and so, as a society, we need to make decisions. what do we do with all that parking space that's going to be vacant? so, here's what 2040 could look like for my daughter without an extra billion cars. as you head off to your first school dance, velvet... - family hug. family hug. - (laughs) ..it will be nice not having to worry about your date's driving skills. look, dad! a ghost must be driving! spooky! i imagine your date to be very kind. and very impotent. all the cars that your mum and i ever owned

were stranded assets, meaning that 96% of the time they were parked or unused. but now, in 2040, with driver costs gone and the rideshare explosion, fewer people actually own cars. they get around in luxurious pods like this for next to nothing. it's just inner cities that are likely to be driverless only. and we could really fatten the doughnut if vehicles were community-owned. but i secretly hope, darling, that rocket boots girl has achieved her ambition of worldwide domination. reporter: so, this is a huge disruption of a massive part of the labour force. damon: inevitably, there'll be debates around this technology. but if enough of us embrace ridesharing, we could reclaim our cities for humans instead of vehicles, and generate millions of new jobs.

(inspirational music plays) kate: this is big vision. we just need to have that vision now. a lot of people want to be working on something that they can see is actually helping to regenerate and innovatively recreate the world. damon: the extra space in our cities could allow the building of more low-cost sustainable homes. and we could see the growth of remanufacturing industries, which might convert existing vehicles to electric. but most exciting could be the urban food farms that spring up in empty parking lots.

or inside disused car parks. and imagine having fresh local food growing on our rooftops. this would also contribute to a much healthier environment. man: it's unbeatable to grow food in your own backyard. it's unbeatable to grow food all through and around your city. it's unbeatable to grow food on your roof. those are the absolute gold standard of emissions. damon: one day you will be amazed by the distances some of our food travelled. velvet: bring up data for 2016. in 2016, the us was importing the same amount of beef as it was exporting.

fish caught in norway was flown to china for filleting. then flown back to norway to be sold. what were you guys thinking? well, sometimes we weren't. but how's this? if we electrify our transport systems and frankly, make them far more attractive... ..a lot more fossil fuels will stay in the ground. if nobody's going to buy internal combustion engine petrol cars, nobody's going to buy oil. what we see is that oil demand is going to peak and it's going to go down dramatically. and it's never coming back. damon: this means areas like the tar sands oil fields could be magnificently transformed.

if you do choose to live in a city, velvet, i hope it's a bit like this. a city where so many of the public parks, urban food projects and cleaner transport networks, all contribute to a healthier environment, while fostering a greater sense of community.. ..and a hell of a lot less road rage. but the bonus is that you can now actually hear birds singing in the middle of the city. (birds chirping) as wonderful as this future could be,

i was pretty gobsmacked to learn that vested interests now spend almost $1 billion a year preventing us from actually lowering our emissions. so, the fossil fuel industry have being doing a magnificent job at copying the tobacco playbook in creating doubt and confusion amongst the public. and i've been following some of their key players, their sneaky players, online, just to try and learn and understand some of the tactics. so, one of the things they do is that they create websites that sound and look very sincere, but are full of misinformation. you see here the innocent hummingbird, the leaf. they'll also fund think tanks that come up with really clever cultural memes that you often see written in the comments sections online, and these are things like, you know, "climate science isn't settled", which is ripped straight from tobacco. or "climate change is a religion". that's another one. it's very evocative. they'll also used fake bots or algorithms

that appear to be humans on social media, and what this does is creates a sense that they have more support than they actually do. and this one's pretty key because companies like exxon will often fund lots of different organisations to make it look like there's this wide consensus of climate denial, whereas in actual fact, all those different organisations were funded by the same source. these tactics have focused the conversation primarily on our emissions, while obscuring a crucial component of our dilemma. if we ceased all emissions today, if we cut emissions to zero, human emissions to zero, we would still be toast. we're still already over a tipping point and on our way to a point of no return. so we have to reduce the emissions that we're producing today, and we also have to sequester carbon and we have to remove excess carbon from the atmosphere

