | A.J. Jacobs (re-release)
Author A.J. Jacobs describes how his tendency to focus on negatives led him to experiment with gratitude by thanking all the people involved in making his daily cup of coffee. What began as a family mealtime ritual evolved into a global quest to thank more than a thousand people along the coffee supply chain, yielding five key lessons about attention, savoring, invisible work, behavioral change, and global interconnectedness. He argues that genuine gratitude not only improves personal well-being but also inspires concrete action to help others, such as supporting access to safe water.
Sunday Pick: Tech Solutions (#1): The affordable tech that will revolutionize farming (with Samir Ibrahim and Josephine Waweru)
This episode of TED Tech, part of a special mini-series recorded at the TED Countdown Climate Summit in Nairobi, explores how affordable solar-powered water pumps are transforming smallholder farming. Host Cheryl Dorsey speaks with Sun Culture CEO Samir Ibrahim about building a farmer-centered business that has driven down the cost of solar irrigation through both engineering and business model innovation, while navigating investors and climate-related priorities. Coffee farmer Josephine Waweru then shares how installing a solar pump on her Kenyan farm solved her water challenges, enabled her to expand her crops and income, and inspired her to encourage other farmers and young people to see farming as a viable, growth-oriented business.
3 tips to make your world beautifully wild | Isabella Tree
Host Elise Hu introduces environmentalist and conservationist Isabella Tree, who shares how rewilding-allowing nature and animals to restore ecosystems-can be done not only on large estates but also in ordinary gardens and urban spaces. Tree describes the transformation of her family's debt-ridden, intensively farmed land into a thriving, biodiverse rewilding project through free-roaming animals and habitat change. She then offers three practical tips for rewilding any green space and concludes with examples of urban rewilding and the mindset shift required to embrace messier, less controlled landscapes.
After the shutdown, SNAP will still be in trouble
The episode examines how a new federal law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, ties states' costs for food stamps (SNAP) to their payment error rates, shifting part of the financial burden from the federal government to states. Reporters follow Oregon official Nate Singer as he works to reduce the state's high error rate without making it harder for people like Safeway cashier and SNAP recipient Vicki Aguilar to access benefits. The story also explores the auditing system, the tradeoff between accuracy and accessibility, the perspective of Governor Tina Kotek, and the added pressure from a federal government shutdown threatening to suspend SNAP payments.
How satellites are supporting farmers across Africa | Catherine Nakalembe
Satellite food security specialist Catherine Nakalembe explains how she uses satellite imagery and machine learning to map and monitor crops across African countries, and why many existing models fail when applied to smallholder farms. In a follow-up conversation with TED Fellows Program Director Lily James-Olds, she describes the gap between powerful data systems and farmers' realities, the importance of ground-based data and local context, and her efforts to build practical, human-centered ways to turn drought and flood information into action. She also shares a grassroots project to establish soil moisture calibration stations in Africa and reflects on the institutional and financial barriers, as well as the sources of hope that keep her pursuing this work.
How to pull the emergency brake on global warming | Mohamed A. Sultan
Host Elise Hu introduces a TED Talk by sustainability strategist Mohamed A. Sultan about the urgency and opportunity of cutting methane emissions, especially across the African continent. Sultan explains how methane from landfills, fossil fuels, and agriculture significantly drives global warming, and highlights concrete African examples in waste management, energy, and rice cultivation that reduce methane while improving public health, jobs, and food security. He argues that better governance, finance, and development models can simultaneously build resilience, advance economic development, and lower methane emissions worldwide.
How refrigeration took over the world
The episode explores how refrigeration and the modern cold chain emerged, from Gustavus Swift's centralized meatpacking and refrigerated railcars to the scientific work of chemist M.E. "Polly" Pennington, who standardized safe temperatures and built public trust in chilled foods. Hosts and guest Nicola Twilley trace how continuous refrigeration reshaped agriculture, consumer expectations of freshness, women's household labor, and even geopolitical events like war logistics and Irish independence. They also examine the downsides of a cold-dependent food system, including diminished flavor, shifted food waste, and significant climate-warming emissions, along with potential efficiency improvements.
How do you rethink how the world works? An entrepreneur and an engineer answer | Yancey Strickler and Jenny Du
Host Elise Hu introduces a conversation between writer and former Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler and engineer-chemist Jenny Du about how feeling like an outsider can shape unconventional careers and systems-level innovations. Strickler reflects on lifelong feelings of not belonging, how that pushed him to question institutions, and how his thinking about punk labels and the Royal Society led to his artist corporation idea. Du describes how a shocking statistic about global food waste set her on a mission to extend the life of healthy foods, and together they discuss resilience, working within entrenched systems, and staying optimistic and truth-focused in a world that often feels "doomy."