What is the problem ? The amount of water available for irrigation and livestock is reducing. Safe drinking water is also not available in many parts of the world. What is the solution ? Getting to the root of the problem, identifying the causes, adopting locally specific interventions and involving the community. What is the evidence? Even in the …

What is the problem ? Agricultural practices is depleting the soil fertility and making farming unproductive. What is the solution ? Regenerative farming , integrating trees and livestock in farming operations. Integrating trees is called agro forestry. What is the evidence? Agroforestry has worked in Africa (Niger, Zambia), Asia (China and India),…

Diageo is reducing its emissions by innovating in its packaging. It is trying to introduce circular economy in the traditional glass bottles. The company is also trying to use new types of material: aluminum and paper. At the same time, Diageo faces climate risks. Agricultural commodities and water are the inputs to manufacturing your favour bevera…

Digital innovation in agriculture is already bringing solutions to farmers that helps them use their mobile phones to obtain a range of useful services. They can get information about product prices and advice on pest control. They can also buy farm inputs as well sell their products. Almost always underbanked, they can also get credit. Is AI addin…

Too much food is wasted by consumers. Reducing this wastage is important. It is good for the climate and for one’s own wallet, not to mention the conscience. Everybody agrees that it is important and yet reducing food waste is hard. People waste food not because they don’t care but often they do not know better ways to buy, store, cook and eat. Luc…

The World Fair Trade Organisation certifies small and medium enterprises which practice fair trade principles. Chief among them is that 50% of their profits are contributed towards a cause. The objective of WFTO is to prove that innovation and entrepreneurship is consistent with stakeholder capitalism. Innovation – the process of increasing product…

Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 was also a leading thinker on education. The central tenets of his thoughts on education were learning among nature, striking a balance of the arts and science in the curriculum and internalising a spirit of internationalism. Tagore was also a practical man and he put his ideas in a…

In Kenya there has been droughts for the last four out of 5seasons. Most farmers depend only rains and are very vulnerable to changing weather. SunCulture provides irrigation solution to small holder farmers. The challenge is to make the product affordable to farmers. This means right sizing the pumps, working with suppliers to reduce costs and pro…

Financial institutions have to take into both short term and long term horizons in assessing climate risks. This is not easy for banks in the emerging world. It requires expertise, access to data and new management processes.In this podcast, Rutang and myself explain the types of climate risks and we demystify climate risk scenarios which help fina…

With climate change El Nino droughts will become more frequent and more intense. To be fore warned is to be fore armed. Warnings will have to be taken seriously and farmers should not plant their seeds hoping that rains will come only to face a total crop failure. Kvuno, a social enterprise spun out of Solidaridad, the international NGO, is develop…

A child substantially shorter than their age in the firstthree years often fails to reach their full potential. It is often caused by poor nutrition. Save the Children, an international NGO with roots in the UK, has been implementing a three year project in Bangladesh with support from the European Union and UK AID to reduce stunting. Reducing stun…

Seychelles is the richest country in Africa but as a small island country it is also being impacted severely by climate change. Sadly it is not just climate changed caused by humanity as a whole, it is the damage to the environment that is caused by the individuals living in and visiting the islands. The environment damage is making it hard to grow…

A top down infrastructural project, in the Aral Sea area, goes terribly wrong. Instead of increasing cotton production and prosperity, the project leads to unprecedented droughts and poverty. The Global Green Growth Institute is implementing a project funded by the South Korean government to rehabilitate the region. Oyunchimeg Amartuvshin, Senior P…

The Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture helps small holder farmers access quality inputs and sell products at fair prices. To do that the foundation has developed the Farmers Hub, a franchisee based business model which helps both agri-entrepreneurs and businesses to invest in products that serve small holder farmers. This approach has …

Saran Song is the CEO of Amru Rice, Camobodia’s largest producer and exporter of organic rice from Cambodia. In this podcast he talks about the contract farming business model, the advantages that farmers can derive from growing organic and sustainable rice and peers into the future of rice. Sections Section 1 : First 10 minutes introducing Saran a…

Heather Couture is an international consultant in computer vision (applying artificial intelligence to images). In this episode, she explains the different types of modern artificial intelligence and its use in a variety of food-related applications. It is used for monitoring crops and trees in fields and automating activities such as harvesting an…

