Hi, I'm Sforz Whitaker, guest hosting today.

If you want to learn how to take real lasting climate action like I do,

I want to invite you to join Countdown,

Ted's new global initiative to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis.

Countdown is an open place.

It draws on a diversity of perspectives to help us shape global and local solutions

that makes sense to the immense array of energies that the world has to offer. Now here's a talk

from the Countdown Global Launch event, featuring climate activists Rawa Gumatzian and Zalala Madifras.

And one more special thing about this talk, you hear actor Don Chito at the beginning and in the

end discussing the importance of community-powered climate solutions.

To hear more of these ideas and get involved, check out countdown.ted.com and subscribe to the countdown podcast wherever you're listening to this.

Home, it's where we celebrate our triumphs, make our memories, and confront our challenges.

And these days, there are plenty of those. An historic pandemic, wildfires, floods, and hurricanes

all threaten our basic safety. These challenges hit even harder in communities that have been cut out

of equal opportunities.

In the U.S., unfair and racist housing policies called redlining have for decades forced black, brown, indigenous, and poor white families into areas rife with toxic chemicals that make people sick.

They are surrounded by concrete that traps heat.

Extreme temperatures demand more cooling, more money, more energy, more carbon. Our problems are

interconnected. Imagine all we can do when we realize the solutions are too.

At the Solutions Project, we've seen that some of the people most impacted by COVID-19, least likely to have a steady place to call home, and most affected by the damage to our climate, are already working on effective and scalable solutions.

Take Buffalo in Miami, where affordable housing has become a community solution to the climate crisis.

Buffalo, New York is the third poorest city in the United States,

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