I’m the director of innovation at Imperial College London, and I don’t think tech is the be-all and end-all to the climate crisis

• There’s no need to wait for new technology to get started on fighting the climate crisis. 
• The global nature of the climate crisis demands innovation that mobilizes international support.
• Startups are improving real-time data capture, but they need to be met with smart infrastructure.

I love technology and gadgets. From the cool tools of a movie hero to something practical I can get my hands on, it can be seductive to think that innovation is the answer to our most pressing problems. But how much can we rely on tech fixes to lead us to the zero-carbon, climate-resilient world we aim for?

First, there’s no need to wait for new technology to get started. In the construction sector, for example, we already have plenty of materials and knowledge to refurbish products in ways that emit no greenhouse-gas emissions and even capture emissions we’ve produced. The challenge, however, is overcoming barriers that prevent residents and owners — individual and commercial — from making improvements. Regulation is a solution, and innovation can help, too. 

Startups are improving real-time data capture to cut energy use, making design phases greener by employing digital twins and providing financial innovations that help people pay the up-front costs of building improvements. But these individual, business-level solutions need to be complemented by the right infrastructure — improved electricity grids, energy-storage solutions, and transportation of carbon dioxide — including appropriate charging structures to sustain these essential services. 

In essence, we need innovation across business models, products, and services to unlock solutions that are already available to us. But how far will these applications get us?

Going net zero 

In 2021, the International Energy Agency published a road map for getting the global energy sector — which accounts for about three-quarters of all greenhouse-gas emissions — to net zero. It estimated that about 80% of the technologies we needed to reach our emissions-reduction objectives for 2030 were already commercially available, often as energy efficiency and renewable power. We need to rapidly deploy these tools this decade. 

When you consider our objectives for 2050, however, only about 50% of the technologies we need are on the market. To reach our targets for that year, the report said, we need improvements across technologies such as hydrogen electrolyzers, advanced batteries, and direct air capture.

Unlike the recent boom in digital technology, many of these areas of innovation are “deep tech” — in other words, real hardware solutions. This type of tech needs a lot of investment at its earliest stages to test ideas and scale up. We need investors, end-user companies, and regulators to work together to create an innovative environment to help these technologies sprint out of the starting blocks.

The global nature of the climate crisis also demands innovation that mobilizes a wide variety of people and organizations around the world to come up with and implement solutions that fit in their local context. Climate-change innovation has a necessary, unique international flavor, which should help us find solutions. 

Adapting to what’s in front of us 

What about resilience? We need to deal with climate-change effects that are baked into our system. Many solutions to this aspect of the challenge rely heavily on processes and existing skills and, importantly, on linking together people, nature, financial structures, and technology in smart, new ways. We need to bring on the resilience innovators, too. 

There is risk in the seductive tech-solutions narrative. It implies that we don’t need to modify our lifestyles to tackle the climate crisis. The IEA’s 2021 report, however, said there needed to be at least 5% behavior change — learning how to do things differently. Technology and solutions are already out there, and we need to choose to use them and be willing to consider a slightly different (possibly better) lifestyle when we do.

Tackling the climate crisis requires plenty of innovation — perhaps not all of it shiny tech. If you want to be part of this change: Be innovative, in all of the different ways I have described.