Futurepump is a small company from the UK with a factory in India manufacturing solar pumps. One of its partners in Africa is Celfre Energy, an even smaller company, which operates in Zimbabwe. Celfre Energy started by importing one Futurepump and creating awareness among farmers. It raised grants and then used the money to import a container load …

Futurepump is a small company from the UK with a factory in the UK manufacturing solar pumps. It is distributing its product in Africa through Davis & Shirtliff, a large company with a 78 year old history. The partnership is bringing the pumps to small holder farmers across 11 countries in Africa. As climate change is having a “real negative impact…

Rice millers in the Central and East Java provinces in Indonesia are facing a shortage of paddy from farmers. Production has been impacted by changing rainfall patterns, pest attacks and the occasional non-availability of pesticides and fertilisers. The industry association Indonesia Rice Millers and Traders Association -PERPADI has partnered with …

Fishing methods of small-scale fishers are more sustainable because they capture less bycatch (fish that is discarded). Unfortunately, like in many places of the world, the livelihoods of small-scale fishers in the Occidental Mindoro province in Philippines are vulnerable both to climate change and overfishing by large fleets. The fishing community…

Description: Small fishing communities in South Africa (and many other parts of the world) have often been discriminated against. First there is colonisation and (in the case of South Africa) the apartheid regime. Then there is the interest of national governments to create an industrial fishing sector. And yet these communities live on thanks to t…

Bangladesh is acutely vulnerable to the climate crisis. BRAC, the world’s largest NGO is implementing adaptation clinics in very vulnerable areas. The process involves understanding the specific problem the community is facing and then implementing a solution, while taking the community along. The results are extremely encouraging. Sections Section…

Cellular meat is not going to flood your supermarket shelves anytime soon. Across the world, only four companies have got regulatory approval. They are organising tasting sessions in restaurants and “pop ups” but it will take several years for companies to scale up manufacturing processes to produce sufficient volumes of products at reasonable cost…

A rancher in South America is worried about the condition of his land. He knows that improving the soil condition will help in growing more grass which his livestock can feed on. He wants to leave his land in a better state to his children so that they can inherit his profession as well and decides to more regenerative practices. A NGO in East Afri…

The Luangwa region and the Kafue regions in Zambia hosts some of the finest national parks in the world. Unfortunately, these forests and the wildlife are under threat. An average farming family who lives near theseareas cuts down 60 to 70 big trees in a year just to use as firewood for cooking food. Falling soil fertility and a growing population …

Years of repeated tilling the same piece of land with a hand hoe has compacted the soil in Malawi into a hard layer. Plant roots cannot penetrate this “hard pan” and they grow laterally, instead of vertically. Rainwater does not penetrate the soil either but rushes along the furrows created in the land, washing away the top soil. This is drasticall…

The wine and the alcohol industry has been around for millennia and obviously is not the major cause of climate change. But then like every other industry it has to reduce its emissions and environmental impact. More importantly, the wine industry is being impacted by unpredictable weather events. Drought, sudden frost and wildfires are affecting t…

In the last five years, plant based foods have started appearing on supermarket shelves, on restaurant menus and even on the assembly chains of fast food outlets. There is still skepticism however. Customer demand in the US and UK seem to be flattening out and there are no real entry barriers to new companies bringing out new products. It is not un…

Extreme events occur not just because of climate change but also local damage to the environment. The effects are also sometimes hard to foresee. Not all events are well reported either. ClimateNode wants to scan websites, news reports, scientific papers to understand what type of climate events are happening, their causes and effects. ClimateNode …

There are 150 million mid-market companies across the world who do not have the resources to invest in measuring climate metrics. Software can help them understand what standards are applicable, pull out and validate data sitting at various places in the company systems, suggest and help manage personalised projects and then communicate results to …

In the Sahel, farmers do not have the money to buy chemical fertilisers. They use organic methods of farming which works well when they do. Unfortunately, the temperatures in the Sahel are already more than global averages. Rainfall is scarce but when it does the downpours are heavy. The top soil is often carried away, making the soil infertile. Pe…

There are six subsectors to the alternative protein industry. Plant based meats, precision fermentation and cellular meat are the main ones. Plant based “mock meat” has been around in Asia for centuries. There are relatively less technological barriers to get products out but companies will still have to overcome taste, nutrition, cost and regulato…

The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) is driving the demand for AI software. Some companies also want to go beyond just meeting the standards and genuinely develop a nature strategy. Xylo Systems, helps energy and property companies understand baseline biodiversity data, analyse possible impacts and develop potential projects…

