Flattening the Climate Change Curve

I am deeply saddened by the horrifying police violence against the black community and broader systematic racial inequality in the US. Black founders in the technology community also face significant prejudice. As of February 2019, just one percent of venture-backed founders over the prior five years were black. Similarly, in 2019, female founders received only 3% of total venture funding. I think education is critical to helping collaboratively combat inequality. Next week’s piece will share the stories of startup founders from the black community and other under-represented groups to highlight prejudice, educate about its pervasiveness and empower change together in the technology sector.

Today’s piece applies the coronavirus “flatten the curve” framework to the issues of global warming and environmental degradation. I propose a framework for evaluating technology innovations that help flatten the climate change curve including those focused on education, halting and mitigation.

I hope you enjoy this week’s update and please feel free to share with colleagues, family and friends passionate about innovation.

Before coronavirus, I traveled to Peru to walk the Salkantay Trek, a 5 day journey by foot from Cusco to Machu Picchu through surrounding mountainous landscapes. Below is one of my favorite pictures from the trek taken at Hamantay Lake:

Our guide was of Incan descent and taught about a traditional Incan deity named Pachamama, considered Mother of Earth, who controlled agriculture and natural disasters. Incans believed we must seek to live in harmony with her and the rest of nature. The Incan people understood the moral importance of admiring and protecting nature.

Modern society has forgotten its dependence on nature and has actively subjugated earth to develop industry with significant environmental cost through global warming. Multilateral agreements aimed at curbing warming, such as the Paris Accord, face implementation and commitment issues as many of the largest global emitters are currently critically off track from promised emission reduction targets. Future technology advancements must play an important role in enabling environmental improvements by leveraging syncretist ideals that blend modern innovation and a long-lost respect for nature.

The coronavirus pandemic is the latest warning of the fragility of humanity when presented with natural threats including environmental destruction. Over the coming years, climate change will pose great challenges to humanity including:

1. Rising sea levels that will destroy homes, displace populations and erode infrastructure

2. Glacial melting that will accelerate sea level rise, destroy fishing ecosystems and marine biodiversity, cascading across the food chain

3. Deforestation that will release greenhouse gas, erode soils and disrupt agriculture

4. Destruction of biodiversity which could create new pandemics as habitat destruction pushes humans into contact with new animals and pathogens and drives extinction of key plant species used in medical and food supply chains

5. More natural disasters including drought and forest fires

6. Secondary effects of conflict over dwindling resource bases

While coronavirus has reported single digit fatality rates, the stakes of climate change are unfathomably greater if left unchecked: even the potential extinction of humanity. Core features of the pandemic are strikingly similar to environmental destruction:

1. Progress Dissonance - many citizens believe the world has progressed enough to make humanity invincible against natural threats, when in fact, we are vulnerable. This manifests as overconfidence in preparedness. Early in the pandemic, much of society assumed healthcare systems were more than strong enough to weather the threat. Similarly, some believe that by the time climate change manifests as a life-threatening issue, society will be immune from its effects because of economic, organizational and industrial improvements. However, as emissions continue to rise, today’s industrial progress actually makes us less prepared to deal with climate change, accruing “earth debt” that exacerbates the problem.

2. Silent Evolution - Coronavirus has a long incubation period of 14 days, which makes it easy to spread within communities before its effects are fully realized. Climate change’s incubation period can last 782 times longer, as there is up to a 30-year lag between greenhouse gas emissions and peak associated warming.

3. Indifference Until Imminence - Society tends not to care about an issue until it directly impacts their communities. The government downplayed coronavirus as long as it was not a “US problem,” similar to responses to prior regional, foreign infectious disease outbreaks. Climate change is already affecting numerous areas, specifically indigineous populations like Amazonians. However, as it largely has not affected the wealthy in the developed world, much of modern society is indifferent to change which has already occurred.

Over-confidence and delayed concern was a disastrous combination for coronavirus and is even more dangerous for climate change, for which the stakes are higher.  The pandemic’s “Flattening the Curve” framework is needed to mobilize an effective response to climate change. Just as there exist pandemic healthcare constraints, society has a limited preparedness capacity to handle effects of environmental destruction. Climate preparedness capacity includes not only healthcare but also supply chain adaptability, infrastructure protection and natural disaster responsiveness. Social distancing slows virus spread to keep infections within current healthcare constraints while agents work to increase medical capacity. For environmental degradation, agents can effect change by working collaboratively to flatten the climate-related death curve and buy time to improve preparedness capacity to mitigate climate effects. Unlike coronavirus, because environmental degradation consists of numerous problems, the environmental curve consists of sub-curves for each issue, each with a unique impact. Moreover, curve patterns for the coronavirus are not static. Rather, virus mutation can change the infection curve. Similarly, unpredictable natural occurrences, or black swans, could similarly accelerate the rate of climate destruction. Below is an illustrative representation of the “Flatten the Curve” framework applied to select environmental issues:

The table below summarizes illustrative effects, curve flattening measures, preparedness initiatives and black swans events for each of a - c:

For perspective, coronavirus is just one point on the future pandemic impact curve. The whole pandemic curve is simply a small line on the biodiversity destruction curve, which is merely a dot on the total environmental degradation curve. Relative to the pandemic “Flattening the Curve” model, the climate change model has numerous nuances:

1. Flattening Lag - Given coronavirus’ 14 day incubation period, current social distancing measures flatten the curve after a few weeks. For climate change, society needs to act now to flatten the curve in decades due to the long lag between emissions and peak warming.

