Net Zero: What’s innovation got to do with it?

Can the aviation industry ever reach Net Zero? Are we on the brink of a green steel revolution? In the final episode of our series, Nina and Simon explore emerging solutions to the hardest decarbonisation challenges, with Faustine Delasalle, CEO of Mission Possible Partnership, Rob Trezona, Co-founder of Kiko Ventures, and Ross Bruton, Head of Ventures at the Carbon Trust.

To reach Net Zero, we will need to step away from business models which rely on patterns of production and consumption that are fundamentally incompatible with a Net Zero world. We need innovative business models that embrace novel ways of designing, producing, and using products and services. In this episode, we explore the exciting possibilities of the circular economy with Andrew Morlet, Chief Executive Officer at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and Aleyn Smith-Gillespie, who leads the Carbon Trust’s work on the circular economy and business model innovation.

To achieve Net Zero, we don’t just need brand new technologies, we also need vast amounts more of the ones we’ve already created, such offshore wind, electric vehicles and solar power. This isn’t just a case of doing more of the same; deploying these huge volumes, and quickly, demands a new approach. In this episode, we explore how innovation can help to scale existing solutions, with a focus on offshore wind. Nina and Simon are joined by Lyndie Hice-Dunton, the Executive Director of the US National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium, Simon Sharpe, the Director of Economics at the UN High Level Climate Champions and Megan Smith, the Head of Offshore Wind Advisory at the Carbon Trust to discuss the success story of offshore wind to date, and where efforts should focus now to take offshore wind to the next level.

What can our approach to tackling the Covid pandemic teach us about how we should address the climate crisis? In this first episode, we ask how innovation can be catalysed in the face of an urgent, global problem. It normally takes over a decade to create a vaccine, but during the Covid-19 pandemic, multiple vaccines were available in a matter of months. How did this remarkable achievement happen? In this episode, Nina and Simon are joined by Sir Patrick Vallance, former Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, to discuss the seven lessons we should learn from the Covid crisis about how to create the right conditions for urgent innovation to prevent dangerous climate change.