Lucia SinapiEVP and MD, Capgemini Ventures
Dr. Nathalie CasasHead of R&D, Climeworks
Synthetic biology is already opening new frontiers when it comes to the development of new materials.”
Over the past two decades, start-ups have become a critical source of innovation as a perfect blend of technology and talent, supported by unprecedent private capital funding: since 2015, venture capital industry (VC) investments into start-ups amount to $2.6 trillion globally.
This has been, and still is, the era of cloud, data, and software, contributing to the digital transformation of the economy and disrupting nearly every industry.
The changes required to achieve the 2050 Net Zero target and return to pre-industrial CO2 levels in the atmosphere go beyond digital and will require massive investments to transition to clean energy, transform our production and consumption models, and minimize our use of natural resources.
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Trees need a lot of space: to generate sufficient CO2 storage capacity we would need to afforest an area the size of Europe.”
Why is carbon removal so important?
Let’s talk about unavoidable and historical emissions. The most important thing any of us, individuals or companies, can do to stop global warming is to shrink our carbon footprints. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), companies must reduce their CO2 emissions by at least 90% before 2050. However, that will still leave around 10% of current levels of unavoidable emissions. Carbon removal is crucial to neutralizing these emissions and keeping global warming at around the 1.5°C target.
Then, there’s the matter of “historical” CO2 emissions already released into the atmosphere. There are billions of tons of historical CO2 emissions in our atmosphere, which must be removed if we are to gobeyond carbon neutrality and achieve net negative emissions (i.e., removing more CO2 from the atmosphere than we pump into it). Carbon removal is the only way to achieve this and, in doing so, take the first steps in restoring balance to our climate.
