Climate Tech in Vancouver

I attended another wonderful event by Vancouver Tech Journal.

I am very interested in climate change and am in the process of figuring out how I can get involved. I am an Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR) for Foresight Canada, but I haven't been able to do more than that.

The "#vtjtalks: How BC Climatetech Could Save The World" was a great opportunity to understand what is happening in Vancouver regarding climate tech.

More investment in climate tech

Mike Winterfield ( @mikewinterfield ) from Active Impact Investments explained that in general, the investment trend was slowing down, while climate tech hit the 1 billion investment mark.

Also, Sithu Ranamukhaarachchi from Creative Destruction Lab mentioned that Vancouver was an excellent place to start, since they have their lab here, which is the only lab focused on climate other than their Paris lab.

The constraints in Canada

As exciting as it seems there was also a discussion that 90% of that funding was toward growth stage. The funds were too big to fund early stage projects/startups. It was also mentioned that there was a gap in scale. To really ramp up, most startups would need to seek funding in the US.

Also due to this trend, it will be more difficult for hardware-related climate tech companies to get adequate funding for each of their stages.

But as you can see in Svante ( @svantesolutions ) success, raising already 450 million, which was proudly presented by Brett Henkel ( @bretthenkel ), it is not impossible to start a hardware climate tech startup in Vancouver.

What you can do

Some of the suggestions that the panel provided were:

Fix your daily activity

A lot of carbon emissions can be reduced by what you do. Some of the large chunks would be cars, house heating and flying. So you can change your car to electric car (or use public transportation), avoid using natural gas to heat your house, and reduce using airplanes.

Vote! Push the government to do more!

The government plays a huge role in climate change. Pushing them to move away from fossil fuels, increase their budget toward climate change and have more funding for climate change, especially in early and later stages would have a great impact.

Work!

Working in climate tech, clean tech startups can make a huge difference.

Thank you to Vancouver Tech Journal, especially Allison, for making such a great event happen!