2. Acceleration Potential - effects of environmental destruction are interrelated, which can cause impact curves to accelerate faster after tipping points than may be the case for coronavirus. For example, if the permafrost were to fully melt, the amount of methane (which traps up to 84x more heat than CO2) released could lead to mass warming, contributing to further glacial melting and biodiversity destruction. Climate-related black swans could be more devastating due to a negative flywheel effect on connected environmental issues.

3. Global Response - Coronavirus impact curves exist in relative national isolation. With border restrictions, the US can flatten its own curve through domestic social distancing. Global data and resource cooperation is helpful but not necessary to flatten the curve in the way that social distancing is necessary. However, given environmental connectedness, there exist only global climate curves. If China were to emit even if the US stopped, global temperatures would still rise. Environmental “flattening the curve” measures require international collaboration.

The technology community has an important role to play in combating climate change through developing flattening the curve and preparedness innovations aimed at education, halting and mitigation. Below is an illustrative environmental innovation framework:

Education focused technology provides knowledge to enable curve flattening by strengthening the pool of information to track progress and establish accountability:

1. Combating Misinformation - Governments and corporations sometimes spread misinformation regarding climate issues. Blockchain technology could combat misinformation through permanent and inalterable storage mechanisms. Arweave’s perma-web technology enabled the creation of an application to help combat the spread of government health misinformation in China during coronavirus and could possibly be leveraged similarly for the environment.

2. Traceability - Supply chain input traceability is important to provide information for companies and consumers to make responsible buying decisions. EcoVadis has created a global corporate sustainability vendor network to improve sustainability ratings across the supply chain.

3. Data Validation -  data tracking for environmental markers will be key to enforcing government regulation. In particular, satellite and drone imaging can collect and validate these markers. Space imaging startups like Planet Labs and Spire can leverage satellite infrastructure to improve tracking, accountability and compliance for green initiatives.

Halting technologies flatten the curve by replacing an existing product or industrial method to curb emissions or rebuild ecosystems. As with social distancing, these measures may reduce output in the short-term, but can preserve massive long-term value:

1. Product Substitution - replaces a high emission activity with a non-emitting activity. For example, electric vehicles replace emitting gasoline-powered engines.

2. Process Improvements - innovations in the supply chain that improve an input commodity to prevent environmental damage. Billions of people use products that contain palm oil. Rainforests are destroyed during palm oil production, harming biodiversity and forests. C16 biosciences created a sustainable palm oil alternative brewed in labs using microbes.

3. Regeneration / Offset - services that help corporations and consumers counteract carbon footprint through offsetting emissions with environmental projects. Pachama and CHOOOSE help agents fund reforestation and other projects to offset carbon footprints.

4. Reappropriation - turning an environmentally negative byproduct into a green offering. BIG, a Danish architecture firm, recently opened the first waste-to-energy power plant. This both reappropriated waste into productive activity and replaced a coal-fired plant.

Mitigation innovations improve society’s preparedness to handle inevitable climate change effects:

1. Urban Planning - helps agents build more climate-sustainable housing and city developments. Netherlands-based WaterStudio develops floating buildings for coasts that could be damaged by rising sea levels. Partnerships with data validation companies can help identify at-risk areas.

2. Disaster Response - tools that help predict natural disasters or improve response time. Zonehaven helps address wildfire disasters by planning intelligent evacuation routes.

3. Food Security - strengthens the resilience of food supply chains to protect against malnutrition. Lab cultured meat companies, such as Mosa Meat, protect protein sources even through disruptions to the food chain. Cultured meat production also replaces factory farming methods that contribute to pollution and deforestation. Innovative agricultural feed businesses, such as nextProtein, leverage alternative sources of protein (including insects), to improve farming yields even with resource and land scarcity constraints. These alternative fertilizer methods also have the potential to achieve a net lower carbon footprint, helping halt warming effects through sustainable farming.

There is still room for more transformation to build on each innovation area. Within Education, financial companies could create “environmental impact scores” so investors have needed information to prioritize green investments. Government regulation could mandate disclosure of company environmental impact markers in public filings. Additionally, within advertising, publishers could leverage artificial intelligence to parse out where corporate marketing claims misinform consumers about environmental issues. Within halting, higher processing power from quantum computing progress could help accelerate the discovery of chemical catalysts that could be used to capture atmospheric greenhouse gases. Similarly, CRISPR gene editing advances could help create “super sequestering plants” that store more carbon from the atmosphere to speed up carbon removal. Similar CRISPR applications to crop gene editing can improve food security by breeding plant species that thrive in spite of climate change. Lastly, engineers should build upon advances in electric vehicles to create commercial electric airplanes to reduce emissions from carrier jet fuel combustion.

The world still has time to flatten the climate change curve. The coronavirus crisis foreshadows the dire consequences of continuing to disrespect nature. Future business initiatives must combine the modern drive for technological innovation with a deep respect for nature to build a world that is simultaneously habitable, meaningful and productive. Over the coming years, it is important to build on the progress of cooperation established by social distancing to finally tackle climate change head on. Hopefully, the silver-lining of this crisis will be the ignition of a new environmentalist movement that helps humanity correct course from its current path to potential self-inflicted extinction. Society may never be as motivated again as this moment in history to collaborate through collective action. Let’s seize this unique opportunity to solve climate change before it’s too late.

If you have comments or questions, feel free to reach out to [email protected].

All Innovation Armory publications represent expressly my individual views and do not represent the views of companies with which I have previously been associated or with which am soon to be associated. These publications are my personal opinions and are not meant to be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

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