Welcome. This is Look Up Ventures’ first long-read. It serves as the first of a series of posts on the great opportunity of Climate Resilience. We invite you to sit back and read - and please share your thoughts with us via the Linkedin-post or reach out to us if you’d like to discuss further.
**The world must undertake an inevitable course correction and transition to a decarbonized economy. Yet, betting on mitigation technologies and Net-Zero pledges as the sole solution to our planetary challenges is an insufficient and flawed - almost illusional - scope for decision-makers and investors.
The effects of climate change are already here. The world can no longer flee and postpone reality - we need to acknowledge that we must now adapt to a more volatile climate. With such realization comes an opportunity much larger than that of mitigation alone. By acknowledging and working with the actual planetary systems, we can change the perspective to building adaptive, resilient systems that have the capacity to withstand, bounce back, and even prosper in the climate of today and tomorrow.**
In recent years, a range of funds with a strict focus on GHG emissions avoidance popped up as part of the second wave of Climate Tech (following the first wave of Clean Tech in the late 00s, widely covered elsewhere). The VC world awakened on the back of valuable learnings from Wave 1 as well as early funding success stories of second wave companies like Climeworks, Solugen, and Northvolt. Ideas with “gigaton decarbonization potential” excited investors and start-ups alike.
In this wave, the investment scope expanded from renewable energy to a wider variety of solutions purposed to lead the world towards a “Net-Zero economy”, e.g. electrification of transport, mobility platforms, batteries, decarbonized manufacturing, lab-grown meat, recycling technologies, etc.
These efforts were - and still are - a much needed capital alignment with the opinions of climate scientists who have been tirelessly and urgently trying to make the world look up (no pun intended..) and mitigate climate change by cutting emissions.
However, the climate urgency raises questions about whether investors, decision-makers, and society are considering the full extent of solutions to environmental changes:
Scientists are alarmed because the climate has already changed and is changing at an accelerating pace*.*
**It is not just a matter of a warmer planet on average. Rather, the urgency especially arises from the increased amount and severity of the underlying extremes that make up the average. From an economic perspective, these extremes translate into risks for companies and governments; Floods, heat waves, droughts, and the increasing weather volatility lead to substantial asset losses, disruptions to global supply chains, disruption of natural growing cycles of our food, insurability issues, etc.
From a mere social perspective, the development also marks a significant shift in priorities for communities around the world. While vulnerable developing countries long have been advocating for adaptation finance in response to the intensifying and changing environment, the changes are now impacting almost any community across the globe. As such…
… we’re moving down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to safeguard our physiological needs and secure a safe, secure environment for ourselves: