In 2017, Santiago Lefebvre started ChangeNOW with a hundred climate solutions and one room. Nine editions later, he opens the Grand Palais in Paris to 40,000 people from 140 countries. But here is the thing he told us that we cannot stop thinking about: the solutions to our planetary crisis already exist. Every single one of them. What the world is missing is not the ideas. It is the ecosystem to deploy them at scale.
That conviction is what led Santiago to found ChangeNOW which is now the world’s largest climate solutions summit, bringing together 1,000 sustainable innovations and more than 1,200 impact investors under one roof. Last year alone, nearly 1,400 investor-founder meetings were arranged through its Dealflow Lounge, making it one of the most powerful platforms for climate action and green investment in the world.
In this episode, we sit down with Santiago just days before ChangeNOW 2026 opens in Paris.
We explore what it takes to build a climate ecosystem rather than just an event, why brilliant clean technology innovations fail to scale, what impact investors keep getting wrong, and why the cultural transition may be the hardest and most important part of the sustainability transition.
Whether you are a climate entrepreneur, impact investor, sustainability leader, or someone who simply believes the world can be fixed, this conversation is for you.
This is a conversation about infrastructure. About courage. About the room where change actually happens.
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