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Oliver Sawbridge

Oliver Sawbridge

Senior Manager, Trade and Geopolitics at The Economist Group; former Senior Research Director at Zero100

Sep 1, 2026

7:29
When you talk about both at once in terms of those risks, could you give our listeners maybe a concrete example just to illustrate what you mean by that?
7:38
I think the clearest example is probably if we look at the Panama Canal.
7:42
So it's a lane being squeezed by a climate risk and geopolitical competition between US and China at the same time.
7:49
And it's a really important corridor.
7:52
So it carries around 5% of world's maritime trade.
7:55
But that is growing in importance because a lot of the Gulf War rerouting energy through it from the US West Coast.
8:04
And because of enduring shifts in those trade flows, it's becoming more important.

8 MINS LATER

15:59
Is that what you're saying?
90:54
So what can shippers do? What are you advising those people to do to try to prepare for these disruptions? I mean, inevitably disruptions are things you can't necessarily anticipate, but how can people better prepare? What should shippers be looking at? How should they be hedging?
91:13
It's a great question.
91:14
And I think, so I just did a bit of research for 0100 that's coming out shortly.
91:21
And we're looking at the convergence of these megatrends because I feel like if companies are sort of looking at specific events, then they're going to over-index on those type of things.
91:30
And we saw this recently.
91:32
Even before the war in Iran kicked off, so many companies were being advised that the highest risk of disruption was going to happen in the South China Sea, and therefore weren't paying attention to what was happening in the Gulf.
91:50
And so I think we need to pay attention to the forces that are impacting a lot of these disruptions, two key ones, particularly in the shipping industry being climate change and geopolitics.
93:15
Do you think that these geopolitical disruptions are going to be something that just needs to be constant, ongoing part of planning going forward? Is this sort of the new normal? This is something that will need to be watched as closely as cost and efficiency?
CarolinePANELIST
8:34
But I also think there's a lot of untapped value using a bottoms-up innovation funnel, right? So the vibe coding that we were just talking about I think is a huge opportunity to break long-term endeavors into smaller pieces and individual tech products.
8:51
I'd just like to jump in on that because I completely agree with Caroline in terms of the change management and looking at the sort of top-down, bottom-up.
8:59
And I recently hosted a couple of sessions at this space event.
9:02
One of the panels I was hosting was focused on the agricultural sector and how to harness space data to help improve yields and what have you.
9:12
And they gathered tons and tons of data points and then put it into this really complex dashboard that then the farmers would have to go back, try and analyze and figure out which data points were relevant and which weren't.
9:23
And there was just no use that came out of it.
9:25
And people just stopped using that specific dashboard.
CarolinePANELIST
11:23
Shamelessly stealing.

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