The Impact Innovator | Issue 281
In this week's The Impact Innovator edition:
The High Seas Treaty, also known as the agreement on?Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction?or 'BBNJ', was signed in New York on 20 September, in the margins of the United Nations High Level Week. In addition to the EU as organisation,?many countries signed the treaty . The agreement provides for the common governance of?about half of the Earth’s surface?and?95% of the ocean’s volume, the largest habitat on our blue planet, to:
The adoption of this agreement is a?historic achievement?marking the successful end of?more than a decade of multilateral work. It complementsthe United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which provides the legal framework under which all human activities in the ocean take place. The text of the treaty was agreed in March 2023 and formally adopted on 19 June, by consensus, at UN Headquarters in New York. It will enter into force after 60 ratifications.?
Once ratified, the High Seas Treaty will allow the establishment of marine protected areas in the high seas at global level, safeguarding the ocean from human pressures in a major contribution to reducing climate change, to protecting biodiversity and achieving the objective to protect at least 30% of the planet by 2030. The treaty thus addresses a blaring gap in ocean protection, as?only about 1% of the high seas is currently protected.?The treaty also sets a framework for a fair and equitable sharing of monetary and non-monetary benefits from marine genetic resources, and for capacity building and transfer of marine technologies to developing countries, as well as a voluntary fund to support developing countries to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goal 14 on 'Life Below Water'.
Northvolt, Europe’s big battery hope, is building its first gigafactory outside the continent in Canada, taking a $5bn bet on the North American market as well as trying to secure better access to crucial minerals. The Swedish start-up will start building its fourth large battery factory just outside Montreal later this year, with production due to start in 2026 as it seeks to service customers including Volkswagen, Volvo Cars and BMW in North America.?Northvolt launched in 2017 with an aim of becoming one of the leading battery makers in Europe and a homegrown rival to the dominant Asian producers. It has opened a factory just below the Arctic Circle in Sweden, broken ground on a second plant in the country with Volvo and announced a third in Germany. But thanks to US president Joe Biden’s generous subsidies — which Canada and its prime minister Justin Trudeau have promised to match “one for one”, according to Cerruti — Northvolt has raised its ambitions
Canada’s government and the local administration in Quebec will each offer $1bn towards the building of the factory, which is expected to employ 3,000 people in its first stage. It will also match the substantial support offered by the US on operating costs. Northvolt has told EU officials that North American support could be worth as much as €8bn per gigafactory. Northvolt will build in McMasterville a battery factory that will eventually have 60 gigawatt hours of annual capacity — equivalent to the needs of about 1mn electric cars a year and similar to the size of its Swedish and German plants — as well as a recycling facility and production of cathode active material. The factory will run only on renewable energy, thanks to Quebec’s hydropower, and Cerruti — currently chief operating officer — will relocate to Montreal to become Northvolt’s head of North America.
La Banque Postale ?and its affiliated entities, LBP AM and CNP Assurances, have unveiled a €1bn impact infrastructure debt fund, setting their sights on energy transition-centric ventures across Europe.?The newly introduced impact debt fund, tagged under Article 8 in accordance with the SFDR regulation, commits to extended backing for initiatives that play a pivotal role in climate change countermeasures or are firmly set on decarbonisation pathways. The fund’s infusion is slated for a span of three years.
Notably, the fund’s core areas of emphasis will encompass renewable energy, circular economy, and clean transport, coupled with energy efficiency. Additionally, cutting-edge sectors like e-mobility, green hydrogen, and energy storage also find a significant place on its radar. La Banque Postale’s head of corporate and investment banking, Bertrand Cousin, shared his perspective, “This initiative is part of our strategy to promote impact finance and is in line with the commitments made by La Banque Postale with regard to the objectives of a mission-led company. I am thrilled with this project, which is a further illustration of the synergies being developed within the major public financial centre.”
Nearly?12?million recreational boats cruise along America’s waterways every year, leaving in their wake smelly exhaust, sheens of fuel and roaring engine noise. Now, a?handful of startups are looking to extend the electric-vehicle boom that’s sweeping through streets worldwide into rivers, lakes and coastal waters.?Arc Boat Company ?is one of the newer entrants in the growing market for battery-powered boats. The Los Angeles–based company, whose team includes former SpaceX and Tesla engineers, launched in?2021?with the mission of electrifying the industry — starting by building a?pricey luxury powerboat .
