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There is a lack of finance for breakthrough and disruptive innovators in Europe, with an estimated equity funding gap of about Euros 70 billion. Many European start-ups can't find the high-risk capital needed to get to the stage where private sector investors get involved.To address the challenge, the EU launched the European Innovation Council (EIC), The EIC can help innovators from the stage of idea and invention to investments and scale-up of their companies. Funding up to 2.5 million in Grants and 15 million euros in equity is available. TBLI has invited an expert in this field, Mauro Andriotto to explain the program and the process to apply.
What will you learn?
- The EU has launched one of the largest startup investment funds in the world
- What companies can apply for 2.5 m Euros in grants or 15m in equity?
- What is the chances of getting funded by EC-European Innovation Council?
- TBLI Talk:Knowledge that Inspires
Time & Date: November 9th, 15:00 CET.
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Climate crisis talks resume on ‘loss and damage’ funding for poorest countries
World leaders will reconvene in Abu Dhabi before UAE’s Cop28 after talks broke down two weeks ago
Governments will meet this weekend for a last-ditch attempt to bridge deep divisions between rich and poor countries over how to get money to vulnerable people afflicted by climate disaster.
Talks over funds for “loss and damage”, which refers to the rescue and rehabilitation of countries and communities experiencing the effects of extreme weather, started in March but broke down in rancour two weeks ago.
Countries have reconvened in Abu Dhabi for a final two-day meeting, ending on Saturday night, to try to resolve the outstanding problems ahead of the UN Cop28 climate summit, which begins in the United Arab Emirates at the end of this month.
Forging a compromise this weekend is viewed as essential to making progress on loss and damage at Cop28, as campaigners fear if there is not broad agreement before the summit the plans will become bogged down in the complex Cop negotiations.
Harjeet Singh, the head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network International, said: “The meeting is a make-or-break moment that will determine the success or failure of the new loss and damage fund. We must bridge the trust gap, operationalise the fund, and provide the necessary support to those who need it most. We cannot afford to fail as the lives and livelihoods of millions are at stake.”
But there remains a chasm between developed countries, who want cash contributions to be voluntary and to come from large emerging economies such as China and Gulf petrostates, as well as traditional donors such as the US and Europe, and poor nations who are concerned over how the fund will be governed and how they will be able to access the rescue funds they desperately need.
All of the world’s governments agreed last year at Cop27 in Egypt that a loss and damage fund should be set up – a historic first step that developing countries had been seeking for more than a decade. Poor countries have contributed least to the climate crisis, with tiny carbon footprints compared to the rich world, but they bear the brunt of extreme weather around the world, owing to geography, the basic state of their infrastructure and a lack of resources.
The floods that devastated Pakistan just over a year ago, and the drought that brought crippling hunger to the horn of Africa, are two examples of extreme weather driven and exacerbated by the climate crisis, where loss and damage funds could have helped vulnerable people in dire need. Disasters such as these are forecast to become much more frequent as global temperatures rise further, and hundreds of billions of dollars a year will be needed to repair the damage.
The main areas of contention are over how the fund should be governed, who should contribute to the fund, and who should be allowed to access the cash.
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Reforestation and Rainforest Preservation Preferred for Climate Action
According to a recent study published in Global Environmental Change, individuals exhibit a greater degree of positivity towards reforestation and rainforest preservation as strategies for addressing climate change compared to their perception of technological solutions.
The research, based on an analysis of over one million social media posts, suggests that people are more optimistic about nature’s potential to mitigate climate change than the capabilities of human technology.
The study, which involved examining 1.5 million posts on the platform formerly known as Twitter (X), utilizing cutting-edge artificial intelligence-driven language models, identified instances of “disgust” and “fear” associated with the concept of "geoengineering." Geoengineering often involves unconventional technological approaches, such as aerosol spraying into the atmosphere or the deployment of solar space sails.
However, researchers from the University of Cambridge, the Mercator Research Institute, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and Boston University found that discussions related to nature-based initiatives aimed at preserving carbon-storing ecosystems, including rainforests, subaqueous kelp forests, and peat bogs, elicited more favorable sentiments such as "joy" in social media posts.
According to projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body responsible for assessing climate science, the conventional approach of gradually reducing greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide and methane may no longer suffice to keep global warming below the critical threshold of 2 °C.
This threshold marks the point at which catastrophic weather events, such as extreme heat, storms, droughts, and floods, become increasingly severe.
In addition to the ongoing efforts to incrementally reduce global emissions stemming from fossil fuel usage in power generation, industry, residential heating, transportation, and food production, the IPCC has emphasized the necessity of actively “geoengineering” climate solutions.
According to projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body responsible for assessing climate science, the conventional approach of gradually reducing greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide and methane may no longer suffice to keep global warming below the critical threshold of 2 °C.
