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Global climate institutions have embraced the primacy of capital, private firms, and markets—and in so doing have fatally undermined their own efficacy.
No, it’s not the first time a national magazine has sent a writer thousands of miles to write a cover-the-waterfront story about the largest state in the U.S. But with California more of a symbol than a state, Joe Hagan manages to coax a few sharp edges out of the well-worn trope, combining marquee politicians with some surprising characters (comic Shang Yeng, Abbot Elementary writer Brittani Nichols, a firearm instructor to the stars) to help compensate for the most eye-roll-inducing dinner party ever committed to print. A commendable piece of macro reporting that’s sure to infuriate everyone.
Octavia E. Butler was asked, seven years after the publication of her uncannily predictive 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, whether her visions of an environmentally ravaged Los Angeles, circa 2024, where the elite barricade themselves in walled fortresses surrounded by poverty-stricken encampments of drug addicts and illiterate poor, was something she really believed would happen.
“I didn’t make up the problems,” replied the writer, who grew up in Pasadena. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”
Relying on the private sector to decarbonize is a recipe for abandoning workers.
Ecological crisis, rural deindustrialization, and real estate speculation have created conditions in which the far right thrives.
Big trees, old trees, and especially big old trees have always been objects of reverence. From Athena’s sacred olive on the Acropolis to the unmistakable ginkgo leaf prevalent in Japanese art and fashion during the Edo period, our profound admiration for slow plants spans time and place as well as cultures and religions. At the same time, the utilization and indeed the desecration of ancient trees is a common feature of history. In the modern period, the American West, more than any other region, witnessed contradictory efforts to destroy and protect ancient conifers. Historian Jared Farmer reflects on our long-term relationships with long-lived trees, and considers the future of oldness on a rapidly changing planet.
In the Netherlands, central heating boilers will be banned by 2026 and its government has incentivized the installation of heat pumps. Meanwhile, the U.K. government estimates that heating buildings accounts for 25% of the U.K.’s greenhouse gas emissions. It passed the Energy Security Bill, and is aiming to install 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028. All of this opens up opportunities for companies advising on, fitting and maintaining heat pumps, which is what Netherlands-based HeatTransformers, does. It just a raised €15 million Series A to go heavy on the (proverbial) gas.
“Heat pumps have an unbeatable CO2 reduction ratio per invested dollars for households,” says Stijn Otten, co-founder and director of HeatTransformers, “This ratio is much higher than with solar for instance. This was already the case back in 2018 when we started, but even more today.”
While heat pumps might not be new technology, the tech isn’t evenly distributed. More than 60% of homes in Norway are heated using heat pumps, for example, while the U.S. sees fewer than 6% so equipped. HeatTransformers seeks to address the traditional challenges of heat pump adoption by connecting heat pump producers and installation specialists with consumers. The HeatTransformers platform takes consumers through the process from the beginning, when they might only be thinking about the benefits of a heat pump, through installation and beyond, with maintenance, online monitoring and the optimization of heat pumps.
This is a model that has attracted global energy companies, heat pump producers and installers as committed partners, including Engie, Bosch, BDR Thermea Group and dozens of local and national installers. Its €15 million Series A funding round was led by Energy Impact Partners (“EIP”), a global investment firm supporting the transition to a sustainable future, with participation from existing investors Fair Capital Partners and InnovationQuarter.
Interestingly, HeatTransformers told TechCrunch that it could have done without the investment but felt that it needed to scale faster in order to address the general state of the global energy market: war in Ukraine, energy poverty and carbon emissions’ climate impact.
“In this process we were looking for truly professional investors who could help us scaling up across multiple markets,” says Otten. “But at the same time, we also wanted investors who share the same impact fundamentals we have. This is what we found in Energy Impact Partners — a leading investment firm in this space with experience scaling companies like us across multiple markets.”
With heat pump sales having risen by almost 38% across Europe last year, which replaced roughly 4 billion cubic meters of natural gas and avoided 8 million tons of CO2 emissions, HeatTransformers has recognized that right now is the time to be expanding, to meet the growing need for heat pumps not just in the Netherlands, but across Europe.
“This investment will cement our market-leading position in the Netherlands, it will enable us to grow into other markets like Germany and the U.K.,” says Otten. “Fundamentally, it will help us grow and increase our impact.”
For Otten himself, the excitement lies in growing his company and, further into the future, having a lasting impact on global residential heating, as well as climate change.
“I am specifically looking forward to building the teams, further developing the tech-platform and building our partnerships with suppliers, energy companies and installation companies across Europe,” says Otten. “In 10 years’ time, heat pumps will be the common way of heating your home across the entire globe. HeatTransformers will have played a pivotal role in speeding up this transition and [will still be] playing a role in the installation of heat pumps and optimizing the energy systems of households across multiple countries.”
HeatTransformers turns up the dial on heat pumps with new funding by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Cows are a significant source of methane emissions, primarily due to their unique digestive system. Milk and beef cows are ruminants, which means they have a specialized stomach chamber (called the rumen), which houses billions of microbes that facilitate the breakdown of fibrous plant material. The process is called “enteric fermentation,” and as these microbes work to digest the cellulose found in the cows’ diet, methane is produced as a byproduct. That’s a problem: The EPA identifies methane as being about 25 times more potent as CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Alga Biosciences leaps to the rescue, creating a new feed for cows that dramatically reduces how much burping goes on.
“Enteric methanogenesis, also known as cattle burps — is the single biggest source of anthropogenic methane emissions in the world. During the digestive process of cows, sheep, goats and other ruminants, microbes in the stomach of these animals break down food into smaller components, such as carbohydrates, proteins and fats. As a byproduct of this process, methane is produced and released into the atmosphere when the animal belches,” explains Alex Brown, co-founder/CEO of Alga Biosciences in an interview with TechCrunch. “When we got into Y Combinator, we put all of our money at the time into academic live animal trials to test our product, and found that methane emissions from beef cattle were undetectable with our approach. This is the first time results of this magnitude have been observed in live animals.”
Reducing belching has a side effect beyond just the environment. Methane is full of energy, and Alga claims that roughly 12% of all the calories a cattleman feeds his cow end up being wasted in the form of methane burps. This is a massive hidden cost for farmers, and it poses a huge opportunity for re-directing those calories to meat and milk production. The theory goes that kelp-based feed additives provide a direct avenue to reduce anthropogenic methane emissions; it could also be a massive economic benefit for farmers.
