by Tim Thonhauser-Röhrich

Whether 2020 left you feeling optimistic or pessimistic overall, one thing we can all agree on is that the last year of turbulence has set us up for a burst of innovation going forward.

While there are many angles climate change can be tackled from, we have chosen 4 key areas in this newsletter, which we are excited to see some big steps forward in, in 2021.

Green Hydrogen

Green Hydrogen technology uses electricity produced by renewable energy to extract hydrogen from water molecules and use it as fuel and it could be a key to a carbon-free economy.

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by Felix Staeritz

2020 has certainly been a year we will never forget.

Whilst we have still not overcome all the challenges Covid-19 has thrown at us, there are many reasons to be positive and many things to be grateful for as we move into the new year.

Boris Marte, Head of Erste Innovation Hub and Fightback Book Contributor, recently told us that ‘2020 triggered our imagination about what is possible’. In this newsletter, we will show you just some of these examples.

First, take air travel as one example. Daily air traffic was down by up to 75%, Lufthansa…

by Nele Stahlmann

Every morning I check my corona app to see if I’ve unwittingly been exposed to someone with Covid-19. Relying on the app is an imperfect system –participation is voluntary, those who test positive must enter that information themselves, and for a long time, the app was not working properly on many phones.
But my national corona app is the first line of defence and helps users break the chain of infection. As winter descends on the Northern Hemisphere, infection rates are skyrocketing.

by Nora Tomac

When Covid-19 hit, imports of fresh fruit and vegetables to the UAE plummeted. For a country highly reliant on agricultural imports, this meant its people had to do without.

Even before the pandemic, the old system of agriculture was failing: traditional farming accounts for a whopping 26% of global greenhouse gas emissions, arable land is shrinking, and the industry is a major driver of deforestation.

Those are just some of the reasons entrepreneurs are exploring vertical farming — a method of farming food indoors that uses up to 95% less water and 99% less land. Companies like…

by Tim Thonhauser-Röhrich

It’s been an intense week. Three days after the US pulled out of the Paris Agreement, the world learned that America had elected Joe Biden, a leader who sees climate change not just as a challenge, but as an economic opportunity. He’s not the only world leader who sees tackling climate change as an economic necessity: Chancellor Merkel does too.

But change cannot come from policymakers alone. It must come from entrepreneurs too.

Last year, a record $270 billion was made in investments for wind and solar. That’s not nearly enough. To keep global average temperatures from…

by Jonas Fehling

It’s been a big week — from the U.S. elections to rising Covid-19 cases, it can be easy to overlook developments that are transforming our future.

In cities across the world, it’s becoming easier than ever to go car-free. In Paris, major streets have transformed into bike highways while in Barcelona, the city has created car-free superblocks to create social cohesion.

As cities become friendlier to people, they are becoming less attractive for car owners. Innovative companies are making it easier for us to ditch our cars altogether.

As a car-less student in Münster, I was an…

by Tim Thonhauser-Röhrich

Have you worked out lately?

Fighting climate change is a lot like going to the gym. At first, you’re motivated by the data. With your health, you’ve stepped on the scale. With the climate, maybe you’ve watched Johan Rockström’s excellent seven-minute video, 10 years to transform the future of humanity. You feel the urgency to make a change. You join the gym — both the physical one and the climate gym, like LFCA.

But then, despite your valiant efforts, the scale doesn’t budge. You turn on the news and hear one depressing story after another about the…

by Benjamin Snow

In last week’s newsletter, we focused on German leadership in health tech, with smart policy spurring smart innovation. This week we see the flip side — VW failing to meet European CO2 emission reduction targets.

This is not a problem of the car industry in general — it’s VW’s problem. Peugeot, Citroën, Tesla, and BMW Group are all well on target to reduce their CO2 emissions. And consumers are demanding it, too. The share of electric cars on the road in Europe skyrocketed from 3% to 10% this year. …