Climate Perspectives™ magazine | Why Net Zero needs innovation?
Climate Perspectives™ magazine | By Alan Cowie, Partnership and Communications Lead, Innovate UK KTN. Innovate UK KTN is an organisation which is used to dealing with challenges, and it has an extraordinary ability to build and convene problem-solving communities of experts and entrepreneurs, capable of tackling big-scale challenges. Notwithstanding this, it is hard to think of a more complex challenge the world is facing than the threat of climate change, and the enormous task of transitioning to a Net Zero economy seems insurmountable at times. The prospect of potentially lethal rises to our global temperatures poses a serious threat to populations, ecologies, and physical environments the world over.
Critical to meeting our Net Zero target is innovation across the whole system: in technology, land use change and behaviour, policy, finance and business models. Net Zero needs Innovation as much as Innovation needs Net Zero – they are symbiotic, interdependent, and complementary.
The recent conflict in Eastern Europe has once again highlighted the weakness of relying on imported fossil fuels, as soaring wholesale gas prices continues to hit energy bills for households and businesses alike. Although it is for all the wrong reasons, this does prompt all of us to look at how we, as a nation, produce and consume energy, and what the opportunities are for low carbon alternatives, as well as improving the fabric of our buildings and infrastructure.
The scale of these problems are already well articulated. We know that 40% of emission reductions rely on technologies not yet commercially deployed on a mass-market scale (according to Tech Nation). We know that the UK’s R&D investment lags significantly behind other developed nations – only 1.7% of our GDP, compared to Germany at 3.1%, and the likes of Israel and South Korea reach an astonishing 4-5% of GDP! The UK’s position is hard to marry with a commitment to reach Net Zero emissions. This needs to change quickly. There is little use in considering the nature of innovation if we are doing so little of it.
The good news is that the opportunities to innovate are ever-growing. You only need to go back a few decades when the idea of value creation through innovation was restricted only to wealth generation. Today, the opportunity is bigger, and we’ve seen a shift in focus away from exploiting innovative ideas at a cost to our society and environment. Innovation now goes way beyond economic gain. Of course, businesses still need to make money, but sustainability and ethical considerations play a much stronger role than ever before. Turning our ideas and scientific research into game-changing products, services and processes for the benefit of our economy, society and environment is what fuels our economy and provides the livelihoods we need to support our modern lives.
So how can we help? As ambitious as we are, our role isn’t to come up with solutions to all these problems. Our role is to connect innovators with academics and industry to form partnerships that have the potential to stimulate the UK economy, improve our sustainability, and address social issues. We convene the brightest minds in business, research and government to come together and collaborate to advance solutions for a greener and brighter future.
Here are a couple of examples of programmes we run which are specifically designed to support Net Zero goals.
Through our Innovation Network programme, we’ve united some of the best minds and greatest thinkers from across the UK in cross-sector areas of innovation, development, and new technologies. Together, they’re charged with finding answers to some of the world’s most significant challenges, to help introduce positive change and shape our collective future.
We know communities like this are far greater than the sum of their parts. Specialist collaborations produce results that just wouldn’t be possible with people thinking and working in isolation. Our Net Zero Places Innovation Network supports local and regional authorities and agencies to connect, collaborate, inform, share experiences and lessons learned, adopt innovation and to level up across the UK.
Our Innovation Exchange programme is specially designed to help organisations search for game-changing solutions from cross sectors to challenges and bring them to market faster.
Leveraging expertise across our diverse network, we promote innovation transfer, matching real industry challenges from large businesses, to companies and innovators already working on the solutions. iX has already delivered 26 commercial contracts, valued at £2.25m. One of them is the Sellafield Game Changers programme, which finds solutions for complex nuclear industry challenges. One of Sellafield’s challenges is centred around Post Operational Clean Out (POCO) tasks such as detecting and removing residues inside of pipes and vessels. Many of the organisations which pitched to Sellafield had no experience of the nuclear sector; their technologies and proposed solutions had been used successfully in other sectors and the ability to transfer the knowledge to the nuclear arena was recognised. To date, five have been awarded Game Changers feasibility funding.
Green Infrastructure Week (25th – 29th April) presents a unique opportunity for Innovate UK KTN to live demonstrate, the power of our networks and connections, as we facilitate four keynote sessions in partnership with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). We will explore the exciting opportunities to be unlocked from hydrogen power, modern nuclear, low-carbon transport, plus a session to explore the role of different types of finance and investment to unlock innovation to achieve Net Zero.
Climate Perspectives™ magazine issue Q1 2023. Read the full issue here.