The company raised a round led by Collaborative Fund, and the company now has raised a total of $4 million in funding. In addition to Collaborative, Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, Cool Climate Collective, Pioneer Fund, Overview Capital and others also participated. The company has also received a grant from USDA Climate Smart Commodities.
Caroline McKeon (co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer), Daria Balatsky (co-founder and Chief Technology Officer), Alex Brown (co-founder and CEO). Image credit: Alga.
“The best climate tech startups will build solutions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions while being cheap, scalable and safe. We are thrilled that cattle farmers, like us, believe that Alga’s solution hits that trifecta,” said Tomas Alvarez Belon, investor at Collaborative Fund. “We are thrilled to support Alga Bio in this journey to create a methane-free world.”
The company is working on producing its feed additive for larger commercial pilots, and the company tells TechCrunch it can already produce at a scale of tens of thousands of head per day. There’s plenty of scale for growth; some sources estimate that there are around 1.5 billion cows in the world.
Alga Biosciences wants to help climate change, one bovine burp at a time by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
For the last two years, climate tech was on a tear. To be fair, so were a lot of other sectors. But when a slowdown hit tech investing in the middle of last year, climate tech startups bucked the trend and kept racking up the deals.
Now the party might be over, if preliminary data from a new report holds up.
Climate tech deal-making in the first quarter registered $5.7 billion across 279 deals, according to a new PitchBook report. The amount raised was down 36% year over year with 35% fewer deals. That’s certainly suggestive of a correction.
Investors have been keeping a closer eye on their pocketbooks as fears of a recession continue to rumble through the markets. And yet key economic indicators show a striking resilience in the U.S. economy, with strong hiring keeping unemployment low while consumer sentiment remains high. That hasn’t stopped economists and big names on Wall Street from continuing to predict a recession in the coming months. (Certainly not the first time they’ve done that.)
Still, all that noise tends to give investors the jitters. Since no one wants to be left holding the bag, investor sentiment has a way of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you’re a startup squeezed for cash, you’ve undoubtedly heard from your investors, and it may feel like a recession is already here.
Yet climate tech’s resilience has led some to call it the ultimate “recession proof” investment. Is that still true?
Maybe.
Let’s break it down. For one, these are preliminary figures looking at data through March 31. It’s hard to say how many deals closed in the last few days of the quarter that weren’t picked up by this report. It might be billions!
Climate tech tapped the brakes in Q1. Will the slowdown continue? by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
Africa contributes less than 3% of the world’s energy-related carbon dioxide emissions but the continent will be one of the most impacted by the adverse effects of climate change. Some explanations for Africa’s vulnerability include poor diffusion of technologies and information relevant to supporting adaptation, usually provided by clean or climate tech companies.
Despite the precise role that technologies such as renewable energy, recycling and green transportation play in improving the world’s environmental footprint, raising venture capital has proved chiefly hard for the companies behind them in years past. However, investor appetite has been enhanced in recent times. In 2021, climate tech startups raised over $60 billion, about 14% of VC dollars raised that year; in Africa, clean tech accounted for 15% to 18% (about $863 million) of the total funding that venture capitalists poured into the region last year in companies such as Sun King, making clean tech second only to fintech.
Development finance institutions (DFIs), including the British International Investment (BII), FMO and Norfund, are active investors in the clean tech space, as are clean tech–focused funds such as All On, Ambo Ventures and Catalyst Fund. In the latest development, Equator, a climate tech venture capital firm focused on sub-Saharan Africa, has reached an initial close of its first fund with $40 million in commitments. Its limited partners include BII, the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP), the Shell Foundation and impact investor DOEN Participaties, according to the company’s statement.
Equator backs seed and Series A startups across energy, agriculture and mobility sectors. On a call with TechCrunch, managing partner Nijhad Jamal said the firm is interested in these sectors because of numerous untapped market opportunities. He also noted that deploying capital at seed and Series A stages allow Equator to act as a bridge between startups’ earliest checks (at the pre-seed stage) and growth capital, which could come from its limited partners.
“The challenge for many of those larger funds and international investors is that they tend to come in when things have already been de-risked and proven out. At the seed and Series A stage, there is a shortage of capital and institutional investors supporting companies at that stage of their life cycle and journey,” commented Jamal. “The hope is that by investing at these stages, we can mobilize capital at Series B and growth equity stages from large regional funds, global climate tech funds, and corporations excited about the sector and region.”
Jamal, before joining Equator, had several stints with asset manager BlackRock and impact investment Acumen Fund, where he managed the firm’s clean tech group. At Moja Capital, a personal fund he founded, Jamal made seed and Series A investments across several sectors, including those central to Equator’s strategy: clean energy, agriculture and mobility. SunCulture, a Kenya-based off-grid solar tech for smallholder farmers, was one of Jamal’s investments. Equator made a follow-on investment in SunCulture and other startups backed by the firm’s operators, including Morgan DeFoort, partner at Equator and founder of Factor[e] Ventures; Apollo Agriculture; Odyssey Energy Solutions; and Roam.
L-R: Nijhad Jamal and Morgan DeFoort. Image Credits: Equator
According to Jamal, Equator wants to back tech-enabled ventures that bring some element of technology, whether hardware or software or business model innovation, to bear in a region where innovation might be lacking. As such, the fund will pay attention to technical founders with domain expertise who are building solutions around clean energy, agriculture and mobility, and who ultimately address the impact of climate change on income inequality in Africa.
“Climate change and income inequality are proven to be directly correlated. Data shows that the gap between the economic output of the world’s richest and poorest countries is 25% larger today than it would have been without global warming,” Jamal remarked. “So climate change has worsened global income inequality and we’re seeing that very acutely in sub-Saharan Africa. And the ventures and innovation that we’re investing in is a material component to addressing some of these challenges.”
Equator, hoping to make up to 15 investments throughout this fund’s life cycle, says it participates in round sizes of $10 million or less, which is typical for pre-Series B clean tech startups in sub-Saharan Africa. For seed stages, the clean tech VC invests between $1 million and $2 million; for Series A stages, it cut checks between $2 million and $4 million. The firm, which has teams in Nairobi, Lagos, London and Colorado, will also leverage support from Factor[e] Ventures, an organization of venture builders and pre-seed investors. While both companies operate independently, Equator and Factor[e] collaborate on sourcing deals and undertaking due diligence, and they share a post-investment support platform to provide value to portfolio companies as they scale.