This threshold marks the point at which catastrophic weather events, such as extreme heat, storms, droughts, and floods, become increasingly severe.
In addition to the ongoing efforts to incrementally reduce global emissions stemming from fossil fuel usage in power generation, industry, residential heating, transportation, and food production, the IPCC has emphasized the necessity of actively “geoengineering” climate solutions.
This proactive approach involves mitigating further warming by either removing greenhouse gases that trap solar energy or by reflecting excess sunlight.
US and UK militaries owe combined $111bn in climate reparations – study
The Guardian exclusive: study finds militaries have generated about 430m metric tonnes of CO2 emissions since 2015 Paris accords
The US and UK militaries owe at least $111bn in reparations to communities most harmed by their planet-heating pollution, a first-of-its-kind study calculates.
The research employs a “social cost of carbon” framework – a way to estimate the cost, in dollars, of the climate damage done by each additional tonne of carbon in the atmosphere.
“The environmental costs of maintaining the global military reach of the US and UK armed forces are astonishing,” said Patrick Bigger, research director of the Climate and Community Project and co-author of the report.
According to the report, which was published by the UK-based thinktank Common Wealth and the US-based Climate and Community Project, the two militaries have generated at least 430m metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent since the 2015 United Nations Paris climate agreement. That’s more than the total greenhouse gas emissions produced in the UK last year.
To offer minimal compensation for damage caused by those emissions, the US military should offer $106bn in international climate financing, while the UK military should offer $5bn, the researchers write, employing an equation drawn up by a Columbia University researcher in 2021.
Those figures, though eye-popping, are “extremely conservative”, the authors say.
“We wanted to get a sense of the minimum scale of climate finance that both of these countries owe due to the effects of their military operations,” said Khem Rogaly, a researcher at Common Wealth and study co-author. “But it really is the minimum.”
One reason: they are based on “opaque” and “incomplete” data from the US and UK governments, which don’t include most emissions from the institutions’ supply chains. The figures omit data from 2017 and 2018, when the UK military failed to report its emissions estimates, and from 2022, which the US has not yet released. They also fail to account for certain climate impacts of military activity such as the unique climate-warming properties of jet fuel, among other issues.
The UK and the US have made some plans to clean up their militaries’ emissions imprints.
The environmental impact wreaked by the US and UK militaries extends far beyond warming from greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers say. The social cost of carbon doesn’t account for health impacts to communities near military activity – from Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where nuclear testing in the 40s and 50s led to severe environmental damage; to Vieques, Puerto Rico, where decades of US navy chemical pollution significantly increased the risk of cardiovascular and respiratory disease for locals; to Iraq, where troops’ use of depleted uranium led to widespread health issues including birth defects during the Gulf war and the 2003 invasion.
“These two militaries have about 900 bases overseas,” said Rogaly. “The effects of having all these military installations across the world is going to be extremely severe when you’re supplying them with fossil fuels, clearing land, building installations for military activity, contaminating with toxic waste.”
Basav Sen, climate policy project director at the Institute for Policy Studies thinktank, who reviewed the report, said the research is “crucial”.
“We can’t account for our emissions without accounting for the military-industrial complex,” he said.
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As Climate Talks Near, Calls Mount for a ‘Phaseout’ of Fossil Fuels
With UN climate negotiations set for next month, a growing number of nations and business leaders are calling for a phaseout of fossil fuels. But with major fossil fuel expansion projects moving ahead around the globe, advocates of strong action face a daunting challenge.
It is boom time in the deserts of New Mexico and West Texas, where vast oil reserves buried in the Permian geological basin are getting a second life, thanks to fracking. Though tapped for more than a century, the basin still contains the largest oil reserve in the United States, and one of the largest in the world. Output has tripled in a decade. And big oil appears determined to tap every last drop.
In October, Vicki Hollub, CEO of Occidental, one of the largest operators there, promised yet more production in a basin that Bloomberg last year described as “uniquely positioned to become the world’s most important growth engine for oil production.”
Did nobody tell them about climate change?
The fossil-fuel business is burgeoning too on the frozen shores of the Arctic Ocean, at the giant Bovanenkovo gas field in Russia’s Yamal peninsula. By drilling deeper, state-owned Gazprom plans to more than double production by 2030. Bovanenkovo may soon be producing 40 percent of Russian gas.
Meanwhile, China itself is set to open dozens more giant coal mines — each with reserves whose burning would emit more than a billion tons of carbon dioxide. China has almost a third of the world’s proposed new coal mines, and Beijing this year announced plans to fast-track them into service.
Similarly, off the reef-lined shores of the Persian Gulf, the world’s largest supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG), Qatar, is preparing to expand production by more than 60 percent between 2021 and 2027. Extensions to the vast North Field reserve are intended to ship LNG to Asia and Europe until at least the 2080s.
