Keynote: Emiley Vollmer

Abandoned in the Zambian bush as a newborn, businesswoman Emiley Vollmer has used the lessons she learned through her survival to create a business firmly embedded in the circular economy.

Vollmer’s astonishing story of against-the-odds survival had Climate 360 delegates on the edge of their seats.

Now an entrepreneur and banker, Vollmer was abandoned by her 18-year-old mother who was fleeing South Africa’s apartheid-era security forces. Because a newborn would slow her down, the teenage mother, who had given birth in a Zambian forest, wrapped her baby in leaves and left her to die. She has recently met her mother, and heard the story.

Instead, Vollmer, who had been abandoned along with a large group of children under 10, was saved by the other children. They lived in the forest for years, living off the land. Later they were saved by German and Russian government officials, and taken to Europe.

“We took what nature provided. We had to grow up with nature wrapping its arms around us,” she said.

Vollmer was taken to Moscow, where she encountered an alien world in which people were divorced from nature. But she never forgot the lessons of the Zambian forest.

Humanity’s ingenuity has been its downfall, Voillmer said. At first nature determined humanity’s survival, but as the global population expanded humans needed and took more and more from nature. “Every time there was a new problem, we solved it and now we have altered the world so much that Mother Nature depends on us,” she said.

Unless humans find ways of returning to living in balance with nature, humanity will come to an end, she warned.

Humans are living in a “very, very linear” economic environment, Vollmer said. Humanity needs to switch to a circular economy in which any commodity is shared, reused and recycled for as long as possible.

“If we make these changes we will have come a long way towards being a species in balance with nature. We will be a species that has taken a remarkable journey that avoids climate catastrophe.”

One of Vollmer’s businesses is LEN24, a financing institution that funds entrepreneurial endeavours that are part of a “loop system” in which products are shared, reused and recycled for as long as possible. Access to finance is often a barrier to African entrepreneurs who want to enter the formal economy, which is why Vollmer created LEN24.

Companies that have opted into LEN24’s loop system have most often increased their profits, Vollmer said.

“In the circular economy we are creating new solutions [that can address climate change and other environmental challenges]. There are lots of businesses to be created, and jobs to be created, if we can only see them.”