“The reality is that capital alone is only part of the problem. Ventures also need highly active and engaged investors to help them reach the growth stage of their trajectory,” added DeFoort.
In all, Equator will be expecting to leverage the current shift in the global narrative about climate tech’s importance and its impact on climate change. The investments coming into the sector, despite lagging fintech by a mile, are progressively being funneled into reducing the cost of technologies such as solar systems and batteries while enabling better access for individuals and businesses with pay-as-you-go models. Jamal says these trends could make the sector more investable and, in many ways, more exciting. “We’re optimistic about the role that we have to play in this ecosystem. I hope this is the first of many funds that continue to follow in these footsteps because more capital, talent and innovation are needed to develop more holistic solutions to the challenges in the climate space.”
Equator secures $40M in commitments for fund targeting climate tech startups in Africa by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch
The materials developer formerly known as ELeather has a new name and $18 million in fresh growth funding from some of the world’s fanciest brands.
Now going by Generation Phoenix, the upcycler says its new investors include Coach parent Tapestry, Jaguar Land Rover (via InMotion Ventures) and Dr. Martens, plus lead investor Material Impact and prior investor Hermès.
The 15-year-old firm is based in Peterborough, U.K., and has worked with brands such as Nike and Delta. The upcycler intends to use the new cash to expand “into the luxury fashion and footwear categories,” Gen Phoenix said in a statement. The company claims it has diverted more than 8,000 tons of leather waste from landfills to date.
“Imagine what can happen when waste is no longer wasted,” Gen Phoenix says in an aspirational message on its new website. The upcycler tells TechCrunch that its “feedstock comes directly from tanneries where about 1/3 of a leather hide is typically discarded.” Turning the leather waste into a usable, leather-like product involves shredding and “entangling” it “around a high-performance core using nothing but high pressure water,” the firm said.
Gen Phoenix’s “recycled leather” is not entirely made of recycled materials. A spokesperson for the company tells TechCrunch that its products feature “up to 86% recycled content,” including recycled leather and recycled plastic. Still, the firm’s final product also contains virgin plastic.
Gen Phoenix founder and CEO John Kennedy explaining the company’s leather-like product. Image Credits: Gen Phoenix
Without sharing a specific deadline, a spokesperson for Gen Phoenix said the company aims to “reduce and eliminate virgin materials from their products completely.”
The upcycler is also “commercialising a bio-based coating system and bio-based substitutions for any synthetic materials used in the process,” the spokesperson added. Hopefully, we’ll soon see Gen Phoenix kick virgin materials altogether.
Zooming out: Gen Phoenix’s inclusion of plastics is hardly unusual, even for “sustainable” brands. Fossil fuel–based materials permeate the fashion business. Polyester? Nylon? Elastane? All plastic.
Even the rise of recycled plastic fabrics warrants deep skepticism; the resulting synthetic clothing is rarely recycled, and the microplastics they shed go basically everywhere, including the ocean, mountaintops, the insides of sea critters and even our own bodies. Addressing the industry’s climate and broader environmental toll demands rethinking everything, from how we dye fabrics to killing “fast fashion” altogether.
Gen Phoenix’s upcycled leather woos luxury brand investors by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch
Here’s a clever new bit of kitchen tech. Victoria, BC firm Sepura recently introduced its eponymous home appliance, which sits under a sink in place of a garbage disposal. There’s an included Bluetooth button, which can be stuck anywhere near the sink. The system itself sits underneath the sink and is designed to hook directly into the drainage.
When enough foodstuffs have accrued beneath the drain, tap the button, and it will initiate a process that effectively shoves the waste products into the appliance. In an introductory video, co-founder and CEO Victor Nicolov is quick to note that the system doesn’t actually grind the food waste, unlike a traditional garbage disposal. “We found it was better to keep things [intact]. We found it was better for our planet to avoid crushing things into our drains.”
The system also has a safeguard to stop water from entering the receptacle, allowing it to drain out of the pipe first. It will also stop if it detects something like a utensil, which you don’t want in the composting bucket.
Today, the firm announced the close of a $3.7 million seed round designed to accelerate production and delivery of its product, which will run $700 when it starts shipping in July. The round was led, appropriately, by sink-maker Blanco.
Image Credits: Sepura Home
“Sepura represents a significant step forward in sustainable living. With its advanced technology and user-friendly design, Sepura offers a simple and effective way to minimize waste and promote a cleaner, healthier environment,” Nicolov says in a release. “We are excited to bring consumers the sustainable solution they are seeking and work to improve how food waste impacts the environment moving forward.”
The company claims that its system can “effectively separate 99.9% of solid waste that goes down the drain.”
Sepura Home raises $3.7 million to make your kitchen sink a composter by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
Battery materials and recycling startup Redwood Materials is expanding a partnership with Volkswagen of America in its bid to collect more end-of-life batteries from consumer electronics and strip out the valuable materials so they can be used to make batteries for electric vehicles.
Redwood has said its technology can recover more than 95% of the critical minerals from batteries (like nickel, cobalt, lithium and copper) and then manufacture the metals into battery components that are supplied to U.S. battery manufacturers for new electric vehicles and energy storage products. Co-founder and CEO JB Straubel, who was formerly the co-founder and CTO at Tesla, has long argued that creating a closed-loop system will reduce battery costs and the need to mine and ship raw materials.
Volkswagen of America and sibling brand Audi contracted with Redwood last year to recover and recycle end-of-life EV battery packs from its thousand-dealership network in the United States. Audi then expanded its partnership with Redwood to launch a consumer-focused recycling program.
Now Volkswagen of America has agreed to set up bins at certain dealerships to collect consumer electronics. The batteries and devices, including cell phones, cordless power tools, electric toothbrushes, wireless headphones and other lithium-ion-powered devices that are collected in the bins, will be sent to Redwood’s Nevada facility to be repurposed as EV batteries.
The consumer recycling program officially launches at 14 dealerships April 22, including locations in New Jersey and Wisconsin. Volkswagen will also set up a bin during the New York International Auto Show, which will be held from April 5 to April 16. Additional dealerships will be added throughout the year.
Redwood has largely been a B2B enterprise since its founding. The company has locked in deals with companies like Panasonic to recycle and process the scrap to recycle scrap from battery cell production. In early 2021, Redwood quietly opened a recycling program to everyday consumers and all of the old electronics sitting in their junk drawers. Redwood posted a “recycle with us” tab on its website, along with an address, where consumers can send their e-waste, and a “contact us” button.
