It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. Climate change is one of the biggest challenges we face,

and the stakes could not be higher. My colleagues at TEDED produced a video series to cut through the complexity and explain the science in a clear way.

It's inspired by Bill Gates' new book,

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.

And today's lesson is about a material that's all around us,

has a huge carbon footprint, and how to reinvent it.

You can watch all seven lessons for free at ed. ted.com

slash plan for zero, and that's plan F-O-R-0, one single word.

Thousands of years ago, the Romans invented a material that allowed them to build much of their

sprawling civilization. Pliny the elder praised an imposing seawall made from the stuff as impregnable to the waves and every day stronger.

He was right.

Much of this construction still stands, having survived millennia of battering by environmental forces that would topple modern buildings.

Today, our roads, sidewalks, bridges, and skyscrapers

are made of a similar, though less durable, material, called concrete.

There's three tons of it for every person on earth,

and over the next 40 years, we'll use enough of it to build the equivalent of New York City every single month.

Concrete has shaped our skylines, but that's not the only way it's changed our world.

It's also played a surprisingly large role in rising global temperatures over the last century,

a trend that has already changed the world

and threatens to even more drastically in the coming decades. To be fair to concrete, basically

everything humanity does contributes to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

Most of those emissions come from industrial processes we often aren't aware of,

...