On Wednesday, the startup said it had closed a $70?million Series B?funding round, bringing its total funding to over $100?million. The round was supported by Arc’s existing venture-capital investors Eclipse, Andreessen Horowitz, Lowercarbon Capital and Abstract Ventures, and also included Menlo Ventures.?With its new funding, Arc plans to design and build a?speedboat for wakeboarding from a?new factory in Torrance, California, with the goal of reaching a?broader — albeit still relatively wealthy — market of recreational boaters. The company is also seeking to double its workforce to around?140?people within the next?18?months, Lee?said.
Neara , an infrastructure modeling platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create 3D, network-wide models for engineering-grade simulations and analytics, announced a €9.3 million capital raise extension. The round was led by Prosus Ventures and supported by Neara’s existing investors, Skip Capital and Square Peg. This increases Neara’s total Series B funding to €22.5 million. Neara’s enterprise-grade, 3D network modeling technology uses AI/ML to seamlessly aggregate utilities’ broad spectrum of data sources into one hyper-realistic digital simulation environment. Utilities use the model to simulate how their assets will respond in the real world under any condition based on hundreds of network and environmental variables.
These models help eliminate network monitoring blindspots by stress-testing grid resilience and improving severe weather response, while reducing reliance on manual field surveys.?The new investment will be used to accelerate Neara’s global expansion in Europe and the United States,?in addition to further developing the company’s new “System of Enablement” functionality. This functionality removes many of the constraints that prevent renewable generation from connecting to the grid, particularly with respect to network availability and accessibility.
Nature Action 100, an investor engagement initiative with 190 institutional investors representing nearly $24 trillion in assets announced its list of 100 companies to be targeted in a campaign aimed at driving corporate action to address nature loss and biodiversity decline.?Companies targeted by the campaign include Amazon, McDonald’s, Nestlé, Walmart and Glencore. According to Nature Action 100, companies were selected based on market capitalization within key sectors, and using of those with the highest impacts on nature. Key targeted sectors include biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, chemicals, household and personal goods, consumer goods retail, food, food and beverage retail, forestry and paper, and metals and mining.
Nature Action 100 was initially launched at the COP15 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in December 2022, coordinating investor engagement activity to increase corporate ambition and action to combat nature loss. According to the Nature Action 100 launch statement, the initiative was formed as financial risk from biodiversity and nature loss grow, with $44 trillion of economic value generation – more than half of global GDP – reliant on nature’s services, and tens of billions of dollars potentially at risk over the next 5 to 10 years from the continued production of deforestation-linked commodities. Each of the 100 focus companies have been sent letters to kick off the engagement campaign, explaining the systemic risk to businesses arising from nature and biodiversity loss, with deteriorating ecosystems already impacting operations, supply chains, and financial returns.
Paine Schwartz Partners has announced the closing of its Food Chain Fund VI at $1.7 billion of capital commitments.Paine Schwartz is a private equity firm that specializes in sustainable food chain?investments , focusing on?two core themes : increasing productivity and sustainability across global food systems and a consumer focus on health and wellness.?The new fund is the largest of the firm’s funds to date, exceeding the firm’s fundraising target, and it includes investments from pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, foundations, and family offices.
Fund VI has already been deployed by about 40%, toward investments in AgroFresh Solutions, Costa Group, Elemental Enzymes, HGS BioScience, and Monterey Mushrooms. “With Fund VI, we are continuing to invest to feed a growing population better food with more efficient use of resources,” said Kevin Schwartz, CEO of Paine Schwartz. “Food and agribusiness has been the fastest growing sector for more than 15 years and continues to be underserved by the investment community. We look forward to leveraging our deep knowledge, industry relationships, and thesis-driven approach to capture the numerous attractive value creation opportunities we see ahead.”
Engineers at MIT and in China are aiming to turn seawater into drinking water with a completely passive device that is inspired by the ocean, and powered by the sun.?In a paper appearing today in the journal?Joule,?the team outlines the design for a new solar desalination system that takes in saltwater and heats it with natural sunlight.?The configuration of the device allows water to circulate in swirling eddies, in a manner similar to the much larger “thermohaline” circulation of the ocean. This circulation, combined with the sun’s heat, drives water to evaporate, leaving salt behind. The resulting water vapor can then be condensed and collected as pure, drinkable water. In the meantime, the leftover salt continues to circulate through and out of the device, rather than accumulating and clogging the system.