The program has collected tens of thousands of pounds of electronics from consumers, according to Redwood.
VW and Redwood want to turn your old laptops into EV batteries by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch
A warming world is going to need a lot of cold drinks. Problem is, today’s refrigeration tech is anything but climate friendly.
The way we cool our food and drinks has barely changed in a century and the technology is still reliant on environmentally harmful refrigerants. Now, a German startup thinks it can freeze those refrigerants out of the market using little more than magnets and water while consuming up to 40% less energy.
Magnotherm has been refining its technology, known as magnetocaloric refrigeration, since it was spun out of TU Darmstadt in 2019. Though it’s only a seed-stage company, the startup has already shipped five display coolers to beverage giant Coca-Cola, TechCrunch+ has learned, and it’s on track to build another 55 that will be rented out for events.
But beverage coolers are just the tech demo: “We are really building a bigger box for supermarket cooling cabinets,” co-CEO Timur Sirman said. “This is where we can actually reduce energy costs and maintenance costs significantly.” The global market for commercial refrigeration is worth $37 billion, according to Grand View Research.
To capitalize on the opportunity, Magnotherm is announcing a seed round today. In an exclusive with TechCrunch+, Sirman said the company was shooting for €5 million, “and now, we’re actually oversubscribed.” Investor interest was so great that they’re closing the round with €6.3 million.
Extantia Capital led the round, with Hessen Kapital, Lauda Dr. R. WOBSER Beteiligungs-GmbH and Revent joining. Four investors from the Better Ventures Angel Club also participated.
The technology Magnotherm hopes to dethrone is broadly used and deeply entrenched. It’s not as efficient as it could be, but more troubling are the substances it uses to keep things cool. The refrigerator sitting in your kitchen gets its chill from the physical properties of its refrigerants, the gases that loop through the cooling system.
None of these refrigerants come without tradeoffs. First generation refrigerants — freon and its ilk — chewed a hole in the ozone layer. Newer ones are more ozone-friendly, but they are powerful greenhouse gases, warming the Earth hundreds to thousands of times more than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.
Countries are working to phase out their use, but finding replacements hasn’t been easy. One frontrunner, propane, is flammable, and regulators have hesitated to greenlight its use in larger refrigerators in case of leaks. Carbon dioxide is another contender, but it only works as a refrigerant under very high pressures, which makes the whole system more expensive.
Magnets and water net Magnotherm $6.9M seed round to kill hazardous refrigerants by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
Every January, government officials, urban dwellers, and rural families across the state of Ceará, Northeast Brazil anxiously await the rainy season forecasts from Funceme, the Research Institute for Meteorology and Water Resources of Ceará. Yet throughout the state, many also proclaim that Funceme’s forecasts are “wrong,” that the forecasts do not work.
Dona Maria, who lives in a rural community in the municipality of Piquet Carneiro, explained it this way: “The problem with Funceme is this: sometimes it doesn’t work. Here, if I have a… how do you say… a forecast from Funceme, it can work in another municipality. Here it doesn’t work. Funceme predicts rain, for example. But then it rains there. In Juazeiro do Norte, it rains. It doesn’t rain here in Piquet Carneiro. It rains there in Barbalha and Várzea Alegre. And here it doesn’t even drizzle, you know? And that’s why I don’t give it a lot of importance. Do you understand?” (Dona Maria, personal communication, March 7, 2022).[1]
But what does it mean that a forecast is wrong?
Indicating more general rainfall patterns, Funceme’s seasonal forecasts consist of a distribution of probabilities of rainfall below, at, or above the mean for a large geographic region. Because a forecast is a distribution of probabilities, technically, a forecast cannot be “wrong,” though its performance may be evaluated over a period of years. Models may indicate that there is a greater chance of rainfall above average, but lower rainfall levels are still possible. At the same time, forecasts are not made at the household or community-level but rather at the regional level, where a region may be a state or larger geographic area. However, for agricultural families in the sertão, or hinterlands, of Ceará, a forecast is wrong when it rains less (or more) in their community or municipality than what was “promised” by the forecast, and the highest probability becomes deterministic at a very fine scale. That is why for Dona Maria, Funceme’s forecasts work in some areas but not in others.
In this post, I explore the evolution of Funceme and its seasonal forecasting in Ceará, where drought is integral to the collective socioecological memory (Alburque Jr. 1994, 2004; Seigerman et al. 2021). The majority of Ceará forms part of the Brazilian semi-arid region, characterized by distinct rainy and dry seasons, low rainfall levels, and high evaporation rates (de Souza Filho 2018). The droughts of 1877–1879, 1915, 1931, 1973, 1983, 1993, and 1998 evoke memories of unequal suffering in the Cearense sertão, as well as the implementation of large-scale infrastructure solutions in response to drought. The most recent drought (2012 to 2018) is considered the worst drought in Ceará’s history (Marengo, Torres, and Alves 2017).[2] While mortality and migration due to drought have declined dramatically in recent decades, in part due to government conditional cash transfer programs (Nelson and Finan 2009), “crises of collective anxiety about the rainy season” occur frequently and are often provoked by the communication of climatic information (Taddei 2008, 79).[3]
In 1987, Ceará restructured the Secretariat of Water Resources (SRH), and Funceme went from the Foundation of Meteorology and Artificial Rain of Ceará to the Research Institute for Meteorology and Water Resources of Ceará.[4] This name change, fifteen years after Funceme was founded, signified a transition from Funceme as an institution focused on experimental artificial rain production to one whose focus was “water in a general sense” (F. L. Viana, personal communication, August 19, 2022).[5] It has evolved as an innovative institution that advances forecasting modeling, basic environmental studies, and research on sociohydrologic dynamics. These advancements are not linear but rather have been achieved through efforts of Funceme’s most recent presidents, who were tasked to justify Funceme’s role as a research institute after the president from 1995 to 2001 almost dissolved Funceme with his business-like model for the research institute (E. S. P. R. Martins, personal communication, October 25, 2022). Today, government and non-government institutions, from regional to international levels, applaud Funceme. However, Funceme’s innovative character is often overshadowed in rural Ceará by the worry surrounding rainy season predictions.[6]
Since the 1970s, hydrologists have made significant progress in understanding the systems that shape the rainy season in Northeast Brazil, including the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), a coupled atmosphere-hydrosphere system in the Atlantic (Hastenrath and Heller 1977, Hastenrath and Greischar 1993).[7] Yet, only in the past couple of decades have researchers at Funceme and around the world developed models to make quantitative forecasts. In its early forecasting years, Funceme employed a climate monitor that used qualitative indicators, including Atlantic and Pacific Ocean conditions, global circulation patterns, and regional studies, to visualize three scenarios without indicating probabilities: rainfall below, at, and above the historic mean (personal communication, F. L. Viana, August 19, 2022). Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, forecasting methods advanced globally, with consensus forecasting as the norm.[8] Funceme has actively contributed to advancements, including the development of seasonal climate forecasts using dynamical downscaling in 1998-1999, the first operational forecast being launched in 2001 (personal communication. E. S. P. R. Martins, October 25, 2022). Dynamic downscaling, also called regionalization, resolves global-scale weather conditions at a finer scale to create more spatially detailed climate information.