These developments — often called “carbon bombs” for their potential to supercharge the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere — are among the largest of hundreds set to expand global production of fossil fuels in the next few years. They help explain why, even as renewable energy production soars, CO2 emissions remain stubbornly high — rising by 1 percent last year.
The promises made by governments at UN climate conferences to deliver net-zero emissions by mid-century are clearly not yet delivering. Critics say they are too nebulous and hold nobody to account, especially in the short term.
So, in the run-up to the next talks, in Dubai in December, calls for a fossil fuel phaseout are growing. The conference, known as COP28, will hear calls from many government delegations for it to outlaw all further development of fossil-fuel mines and wells and to set deadlines to end existing extraction. The question is: Will the conference respond?
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Beef, soy and palm oil products linked to deforestation still imported into UK
Campaigners accuse government of failing to stick to promises made at Cop26 climate summit in 2021
Beef, soy and palm oil products driving deforestation are still being imported into the UK, despite government promises this practice would end, data has revealed.
Campaigners have criticised the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) for failing to put practices in place to stop the import of goods from areas with high deforestation rates. This is despite the government having promised at the Cop26 climate conference in 2021 to implement the rules.
The Environment Act 2021 established a ban on the use of commodities produced on illegally deforested land abroad, but this has not come into force because Defra has failed to publish the list of the commodities covered by the regime.
The former environment minister Zac Goldsmith said: “We passed the Environment Act with much fanfare, not least so we could present ourselves as a world leader at Cop26 … and it was a genuinely landmark law to cut illegal deforestation caused by commodity production from our supply chains. But there has been virtually no progress since the law passed and not a single tropical tree has yet been saved.
“It should go without saying that there is no solution to climate change, indeed there is no future for our species, if we fail to halt the loss of the world’s great forests. So the government needs to stop with the delays and U-turns and get on with it.”
An investigation by Global Witness and Trase has found the UK is still importing seven commodities associated with deforestation including palm oil, soy and cattle products.
Of the estimated total 20,400 hectares (50,400 acres) of deforestation linked to UK imports between November 2021 and July 2023, 8,800 hectares were estimated to be linked to palm oil, 3,470 hectares to soy, and 2,950 hectares to cattle products.
The researchers said these numbers were likely to be underestimates because they included raw commodities rather than processed products that contained the ingredients, such as chocolate.
Campaigners also said the UK’s regime was weaker than that of the EU, which covered deforestation and forest degradation. The UK’s ban covers only illegal deforestation.
Veronica Oakeshott, the head of the forest campaign at Global Witness, said: “For two years, the government has been dithering about which deforestation-causing commodities to include in these regulations. In this time, tropical forests have continued to be destroyed to grow crops and graze cattle. And some of that product ends up for sale in the UK. This delay is tainting the UK public’s products – from the beef on our dinner plates to the palm oil in our shampoo.
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How utilities can make community solar work for low-income customers
Contributed by Isabelle Hazlewood, Program Manager, Low Income Solar Programs, Eversource
As energy costs across the nation continue to rise, finding new solutions to help customers save money must be top of mind. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (“NREL”), a staggering 43% of all households in the United States are considered Low and Moderate-income (“LMI”).
These customers often pay a disproportionate amount of their income on energy bills each year. On average, U.S. households earning less than 200% of the Federal Poverty Level pay 8.1% of their income on energy costs, compared to just 2.3% for non-low-income households. While energy assistance and utility financial hardship programs can help, many customers still have “chronic issues paying their utility bill.” To solve the energy affordability crisis in the U.S. new solutions are needed. Can community solar be that silver bullet?
Community solar projects are large solar arrays, often called solar farms or gardens, that can serve many customers. As opposed to on-site solar, which typically only serves the needs of a single building, community solar projects generate enough electricity to provide benefits to numerous households and businesses throughout a utility’s service territory. Community solar has been touted as a popular solution for expanding solar access to underserved markets because it allows customers to access solar energy without facing many of the challenges associated with on-site solar installation.
The community solar market is expanding with growth expectations of 118% over the next 5 years. The federal Department of Energy has set a goal of powering 5 million households with community solar by 2025, and the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act (“IRA”) provides new tax credits of up to 50% for community solar projects that serve LMI customers.
Despite strong interest in using community solar as a tool to deliver clean energy bill savings to LMI customers, LMI community solar projects make up only a small percentage of the overall market. At the end of 2021, NREL estimated that there were 5,219MW of community solar installed in the United States but only 65MW of those projects served LMI households.
State governments and regulators throughout the country have been grappling with how best to grow the LMI community solar market for years. Over 20 states have policies to encourage the development of LMI community solar, most often in the form of additional incentives or mandates. However, even in Massachusetts, one of the largest community solar markets in the country with rich incentives for LMI projects, low-income community solar makes up only a fraction of projects.
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