and store it. with an increased sense of urgency, i met with paul hawken, who thankfully isn't afraid of heights. he's the founder of project drawdown - the first comprehensive plan to reverse global warming. if you look at the solutions that we model in drawdown, they're virtually all regenerative development. that is to say the earth is better off, the people are better off, the communities are better off, the creatures are better off, the birds are better off. no matter what it is, they're better off for it than had we not done it. paul suggested i first explore food and agriculture for drawdown opportunities. when you change agriculture practices related to food, you can do two things. one is you stop emitting carbon, co2,

but you're also sequestering carbon. so it's one of those sectors... yeah! ..that actually does both - it's a twofer. which is... not only does it stop putting it up, but it actually brings it down. so you're flipping a whole sector. yeah, i think that people should be eating more fruit and vegetable and less sweet stuff and so that the sweet stuff should be, um... like, you should be rationed on sweet stuff. when i grow up, i want it to be national hot dog day every day. i want to see more trees and also want to see chocolate raining from the clouds. be more healthy. that's all i really have to say about the food. like, i wanted not so much people eating meat because that's animals. but i do like bacon. bacon's nice.

but... it still, like, pigs and i have a pig toy. and when i eat bacon, i feel kind of sad. man: soil's almost an unknown universe in that there's over 6 billion microorganisms of huge diversity in a small spoonful of soil, of healthy soil. which is really quite amazing. don't know who counted them, but someone did. - (laughs) - it's a tough job. yeah. i was in regional victoria in australia to meet col seis, a champion of regenerative agriculture. in 1979, we had a major bushfire at home. like...a wildfire. and lost virtually all of our sheep,

which were 3,000 merino sheep. i nt from ing ok to bei broke ornight. so i had to work out a way of doing it without spending any money. and i developed a different way of farming, totally different, through 1980s and 1990s, which turned out to regenerate the land. damon: using a lot less chemicals and inputs than is traditionally used. that's right. and since i changed - i actually did the figures on it - i've saved over $2 million, since i changed. i don't go where the $2 million went. (laughs) col helps farmers around the world use plants to pull carbon from the atmosphere and put it into their soil... ..because our constant ploughing of the soil has released billions of tonnes of the stuff. eric: over the last 10,000 years of agriculture, the degradation of soils has been one of the leading causes of climate change.

it's actually, as of right now, a larger cause of climate change than burning fossil fuels. damon: i asked col to strike a farming calendar pose to explain how he brings the carbon back home. plants use carbon dioxide and energy from the sun to create simple sugars. the plant uses some of these sugars to grow. the rest is pumped into the soil, through the roots. these sugars feed soil microbes, which interact with the plant and the carbon dioxide taken from the atmosphere is sequestered into the soil as carbon. - man: g'day! - fraser. - hey, damon. - nice to meet you, mate. - you too. - how you going? - very well. g'day. col. - g'day.

woman: we went to take the kids fishing and we had to go and find worms on the farm and fraser was just going from paddock to paddock trying to find worms. - there wasn't any. - there was none. and it ended up... this fun experience ended up being not so fun because there was so much frustration about how come there weren't any worms and... 'cause healthy soil has worms. fraser: we had everything going for our farm and i didn't feel that it was getting the yields and getting the results that, you know, i thought were going to be there. and i tried just throwing more fertiliser at it and that didn't seem to work. and so i just had all these questions around what we were doing and why we were doing it. so, what's going on here, fellas? so, this is what we call a chemical summer fallow. damon: yep. fraser: where we control the weeds with a chemical over summer. so, how does that affect the soil, like, in terms of the... colin: this form of agriculture

really kills the whole soil ecosystem. fraser: so, what are we looking at there, col? colin: that hard compaction, poor-structured soil is really not good in agriculture. like, if you think about a plant trying to get through that, it's almost impossible. um... the other thing too, water can't get in there. damon: to counteract these problems, col's simple advice to fraser was to start planting. ok, so what we've done here is planted a mix of different species. about 80 in total. they all play a role in the soil health, with their different roots and their different root exudates. so we've got the sunflower here and the sorghum. - um, millet. - damon: yeah, right. down here. damon: and all these together means with that variety, it's making the soil... ..it's pulling the carbon into the soil

and making it healthier. that's right. yeah. exactly. - damon: go, nature! - fraser: yeah. (mooing) colin: if we go back even a few thousand years, all of the grasslands in the world were dominated by large mobs of grazing animals. and also, they were kept moving all the time by predators. so the animals - in this case, cattle - are never kept on the same area at one time. damon: by letting the cattle run amok in the crops, good things happen. they flatten the field, they create a utopia for the local insects which becomes a natural fertiliser, and crucially, they are fed as nature intended.