Funceme broke conventions by adopting an objective forecast system in 2012 (personal communication. E. S. P. R. Martins, October 25, 2022). It gained independence in forecast production, running the ECHAM4.6 model (an atmospheric general circulation model) and adopting a thirty-year hindcast (1981 to 2010) for its ECHAM4.6 and RSM97 models. Sea surface temperatures were incorporated into the ECHAM4.6, and scenarios were run to better communicate forecast uncertainties. Concurrently, Funceme contributed to a national climate model superset, which helped Funceme establish itself as a national forecasting leader.[9] Today, Funceme uses probabilistic forecasting, which provides the probability that an event (rainfall) of a specific or range of magnitudes may occur in a specific region (the state of Ceará) in a particular time period (a trimester). However, despite forecast improvements, whether these innovations lead to better informed decisions is not clear. Decisions may depend not only on the forecast’s objectivity but also factors including users’ understanding of uncertainty in forecasts, personal or professional interests, and how available information is applied (Morss et al. 2008).
Salience, relevance, authority, and legitimacy are key to the uptake of forecast information by different actors (Taddei 2008). In part, Funceme establishes authority and legitimacy during forecast meetings using graphs that depict forecast model results. Data visualization is a discursive tool for social semiotics (Aiello 2020), as seemingly simple charts substantiate the presented rainfall probabilities. Model complexity, the immense quantity of atmospheric and other environmental data, and fluxes of ambient conditions are flattened into digestible nuggets for non-experts.
At this year’s forecast announcement, Funceme’s president, Dr. Eduardo Sávio P. R. Martins, used a pizza analogy to explain the anxiously awaited rainfall probabilities. As of January 20, the climate forecast indicated probabilities of 10:40:50 (10 percent below average, 40 percent around average, and 50 percent above average). Martins had the audience imagine these probabilities as portions of a pizza: cutting the pizza in half gives 50 percent of the pizza as above-average rainfall. The other half, divided into parts proportional to 40 and 10 percent, represents the other probabilities. Rotating the pizza, you can pick a slice from any of the three options. Rotating it again, you may get a slice from a different part of the pizza, that is, a different rainy season outcome. Martins also emphasized that the models suggested high spatial and temporal variability, addressing common misconceptions held by Dona Maria and others. Rainfall will probably not fall uniformly across Ceará or during the trimester.
Dr. Eduardo Sávio P. R. Martins, the president of Funceme, presents the seasonal forecast for Ceará for the months of February, March, and April on January 20, 2023. The presentation took place at the Governor’s Palace in Fortaleza, Ceará and was live-streamed by Funceme via Instagram.
Directing perceptions about probabilities during public presentations is one strategy Funceme uses to educate its interlocutors, especially the press. To that effect, Martins beseeched those who were to communicate the forecast to ensure they had these concepts correctly explained before publishing, “So that we [Funceme] don’t have a lot of work later on to, let’s say, redo presentations for other groups to clarify communication problems.”[10] While Funceme’s forecasts are shared via social media, including Instagram and WhatsApp, in addition to newspapers and the radio, there is no guarantee that their complete message reaches or changes perceptions of those living in the sertão.
As a publicly facing research institution, Funceme confronts compound challenges of innovating and communicating those innovations in understandable, useful, and usable ways. Throughout the year, Martins discusses the implications of forecasts and climate trends with different government actors. In mid-March, for example, Martins met with the governor of Ceará and the leaders of various government organs to determine flood-risk areas due to strong rains. Funceme’s forecasts also provide technical experts at the state water management company, Cogerh, a baseline to model water availability in the state’s reservoirs to support bulk-water allocation decision-making by river-basin committees, composed of representatives from civil society, industry, and the government (Lemos et al. 2020).
Funceme, a state institution, also faces the challenge of precarity every four years during the gubernatorial elections. Each election poses the possibility of the reconfiguration of the SRH and Funceme. For two decades, Funceme has experienced relative stability, in part a reflection of the technical competence by Martins, now in his seventeenth year as president. The future of Funceme will depend on its ability to adapt to new leadership, potential political influence, and new environment scenarios in the face of rapidly changing climates.
Thank you to Dr. Eduardo Sávio P. R. Martins for his insights, feedback, and collaboration in the development of this research. Also, thank you to Dr. Francisco Vasconcelos Junior and Kim Fernandes for their useful comments on drafts of this post.
[1] Original: “O problema da Funceme é o seguinte às vezes ele não funciona. Aqui, se eu tenho uma, como é que diz uma previsão da Funceme? Ela pode funcionar lá em outro outro município. Aqui não funciona. Ele prevê uma chuva, por exemplo. Mas aí chove. Lá em Juazeiro do Norte não chove aqui em Piquet Carneiro, chove lá em Barbalha e Várzea Alegre. E aqui nem pinga, né? Então é por isso que eu não dou muita importância, entendeu?”
[2] Individually, the rainy seasons of 2012 to 2018 are ranked better than the tenth most critical year in the history of systematic records, but the persistence of drought reveals a very different drought footprint. See for example:
Martins, Eduardo Sávio P. R., Magalhães, Antônio. R., and Diógenes Fontenele. 2017. “A seca plurianual de 2010-2017 no Nordeste e seus impactos.” Parcerias Estratégicas 22: 17-40.
Martins, Eduardo Sávio P. R. and Francisco de Chagas Vasconcelos Júnior. “O clima da Região Nordeste entre 2009 e 2017: Monitoramento e Previsão.” 2017. Parcerias Estratégicas 22: 63-80.
Escada, Paulo, Caio A. S. Coelho, Renzo Taddei, Suraje Dessai, Iracema F. A. Cavalcanti, Roberto Donato, Mary T. Kayano, et al. 2021. “Climate services in Brazil: Past, present, and future perspectives.” Climate Services 24: 100276.
