In today’s edition:

🛩 An airline innovation lab

🇧🇷 Climate programmes for Brazil

🧱 Finding materials for the future

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💼 Big Business (1-minute read)

The first "airline innovation lab"

US-based international airline operator, Delta airlines, has unveiled the “sustainable skies lab” which it claims is the sector’s first innovation lab dedicated to low-carbon technologies.

Partnerships are key: For technologies that don’t yet exist commercially — such as large electric and hydrogen passenger planes — Delta is going to use the lab to facilitate partnerships with both established companies (such as the manufacturer Airbus) and startups (like the electric plane firm, Joby) to accelerate the development and scale novel tech solutions.

The importance: Decarbonising aviation by using low-carbon tech requires: investment, resources and bringing the right people together — Delta airlines are trying to do all 3 with its skies lab.

Grosvenor Property sending suppliers to school the key to Scope 3?

Challenge: Scope 3 includes all indirect emissions in a company’s value chain, both upstream from suppliers and downstream in using products and services. Large organisations looking to reduce Scope 3 rely on their supplier base to decarbonise (Or by shifting to greener suppliers)

Left behind: For small and medium-sized suppliers, efforts to upskill and report on decarbonisation can be a costly endeavour.

No one left behind: London-based property developer Grosvenor established a free eight-month mentorship programme for its suppliers - 27 of which are now set to have their decarb targets verified by the SBTi.

What we love: An inclusive stance to supply chain decarbonisation sending ripples of positive climate impact through the value chain.

Lula sworn in as Brazilian President, promising stronger climate and forest programmes

He was sworn in this week and immediately issued six decrees revoking measures introduced by his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro that have made deforestation easier. One of the decrees annuls permission for mining in Indigenous lands and other protected areas. Another decree reinstates the Amazon Fund – a finance pot provided to Brazil by wealthier nations to finance forest conservation, management and restoration. Norway swiftly confirmed plans to reinstate its contributions to the Fund.

🤖 Future of Tech (1-minute read)

Sweet success: approval for world's first vaccine for honeybees

The situ: Honeybees are essential to U.S. agriculture, especially as pollinators for crops such as almonds, apples and cranberries, estimated to be worth $15bn in added crop value.

The problem: A disease called American foulbrood disease is ravaging honeybees in the U.S. — the only current treatment method requires burning the colony of infected bees. In 2019, 50bn bees (7x the world’s human population) were reportedly wiped out partly due to the disease.

Sweet success: US Department for Agriculture (USDA) has approved the use of a vaccine that will help protect honey bees from foulbrood disease. The vaccine works by introducing an inactive disease into the royal jelly fed to the queen bee, whose larvae gain immunity.

The hottest new thing in sustainable buildings is wood; Zanzibar plans the world's tallest mass timber building

Challenge: Some 11% of annual global greenhouse gas emissions are ‘embodied carbon’ from buildings, according to the World Green Building Council.

Solution: Replacing materials such as steel and concrete with timber is proving to be a popular option for cutting these emissions — analysis shows that wood-framed structures emit 14% less energy during their life. The world’s tallest mass timber tower (25 stories & 284 feet) opened in Milwaukee in 2022. Now, a new development in Zanzibar is aiming to beat its record.

Details: Zanzibar’s government plans to build a 28-storey tower with a height of almost 315 feet. The Burj Zanzibar will be the tallest residential building in a planned eco-neighbourhood.

💡 Start-Up Spotlight(1-minute read)

KoBold Metals

One-Liner: Finding the materials of the future critical for the electric vehicle and renewable energy revolutions with AI

Problem Statement: EV batteries require cobalt, nickel, copper, and lithium – we’ll need all of the world’s reserves of these metals plus another $12 trillion of new sources to ensure we can meet demand. However, more than 99% of exploration projects fail to become mines, and the industry now spends 3x more to make 60% fewer discoveries compared to 30 years ago.

How it works: The company uses artificial intelligence, geochemical, geophysical, and geological data to create technology that can locate cobalt. The product uses machine learning algorithms and acts like Google Maps but for identifying minerals. KoBold Metals has purchased land in North America based on the predictions given by the product

Revenue source: Has positions in over 30 projects across three continents, profits by owning all or a portion of the mineral resources discovered. For example, the recent stake in Zambia Copper mine

Potential Impact: At the base of many mineral supply chains are a host of unsustainable and unethical practices, including child labour, low wages and unsafe conditions. By increasing the diversity of supply of these resources across geographies, there is the potential to offer battery manufacturers sustainable, ethical choices in material sourcing and bring greater scrutiny to mines where that currently isn’t the case.

Founders: Josh Goldman, Ph.D (McKinsey, Harvard, Imperial); Kurt House, Ph.D (MIT, Harvard); Jeff Jurinak, Ph.D.

Latest Funding Round: Series B - Feb 2022 - $192.5Mn

Partnerships include: Exploration Alliances with Rio Tinto and BHP; Earn-in agreements with exploration companies; Joint ventures with mine operators to further explore existing mine licences

💭 Little Bytes

Quote:  “[This latest breakthrough] will not contribute meaningfully to climate abatement in the next 20-30 years.” Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at the Imperial College in London, on the prospect of commercial nuclear fusion power plants

Stat: EVs accounted for one-third of all UK car sales in December — SMMT

Watch: Seawater tomatoes with 0 emissions

🗞 In other news…

• UK Environment Agency workers to strike for the first time

• A group of investors with more than $2trn in assets under management has called on mining giant Glencore to showcase how its ongoing development of thermal coal is in alignment with its net-zero strategy for 2050

• The G7 countries and the EU have offered Vietnam a $15.5bn financial package to accelerate the south-east Asian nation’s shift from coal to renewable energy.

• Amazon’s Alexa will soon help EV drivers find a charger

Written by Colin and Ollie - Drop us a message!