colin: over the last 50 or 60 years, we've removed animals like cattle and sheep from eating their natural food and put them in feedlots, eating grain. and we should never have done that because they have never evolved to eat grain. so what happens is that the cattle are basically sick. and we are finding out now that the meat from feedlots is not healthy for us. it's certainly not healthy for the animals. and it's something that we should never have done. damon: any discussion around livestock has to include methane, which is another damaging greenhouse gas, quite rudely burped out by the cows. (burping) while some livestock practices offset that damage, the bad news for the hot dog kid is that we need to embrace a more plant-rich diet.

and the meat we do eat should ideally come from regenerative practices like fraser's. plant-rich diet means that we actually reduce the amount of protein that we eat in wealthier nations, because it's too high. it's 100-110g per day. what we model is decreasing that to 50-60 g. the fact is, some people want to eat meat. what meat they eat is critically important. how it's produced, how it relates to the land are very, very important. but as our climate becomes increasingly volatile, this type of farming has one more crucial advantage. for every 1% increase in carbon to 30cm, we increase the water holding capacity of soil by 166,000 litres per hectare.

on every rainfall event. when it rains, the soil on the left, with more carbon and organic matter, absorbs the water and less runs off the top. whereas the chemical-ridden soil on the right absorbs almost no water, and allows it to run off, taking the chemicals with it into nearby rivers and waterways. colin: that's the way we can buffer against droughts and dry seasons. grasslands, all around the world, they virtually had a built-in irrigation system. fraser: really can see the aggregation that's going on from all these roots of all the different plants we've been growing in here. so what we've got going here with this clod is basically a dry paddock with, um, not much growing in it, apart from a few weeds. and here, three months ago, we planted the multi-species grazing crop, yeah.

damon: so that's in three months that's happened? fraser: that's in three-months. it's incredible, isn't it? that kind of represents big ag, and this represents mother nature. and it's pretty obvious who i'd rather get my source of vegetables from. fraser: well, when we talk about trying to work out some of the global problems and trying to do it quickly, well, you can really see the speed that it can happen here. i mean, look at all these roots. like, that's all carbon pumped, isn't it? it is. it really shows that plants, plants and more plants. in other words, plant diversity, um, plus grazing animals will create that and fix our problems. eric: people ask me, "well, what can we say to farmers?" and the answer is, "we can't do without you." we can't mitigate climate change without agriculture, so we have to find ways, better ways for agriculture to become part of the solution, instead of part of the problem.

damon: fraser will now let his multi-species crop break down. he can then plant his commercial crops here without having to break the soil and release carbon. but perhaps most importantly, he can now take the kids fishing. so, i just bake it for 20 to 30 minutes? yes, that's it. you've got it. and then, once it's done, you just sprinkle the greens on the top and that's it. beautiful. - thanks, nan. love you. - ok. bye, darl. bye! damon: by 2040, my hope, velvet, is that more people will have an understanding of how the foods they eat impact our environment. if this transpires, your generation are likely to eat a lot less meat

than mine did. there's no doubt we'll continue our obsession with fad diets. we find it's the flavour-free diet that's the way to go because let's face it - it's the flavour that gets us into trouble. isn't that right? damon: i'll just love tending our garden. from an app. and your mum and i will completely understand when you start avoiding dinner at our house. with less global consumption of meat, aided by some pretty convincing substitutes... ..we could see many feedlots close down. and animals returned to the land for use in regenerative farming. but just imagine what we could do with the one third of the world's cropland that is currently being used to grow food for animals.

this land could transition to a range of regenerative practices that drawdown vast amounts of carbon into the soil, while retaining precious water and producing nutrient-dense food. instead of soy or grains, we could feed the animals grass, crop residue, or food waste. this would improve the health of the animals, the people who choose to eat them and our environment. the steep croplands around the world, darling, could be used to grow foods that also draw down huge amounts of carbon.