[3] Original: “crises de ansiedade coletiva em relação à estação de chuvas”; See also: Taddei, Renzo. 2005. Of clouds and streams, prophets and profits: The political semiotics of climate and water in the Brazilian Northeast. Doctoral thesis. Columbia University.
[4] Fundação Cearense de Meteorologia e Chuvas Artificiais and the Fundação Cearense de Meteorologia e Recursos Hídricos, respectively.
[5] Original: “água no sentido geral”
[6] People in the sertão are also inundated with sometimes conflicting rainfall information from a variety of sources—from national agencies to private institutions. This poses a challenge for Funceme to maintain its legitimacy among rural community members, who link conflicting rainfall information from various sources with Funceme because the information is all about rain.
[7] Meteorological drought has been related to anomalies in the Atlantic system, which result in the ITCZ remaining anomalously far north (Hastenrath and Greischar 1993). Meteorological drought is defined as rainfall in the category below the mean. We can imagine having thirty years for which we put rainfall in order from lowest to highest and divide then in the ten years into three categories: The first ten years (below average), the last ten years (above average), and the ten years between these two category, which represent rainfall around the average. The El Niño-South Oscillation (ENSO) and the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) also influence climate patterns at varying temporal scales. See for example:
Kayano, Mary Toshie, and Vinicius Buscioli Capistrano. “How the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (Amo) Modifies the Enso Influence on the South American Rainfall.” International Journal of Climatology 34(1): 162-78.
Vasconcelos Junior, Francisco das Chagas, Charles Jones, and Adilson Wagner Gandu. 2018. “Interannual and Intraseasonal Variations of the Onset and Demise of the Pre-Wet Season and the Wet Season in the Northern Northeast Brazil.” Revista Brasileira de Meteorologia 33: 472-484.
[8] A significant level of subjectivity is added when a group of forecasters determine a single forecast through consensus. In this negotiation process, social and political pressures (e.g., the need to establish a forecast that appeases farmers or state agencies) may drive outcomes. Conversely, objective forecasts are produced directly from the selected models, without a negotiation process.
[9] The superset included a statistical model for Brazil (INMET) and four global atmospheric models (one from Funceme and three from the National Center for Weather Forecasting and Climate Studies). Other projects with sociotechnological significance, including the development of a national drought monitor, attest to the innovative and socially driven character of Funceme.
[10] Original: “[P]ara a gente depois não ter um trabalho muito grande de, digamos assim, de refazer apresentações em outros grupos para esclarecer problemas de comunicação.”
Aiello, Giorgia. 2020. “Inventorizing, situating, transforming: Social semiotics and data visualization.” In Data Visualization in Society, edited by Martin Engebretsen and Helen Kennedy, 49-62. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Albuquerque Jr, Durval Muniz de. 1994. “Palavras que calcinam, palavras que dominam: a invenção da seca do Nordeste.” Revista Brasileira de História 14 (28): 111-120. [pdf]
—. 2004. The invention of the Brazilian Northeast. Durham: Duke University Press.
de Souza Filho, Francisco. 2018. Projecto Ceará 2050. Fortaleza (Brazil).
Hastenrath, Stefan, and Leon Heller. 1977. “Dynamics of climatic hazards in northeast Brazil.” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 103 (435): 77-92.
Hastenrath, Stefan, and Lawrence Greischar. 1993. “Further Work on the Prediction of Northeast Brazil Rainfall Anomalies.” Journal of Climate 6 (4): 743-758.
Lemos, Maria Carmen, Bruno Peregrina Puga, Rosa Maria Formiga-Johnsson, and Cydney Kate Seigerman. 2020. “Building on adaptive capacity to extreme events in Brazil: water reform, participation, and climate information across four river basins.” Regional Environmental Change 20 (2): 53.
Marengo, Jose A., Roger Rodrigues Torres, and Lincoln Muniz Alves. 2017. “Drought in Northeast Brazil—past, present, and future.” Theoretical and Applied Climatology 129 (3): 1189-1200.
Morss, Rebecca E., Julie L. Demuth, and Jeffrey K. Lazo. 2008. “Communicating Uncertainty in Weather Forecasts: A Survey of the U.S. Public.” Weather and Forecasting 23 (5): 974-991
Nelson Donald, R., and J. Finan Timothy. 2009. “Praying for Drought: Persistent Vulnerability and the Politics of Patronage in Ceará, Northeast Brazil.” American Anthropologist 111 (3): 302-316.
Seigerman, Cydney K., Raul. L. P. Basílio, and Donald R. Nelson. 2021. “Secas entrelaçadas: uma abordagem integrativa para explorar a sobreposição parcial e as divisões volúveis entre definições, experiências e memórias da seca no Ceará, Brasil.” In Tempo e memória ambiental : etnografia da duração das paisagens citadinas, edited by Ana Luiza Carvalho da Rocha and Cornelia Eckert, 25-54. Brasília: ABA Publicações.
Taddei, Renzo. 2008. “A comunicação social de informações sobre tempo e clima: o ponto de vista do usuário.” Boletim SBMET: 76-86. [pdf]
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 will have a whole new look this fall with one aim in mind: bring together investors, founders and technologists who have specific industry interests — all under one roof at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Disrupt has always been big. But this year we’re folding TC Sessions, the standalone industry events that are traditionally held throughout the year, into the big annual tech event.
Disrupt will have six industry tracks, each with its own stage, including AI, fintech, hardware, SaaS, security and sustainability. Yup, sustainability, a category that will combine transportation, climate tech, smart cities and renewables.
What the heck is sustainable tech, anyway? In our experience, it’s a moving target. The term is arguably many things: aspirational, a misnomer, a buzzword and a catch-all for products and services that are less environmentally destructive than doing business as normal.
To us, the goal of sustainable tech is simply to do less harm to the planet (thus sustaining something close to life as we know it). Yet, how to achieve that goal — without resting on piecemeal tweaks and greenwashing — is a rich and messy topic worth probing.
That is what we aim to do on the Sustainability Stage — discuss material ways to mitigate the damage we’re doing, while interrogating bullshit and distractions along the way.
The stakes have never been higher. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said with the release of its sixth major assessment, “keeping warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels requires deep, rapid and sustained greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors.” The tech industry must do its part by drawing down scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, cleaning up its pollutive supply chains and accelerating the transition to renewables.