Transition Zero has used artificial intelligence to measure emissions from coal and gas power plants. It has trained software to learn from satellite images and verified published emissions. The trained software can then estimate emissions only from satellite pictures of power plants where the published data is not available or needs to be verified…

Arnab Sengupta has worked with about six agricultural commodities and knows a lot about tuna. Tuna is consumed fresh and in canned forms. It is caught in the deep sea near some of the small island developing states and then processed in Thailand or Ecuador. The processing industry employs a lot of people because the fish has to be cleaned perfectly…

The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive are complex (climate is only one of the five pillars of sustainability) and that creates the need for software to manage the process of meeting the new standards. Metabolic a consultancy used its experience of working with clients to develop Link a product that enables users start with data that they…

Credit lines are a very common instrument of moving climate finance from international development financial institutions to intermediaries in developing countries. Unfortunately and very surprisingly, not all of these lines get utilised. Rainer and Sanjoy who have worked with credit lines for many years explain how credit lines can be made more ef…

A small country like Bangladesh is vulnerable to both extreme events and slow deterioration of living conditions due to climate change. People migrate in droves when extreme events occur, they migrate in trickles as agriculture and fishing becomes unviable. The Climate Bridge Fund, supported by the German Development Bank, and implemented by BRAC, …

BBOXX started selling small solar home systems in Rwanda thirteen years back. It was heady times as several entrepreneurs from the Western world rushed to provide modern electricity to millions of customers in Africa . The industry soon attracted enormous global investor interest. Like all hype cycles, reality dawned as some of these companies coll…

A very small part of arable land in Africa is irrigated and with climate change already happening, there is neither time nor money to build grand irrigation projects. What can be done, however, is to collect rainwater, which now comes in sudden heavy downpours, using age-old techniques. Add on solutions that measure soil moisture, predict weather a…

Michael Poisson helps us understand the types of companies in the crowded ESG scoring industry. The industry is very crowded with various types of companies offering different data products based on the customer needs. Incoming regulations will lead to standardised products. Companies use broadly two types of approaches. One way is to make sense of…

What you learn at a world class incubator? In this podcast , two entrepreneurs reflect on the time they spent at Carbon 13, Cambridge’s climate venture builder. Why did they apply? What happened when they meet their other cohort members? Did the experience help them? What is the progress they have made since then? Finally, it seems to boil down to …

Human wildlife conflict has social causes and is being exacerbated by climate change. Solving it requires an integrated approach. Technology is key but you cannot air drop it in these frontiers of climate change. To make real impact organisations of different types must come together and their funders will have to support these partnerships. Listen…

Deep Science Ventures is building climate businesses with a plan. What is required to reverse global warming? What are the constraints in reaching outcomes? What technology solutions can remove these constraints? Who are the best people to develop the technology? How can we give them opportunity to think about the problem? Listen to this fascinatin…

The mining industry contributes more than 4 per cent of the global greenhouse gas emissions. That is about the share of cement and chemicals & amp; petrochemicals taken together. It also consumes water in areas where it is in short supply. Things can get worse. The transition to electric vehicles and renewable energy will increase the demand for mi…

Can the tools that we have – science, technology and business – address the issues that we face from climate change? After all, these are the very things that has brought us to this problem. So it is right to be skeptical. But then in the limited time these tools are all that we have. It is not practical to think that we will build everything afres…

2 people attract 15 volunteers. These 15 volunteers are supported by people across the UK. Seeing the success of this first group, scores of groups spring up across the UK and the world all working on recycling plastic waste for products such as survival blankets for people who have nothing else to keep warm during the winter. The groups partner wi…

Description: Suppose millions of people come together to fund innovations that have the highest impact on solving the climate crisis. The areas they target are the priority areas science is telling us to focus on, not just the VC flavour of the year. The innovations they support are examined by intelligent common people as well as by experts. The i…

Wasted food leads to a greenhouse gas emissions. Not only is food waste causing global warming but climate change will lead to greater food waste. Extreme events will damage crops. Unseasonal flowering will lead to short term surpluses. Food is wasted because as consumers we have some unsustainable habits and because retailers are seeking efficienc…

The inside story behind the dramatic drop in renewable energy prices is often quite mundane. In this podcast, we discuss how nitty gritty technical and commercial details led to the rapid decline of offshore wind prices in the UK. The story is really that of a trusted organization bringing together industry players to collaboratively explore soluti…