There’s a lot of work to leverage technology in the fight against climate change, and it can be difficult to find the signal in the noise. That’s according to Olamide Oguntoye, tech policy lead at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, who joined Devex for a panel discussion during COP 26.
Climate tech innovations span three categories, he said, and this framework might be useful in analyzing what kinds of support these solutions need to scale.
“One thing we’ve done is to look at the landscape and categorize these technologies into three big buckets: the ones that are already here and are already mature, the ones that are on the other extreme end, which need R&D support, and everything in between,” he said.
For those technologies that are already available, such as energy efficiency technology for homes, policymakers can help by standardizing them.
For the technologies that need research and development support, policymakers can look at how public finance can help address bottlenecks around experimentation and demonstration.
And for the technologies in between that need to be scaled up, public-private partnerships are essential in supporting entrepreneurs and startups in order to ensure these technologies can be brought to scale — not just in high-income countries, but in the low-income countries most affected by climate change.
Oguntoye said he is most excited about technologies that are on what he describes as a learning curve, “technologies whose price gets decreased with increased installation.” An example is solar power, which has seen a dramatic decrease in price over the past decade.
“That same kind of learning curve evolution is happening in areas like batteries,” he said.
Watch the panel to hear more from Oguntoye as well as Ifeoma Malo, co-founder and CEO at Clean Technology Hub Nigeria, and Zack Parisa, co-founder and CEO at Natural Capital Exchange.