a practice called agroforestry does this by simultaneously growing foods like pawpaw, bananas, coffee, avocados or vegetables, but crucially, on small parcels of land. woman: with highly diversified local food systems, you have a way of really dramatically decreasing the scale of land, water, energy needed, and massively increasing how much you can get from that land. industrial ag says, "without us, you're not... "you're going to starve. you're not going to eat." well, actually between 70% and 80% of the food in the world is created by small holders. industrial ag provides 20% of the food in the world. most of that is corn and soy fed to animals.

a lot of that is sugar, which we don't need. so the idea that big ag is going to save us, or without which we cannot exist is absolutely upside down and backwards, because they produce sickness, they produce obesity, they produce diabetes. that's what big ag is producing. damon: i hope one day, velvet, you get to read the story of how we reached this future. it's about how those who polluted our air with excess carbon had to pay a penalty. and the money raised paid farmers to clean our air by putting it back into the soil. this helped restore the climate... ..biodiversity loss... ..and land conversion... ..while pulling more people into the doughnut

by saving precious water, improving the quality of our food, and in turn improving our health. it's interesting, making this film, the more that i'm learning about... ..you realise how hard it is to actually do the right thing. and in a sense, it's tempting to kind of just shut down and switch off because, i mean, here i am sitting on an aeroplane that is spewing out half a tonne of carbon, making this film, or getting water in this cup that's probably going to go straight into the ocean and hurt a baby turtle, and i don't want to know that. and most people don't want to know about that, so they switch off. and you can't help but be a hypocrite at the moment because our entire system is built on and by fossil fuels.

fossil fuels have done us really well to get to this point. there's some great things in the world. but we can't keep doing what we're doing. it's actually impossible to maintain the resources we're using. so we're going to have to transition, and it's going to be a little bit awkward, if we're going to give our kids a better future. (ship of fools by world party plays) ♪ we are setting sail ♪ ♪ to the place on the map ♪ ♪ from which no-one ♪ has ever returned... ♪ damon: while storing carbon in our soil will go a long way to solving our problem, there is a limit to how much carbon soil can hold. so we're going to need another leg-up from mother nature. make sure coral looks ok 'cause it normally looks like a rainbow in the sea

with all the fishes, but sometimes if you litter, it looks a bit not good. it looks like...a big, big mess. at the beach, it would just not be the same if you can't swim in the water. and also all the really amazing marine animals like vaquita, whales, sea fish - if they were all gone, then it just wouldn't be the same, the world. i want the oceans to be cleaner. paul: one of the coming attractions that i think is gonna to have the biggest impact is what is called marine permaculture. it's just another way of farming in the ocean, but this is a more wild farming because it actually sets up the context for the oceans to regenerate themselves.

paul: dr brian von herzen, a physicist, used to fly to europe every year and he saw how quickly the greenland ice sheet was melting and decided to change his whole life in 2006 to restoring living systems, and focused on the ocean. damon: brian told me to pack a lunch... ..and a sick bag, as we were spending the day out at sea. man: with 93% of global warming going into the ocean today each year, the problem is that the waters are getting too warm and without enough overturning circulation, and there aren't enough nutrients, and the result is we lose the life in the ocean. damon: understandably, there has been reluctance to meddle with our oceans. but the fact that they are getting warmer, becoming acidic,

and many fish species are now in danger of collapse... ..means that they actually need our help. brian's solution is seaweed. so what we do with marine permaculture is we restore overturning circulation. it's as if your leg was asleep and you lost circulation. we have to do that with the ocean. we've gotta get that overturning circulation going again to bring the cool waters up with the higher nutrient levels that can actually restore conditions for the seaweeds. between australia and the united states, there's 100,000,000 km of ocean desert that is amenable to marine permaculture. we can actually restore life in subtropical oceans, restore the fish habitat that's needed to restore fisheries. damon: marine permaculture is a regenerative technology

that works like this. a frame made of recycled material becomes a platform for the seaweed to grow on. it sits just below the surface and sinks lower as the seaweed grows and gets heavier. a pump powered simply by the rise and fall of the ocean, brings the cold, nutrient-laden waters from below and disperses them over the seaweed in the upper warmer layer. the seaweed can be regularly harvested and used for a range of purposes. seaweed is good for food, animal feed, fertiliser, fibre and biofuel. there's so much we can do with seaweeds. so, we're cruising along in this very low-carbon vessel, following brian, who's swum down to get the seaweed