Disrupt in particular is all about startups. The specific areas we’re eager to dig into this year via panels and fireside chats include: fixing the broken U.S. power grid, examining how cities will adapt to more frequent extreme weather events, mitigating fast fashion’s environmental toll and rethinking some of the world’s most-loved beverages.
Book your early-bird pass today and save $800 to the startup event of the year. Prices go up May 12.
Sustainability at Disrupt by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch
Steering humanity out of the climate crisis demands action in a very literal way. Boots on the ground, people rolling up sleeves and getting hands dirty retrofitting existing infrastructure, such as poorly insulated houses, type stuff. The goal is to re-make our built environment to be energy efficient and drive down carbon emissions ASAP. So we really need lots and lots more skilled tradespeople — fast. Aka, the kind of multifaceted, hands-on skills that technologists haven’t figured out how to automate yet.
Fixing this problem absolutely, therefore, demands human beings. Lots and lots of people to come in, eager and willing to learn new stuff, and take up green retrofitting jobs. So it’s a job discovery problem. And a training/upskilling/reskilling problem. Which means digital technology can of course help. And this is where a U.K. edtech startup founded last year, called greenworkx, is angling to step in — with a new spot of supportive construction: A digital pathway designed to boost the flow of skilled workers into green jobs.
The London-based team, which has just closed a £600k pre-seed funding round, describes what’s it’s building as “the go-to talent portal for green jobs”. The app soft launched towards the start of the year, after the co-founders formally incorporated the startup in mid June last year. The early stage funding round was led by Mangrove Capital Partners, with participation from Ada Ventures, and a number of angel investors in the climate and edtech sectors, including the CEOs of Multiverse (Euan Blair), MyTutor (Bertie Hubbard) and Octopus Electric Vehicles (Fiona Howarth).
Commenting in a statement, Nikolas Krawinkel, partner at Mangrove, heralded the opportunity of the looming “green industrial revolution”, writing: “We’re on the cusp of a green industrial revolution, which will require a huge rethink of our education and training systems. The greenworkx team have a deep understanding of digital-first learning methodologies and we’re excited to work with them to take on this profoundly important challenge.”
“The urgent ramp-up needed in the green workforce is a unique opportunity to build a fairer, more equitable future by bringing millions into a rapidly-growing sector of huge social and environmental importance,” added Matt Penneycard, founding partner at Ada Ventures, in another supporting statement. “We’re incredibly excited about the double impact that greenworkx can have in empowering people to access well-paid, future-ready jobs, whilst simultaneously directly driving the net-zero revolution to address the climate crisis.”
The startup’s vision is to build a platform and digital tools to drive awareness and accelerate the uptake of green jobs, using techniques like bite-sized learning and algorithmic matching of jobseekers to connect them with relevant opportunities to help build and power up the green economy.
Co-founders Mat Ilic and Richard Ng bring backgrounds in public policy work and education and edtech to bear on this skills funnel challenge.
Ilic, the policy guy, says he was inspired to tackle the people side and the green jobs challenge as he was reading John Doerr’s book, Speed and Scale — which is literally subtitled an “action plan for solving our climate crisis now”. “It was the first time that net zero felt like a manageable problem,” he tells TechCrunch, saying the book helped him realize “how significant people are” — especially “the people we need to bring about the transition, not just people to make lifestyle changes” — and so the “loose idea was was born then and there”.
Ng, who started his career as a maths teacher before moving into edtech and, latterly, training software engineers at U.K. tech apprenticeship startup Multiverse, says he’d felt pretty settled in that career — until he got speaking to Ilic and also got the green jobs itch.
“He was explaining to me this problem that in order to reach Net Zero we need to deploy all this green infrastructure… and I remember being really shocked by this because I thought wow, this is obviously a huge problem, which is really high stakes, really time urgent, and yet when I think about skills and future work so often it’s purely about ‘oh we need to code’,” he says in a video call with TechCrunch, offering a tacit critique of the full-throttle focus on ‘learn to code’ of the past (many) years. (Code, after all, may well end up being automated by powerful technologies like generative AI — even as we’re still in desperate need of double glazers, plumbers, electricians etc etc.)
There are also of course plenty of people for whom learning to code is never going to be the right fit. And Ng says he realized there’s an unfolding opportunity for all sorts of workers to thrive in green jobs as demand for these more hands-on, people-facing skills keeps growing — as well as being excited by the chance to build out the kind of support for vocational training and learning that the U.K.’s traditional educational system has not been geared toward.
“We need people to work with data, that’s very necessary, and there’s a bunch of people working on that now. But I was like this is also super, super important and really, really underserved,” he says. “Coding, unfortunately, is phenomenally inaccessible for a bunch of people… [Whereas] these jobs… are really, really meaningful, they’re pretty well paid and they’re actually very accessible as well. And so, for me, it was also about making sure that as we think about this really important challenge Net Zero we’re also using that as an opportunity to make sure we have this bright future of work which is hopefully much more inclusive and accessible to the communities which I care a lot about.”
The scale of the retrofit challenge means the skills supply problem is vast indeed. Ilic cites a statistic suggesting at least 30 million roles will be needed globally by the end of the decade — and half a million in the U.K. alone, just for domestic energy retrofitting. (And the startup’s stated mission is to get 10 million people into green jobs over 10 years.)
While the challenge is global the U.K. certainly has some of the worst insulated homes in Europe, making that element a particularly acute local problem. Solutions can also be interdependent, too — since, for example, poorly insulated homes aren’t a good fit for low carbon heat pumps — which means tackling drafty buildings is really a prerequisite for speeding up the decarbonization of U.K. housing stock.
“We’re talking about half a million different professions and trades needed in already an existing skills shortage in construction — and that’s before we start talking about the other aspect of this, which is the existing workers who need to be reskilled in what’s basically the biggest reallocation of capital and the means of production since the Industrial Revolution,” says Ilic, adding: “And no one seems to be talking about it with the level of urgency and emergency and scale that is needed — and more fundamentally, we’re here because we believe it’s eminently solvable. And that’s what’s so practical about the way that we’re looking at this challenge.”
Some other startups are talking about it, of course. Denmark-based Lun, for example, recently bagged seed funding to build software tools to encourage more tradespeople to focus on installing heat pumps, instead of taking on less climate friendly jobs. While US-based BlocPower has already been beavering away for almost a decade with a residential retrofit-as-service platform focused on low-income communities. But it’s fair to say the scale of the change needed across our societies is so absolute — so root and branch — that it’ll need a tsunami of startups tackling as many bits and pieces as possible if we’re to drive the necessary system flip at the blistering pace now required to avoid even worse heating and weather extremes (not to mention the risk of runaway climate change).
