“We are here to discuss one of the biggest challenges on earth; planetary health.”

With these words, Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, CEO of Novo Nordisk Foundation introduced the CORC Carbon Forum in December 2022.

To the Novo Nordisk Foundation the green agenda is very important. And that may come as a surprise to some. With the foundation’s work on their new strategy, they have been realizing that human health is interwoven with the problem of planetary health.

“We are particularly focusing on scaleable and cost-effective climate mitigation solutions, such as the CORC center and the likes. The center – and this event - speak very much to the DNA of the foundation. The agenda for today fits it well; we love to do things where we can contribute across sectors,” Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen explains.

Q: If you are to look 10 years ahead from now, what is your dream that CORC has become?

“I think CORC need to take some of the promising lab scale technologies and find scalable technologies that can facilitate Denmark's 70 per cent goal. That’s the hope.”

The Novo Nordisk Foundation looks at it in a holistic way; through working in partnership with other big foundations such as for instance the Gates foundation and also centers such as CORC, results become much bigger.

“There's no doubt that the mission driven approach is very important. Because of the sense of urgency, you have to be mission-driven. It’s like landing on the moon; there’s a mission of needing to remove gigatons of green house gas emissions. And by being multidisciplinary, taking a curious approach and allowing different technologies to work together and also with the industry, we can test that the new technologies are actually scalable. To work together closely with the industry early on creating proof of concept is needed to make sure that society actually can adopt it,” he underlines.

Q: What is your hope for the outcome of today?

“No one can do this alone. Therefore, it’s great to see people here from different areas and sectors. We have to work together where everyone understands what the goal is and takes some sacrifice to get there. This is the first forum and I really hope we instill in each other a sense of urgency, a sense of wanting to work together and also a sense of demanding a regulatory framework. So that we will actually facilitate that these technologies have a seamless flow also to regulators and politicians and become adoptable and can be exploited early on,” he says.

“I also hope that our own decisionmakers will listen to the outcome of the discussions in this forum. This is the beginning of a series of very important events where we get more and more closely together to solve some of these problems.

>> Find out more about the CORC Carbon Forum here and watch the full event