The new system has a higher water-production rate and a higher salt-rejection rate than all other passive solar desalination concepts currently being tested. The researchers estimate that if the system is scaled up to the size of a small suitcase, it could produce about 4 to 6 liters of drinking water per hour and last several years before requiring replacement parts. At this scale and performance, the system could produce drinking water at a rate and price that is cheaper than tap water.?The team envisions a scaled-up device could passively produce enough drinking water to meet the daily requirements of a small family. The system could also supply off-grid, coastal communities where seawater is easily accessible.? The team built several prototypes, with one, three, and 10 stages, and tested their performance in water of varying salinity, including natural seawater and water that was seven times saltier. From these tests, the researchers calculated that if each stage were scaled up to a square meter, it would produce up to 5 liters of drinking water per hour, and that the system could desalinate water without accumulating salt for several years. Given this extended lifetime, and the fact that the system is entirely passive, requiring no electricity to run, the team estimates that the overall cost of running the system would be cheaper than what it costs to produce tap water in the United States.
Indigenous farmers in the Amazon cultivate nutrient-rich, carbon-storing soil to grow crops – and archaeological evidence of this “dark earth” suggests they have been doing so for centuries. Studying the technique could help with wider efforts to store carbon in soil in an attempt to slow climate change.? Dark earth is soil?packed with organic material ?found near or around human settlements, particularly in piles of waste. Artefacts such as broken ceramics are often found in the soil, along with a high concentration of nutrients that turn the earth darker than surrounding natural soils. Such soil has been found at many archaeological sites in the Amazon and seems to have been used for farming, but it wasn’t clear whether dark earth was actively cultivated or merely a byproduct of human activity.?
In the modern Kuikuro village, they found that farmers actively spread charcoal, ash and organic waste such as fish and scraps of manioc, also called cassava or yuca, to make dark earth, known there as “eegepe”. The chemical composition and spatial patterns of dark earth deposits were also similar in both modern and ancient settlements, supporting the idea that past societies actively made the soil.?“The chemistry is like fertile soil for plants, just exaggerated,” says?Morgan Schmidt ?at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. The enriched soils also contained substantially more carbon than typical soils in the Amazon, comparable to the amount of carbon stored in the rainforest growing above the soil. This suggests that dark earth in the Amazon may amount to a large and as yet uncounted store of carbon. Though stored for centuries, the soil carbon could be released due to warming temperatures or unsustainable agriculture, says Goldberg. He says the centuries of soil management also suggest the importance of?efforts to store more carbon ?in soil today. “We can see that it works,” he says.
Want to live?longer? For centuries the attempt to stop ageing was the preserve of charlatans touting the benefits of mercury and arsenic, or assortments of herbs and pills, often to disastrous effect. Yet after years of false starts, the idea of a genuine elixir of longevity is taking wing. Behind it is a coterie of fascinated and ambitious?scientists ?and enthusiastic and self-interested billionaires. Increasingly, they are being joined by ordinary folk who have come to think that the right behaviour and drugs could add years, maybe decades, to their lives. Living to 100 today is not unheard of, but is still rare. In America and Britain centenarians make up around 0.03% of the population. Should the latest efforts to prolong life reach their potential, living to see your 100th birthday could become the norm; making it to 120 could become a perfectly reasonable aspiration. More exciting still, those extra years would be healthy. What progress has been made in expanding lifespans has so far come by countering the causes of death, especially infectious disease. The process of ageing itself, with its attendant ills such as dementia, has not yet been slowed. This time, that is the intention.
The idea, as we set out in our?Technology Quarterly , is to manipulate biological processes associated with ageing that, when dampened in laboratory animals, seem to extend their lives. Some of these are familiar, such as severely restricting the number of calories an animal consumes as part of an otherwise balanced diet. Living such a calorie-restricted life is too much to ask of most people; but drugs that affect the relevant biological pathways appear to bring similar results. One is metformin, which has been approved for use against type-2 diabetes; another is rapamycin, an immunosuppressant used in organ transplants. Early adopters are starting to take these drugs “off label”, off their own bat or by signing what amount to servicing contracts with a new class of longevity firms. Another path is to develop drugs that kill “senescent” cells for which?the body has no further use. The natural means for disposing of these cells, like a number of other repair mechanisms, themselves weaken with age. Giving them a helping hand is not just a matter of tidying up. Senescent cells cause all sorts of malfunctions in their healthy neighbours. “Senolytic” drugs which target them pose obvious risks: it is hard to kill off one type of cell without inconveniencing others. But the promise is clear.
For true believers that is just the beginning. Groups of academic and commercial researchers are studying how to rejuvenate cells and tissues by changing the “epigenetic” markers on chromosomes, which tell cells which genes they should activate. These markers accumulate with age; strip them back and you might produce the cells of a 20-year-old body inside one that is in fact 65. Mimicking calorie restriction and clearing out senescent cells would delay ageing. Boosters claim that epigenetic rejuvenation could halt or reverse it.