Our Earth has been around for 4.6 billion years. Man has only been here for a fraction of that time. And yet in the past 250 years we have destroyed more than 50 percent of Earth’s forests and tipped off on a scale beyond sustainability.
In Canada, big companies and governments are waking up to our climate emergency and setting ambitious net-zero targets. From pension funds to oilpatches, from municipalities to the federal government, organizations and leaders across the country are pushing for change. To understand why this is so necessary, you only have to observe the increasing number of heat waves, wildfires, droughts and floods.
Setting a strategy is one thing; Solutions are far more difficult to implement, especially with commitments that extend beyond horizons where it is difficult to know how change will be delivered. Despite good intentions and increasing stakeholder pressure to act, it will be easier for most leaders to support proposals than to implement real solutions.
And it is not because there is a paucity of viable solutions available. Canada’s clean technology enterprises are driven by innovation and entrepreneurship. We have 13 of the top 100 global cleantech companies in the country, second only to the United States. But the gap between innovation and implementation remains, and many of our large companies fail to achieve widespread adoption of their products.
However, there is no way to purify the void without climate technology. Even though many Canadian organizations who must purchase these products are working to figure out how to reduce emissions from their fleets, make their buildings run more efficiently and have access to clean energy, But they don’t necessarily know how to drive the necessary scale changes.
Corporations certainly see the need – they are striving to meet new ESG goals while maintaining their competitive advantage, gaining market share and reducing risk for their investors, shareholders, regulators and customers. Huh. They know they will need to work with startups to achieve their sustainability goals. The difficulty is breaking down the traditional distinction between corporations and startups.
Corporations tend to avoid partnering with startups because of a range of real or perceived constraints, ranging from a lack of awareness of available technologies, to fears about the risks of working with unproven or emerging technologies. But in the face of undeniable scientific evidence, global norms are changing and a zero-risk attitude may become the biggest risk of all.
This is the critical gap. It is the same for governments, but with the complicating factor they also need to comply with procurement rules and trade agreements. For many mindless startups, these requirements only serve to widen the gap into a chasm.
To help bridge that gap, KPMG and the MaRS Discovery District recently joined forces. The new collaboration, known as the Climate Impact Accelerator, aims to enable corporations to move more quickly through pilot projects toward commercial-scale development.
The project combines KPMG’s customer relations and innovation architecture model with MARS’ experience in enterprise relationships and innovation adoption, and will work to identify enterprises with technologies that reduce GHG that are ready to deploy. Its goal is to help governments and corporations adopt Canadian technologies and scale them to drive meaningful and measurable impacts on climate change.
Startups that will be part of this collaboration will bring promising solutions such as Brainbox AI, a Montreal company, that can reduce the energy cost of a new or legacy building by 25 percent and its carbon footprint by 40 percent by optimizing HVAC systems on a predictive basis. can be reduced to . Data ranging from local weather forecasts to past usage trends. The technology saves money for its customers and requires no changes to the existing building’s structure, meaning it can be easily renovated or built into the planning and construction.
The company’s systems are now installed in more than 100 million square feet of real estate in more than 20 countries.
There’s also Peak Power, a startup that plugs distributed energy sources — think on-site electric vehicles and battery storage units — into a building’s power supply so it can use energy more efficiently. It’s already found customers in New York, California and Toronto, where it’s easy to imagine growing demand driven by updated green standards.
“We have to persuade the region to follow our lead,” says chief strategy officer Imran Noorani.
Some of these corporate and government goals will be achieved systematically, but we cannot be passive about making our future environmentally and financially sustainable. The best way to achieve our ambitious goals is to build strong partnerships between innovative young enterprises, large companies and government procurement. We need to help bridge the gap to implement the change needed.
Yung Woo is the CEO of MaRS Discovery District and Armughan Ahmed is the President and Managing Partner of Digital at KPMG in Canada. Torstar, the parent company of the Toronto Star, has partnered with MaRS to highlight innovation in Canadian companies.
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Disclaimer This content was produced as part of a partnership and therefore may not meet the standards of fair or independent journalism.