Greenworkx’s app is soft launched at this stage — with a handful (around 40) of green skills seekers signed up to a (free) introductory retrofit course they’re offering.
Early users are more of a mix than the team’s expected target youth demographic (i.e. 16-24-year-old school and college leavers who did not follow the academic higher education route to university) — with Ng noting other profiles of interest include immigrants in their mid thirties to forties seeking a career switch into more stable work. Another early user he mentions was a former nurse — a women in her late fifties who could no longer continue working in a patient-facing role (owing to developing allergies) but who was looking for another job that allows her to keep serving her community and retrofitting social housing fit the bill for her. (“It’s a way to basically continue serving her community.”)
To locate their first users they’ve been partnering with organizations and charities that are focused on employability. But as they seek to scale up they plan to expand the pool of jobseekers via digital marketing on social media and tapping up the sorts of influencers who might resonant with key targets. They’re also planning a possible green jobs travelling roadshow to take their message of climate opportunity around the country in an electric bus.
The early product is still quite a manual experience, per the co-founders, as the team has been focused on understanding learner profiles and needs so they can better tailor the platform experience. But the goal is, ultimately, to automate the process of matching jobseekers to green skills opportunities to be able to scale the platform and its outputs.
“We’ve had our first proactive inbound from a small company this week looking for energy assessors and retrofit assessors,” notes Ilic. “So it’s been really interesting to see that. And in terms of where we focus attention on the job side, so really a lot of investment is going into decarbonizing social housing at the moment — housing associations, local authorities and smaller energy efficiency or construction companies are all looking for these sort of energy efficiency professionals or trades. So some of that is them reaching out to us some of it is us working with them. So we’re pretty confident that for this kind of batch of people that we’re taking through — both the understanding retrofit courses as well as some partnerships that are more focused on domestic energy assessment or retrofit advice — we should be able to get our first job outcomes and then explore how it goes from there.”
For larger energy companies and construction firms the first focus is likely to be on upskilling an existing workforce, rather than trying to hire scores of new workers. So the startup is thinking how it might best support those goals. They’re also still figuring out how much training content they might offer themselves — vs working with partners and/or employers to provide it. But the overarching goal is to find ways to support as many people as possible to think about a career switch, skills upgrade or first leap into green jobs.
“We’re a b2b proposition. And the ultimate goal is to create value by giving people the talent they couldn’t otherwise reach — so filling roles,” says Ilic. “But I think we’re exploring a range of different steps in between, including actually having that curriculum and training proposition to support reskilling existing workers, because if we’re building a high quality digital curriculum for connecting people to these jobs from a standing start, actually it’s also relevant for people that are learning about low carbon heating technologies in their current jobs. So both reskilling and recruitment are going to be part of our value proposition.”
“We are starting supply side. We want to build a tool that will matter so much to learners that they will obsess about,” he adds. “They would be prepared to pay for it even though we’d never want to charge them for it because we want to create a frictionless route for them to be able to access these roles. Because that’s partly in our collective interest — as I said, we’re looking at servicing the labour demand — but, yeah, we feel that the business side will become kind of apparent as things unfold; as you see the kind of exponential growth, say the consumer demand for solar among other things, so that’s what we’re planning.”
This report was updated to correct a citation by Ilic: The projection is for 30M retrofit jobs being needed globally before the end of the decade, not in the U.K. — there the projection is for half a million roles being required by 2030
UK’s greenworkx takes aim at the domestic retrofit skills challenge by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
In a major blow to shared micromobility companies Lime, Dott and Tier, Paris has voted to ban rental e-scooters from its streets. Many in the industry fear the move in Paris, where free-floating scooters initially took off in 2018, will have ripple effects in other cities.
Paris has been one of the most heavily regulated e-scooter markets, something companies have pointed to as an example of how they can play nice with cities. Yet, despite limiting scooter top speeds to as slow as 10 kilometers per hour (about 6 miles per hour) and requiring riders to use dedicated parking areas or pay fines, Paris has become the first city to completely reverse its policy on offering contracts to shared micromobility companies.
In a referendum on Sunday organized by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, Paris residents voted 89% against keeping shared e-scooters in the city. The three companies that pay for contracts to operate in the City of Light will have to pull their fleets — a total of 15,000 e-scooters — out of the city by September 1.
Hidalgo, who originally welcomed shared e-scooters to Paris, has pushed for the city to become a more livable 15-minute city and has spearheaded policies that reclaim parking spots from cars to create new bike lanes and pedestrian-friendly areas. However, shared scooters have gotten a lot of pushback from many city residents who often complain about reckless driving and clutter on sidewalks.
Hidalgo said on Sunday that scooters are the cause of a lot of accidents and that the business model was too expensive to be sustainable, with a 10-minute ride costing about €5. She also said free-floating scooters aren’t as climate friendly as she’d want. At the start of the year, TechCrunch dived deep into scooter usage in Paris and found through a variety of studies that while e-scooters are incredibly popular, they mostly replace walking or public transit rather than car usage.
That doesn’t mean they didn’t replace any car trips. One study from 2019 found 7% of kilometers covered by scooters replace car and personal taxi trips, a number that has likely grown over the years. But 7% is not nothing, says Hélène Chartier, director of urban planning at C40, a global network of mayors taking urgent climate change action. Chartier previously served as an advisor to Hidalgo.
“As part of a mobility package that Paris would offer as an alternative to cars, [shared e-scooters] could have been an option,” said Chartier. “Without all of the other problems, they could have said, ‘Ok why not?’ But if you add the accidents, if you add the difficulty on the public space, at some point, you need to say this is not the main solution. We should invest more in bikes, e-bikes, walking.”
David Zipper, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government, tweeted that he wasn’t surprised to see Paris vote against shared e-scooters, but he didn’t expect such a large margin. That sentiment has been mirrored by scooter advocates and the companies themselves.
Dott, Lime and Tier said in a joint statement that the low voter turnout affected the results of the referendum. Only 103,084 people turned out to vote, which is about 7.5% of registered Paris voters. They blamed restrictive rules, a limited number of polling stations (and thus long lines that dissuade young voters) and no electronic voting, saying the combination “heavily skewed toward older age groups, which has widened the gap between pros and cons.”
Additionally, the companies said the referendum was held the same day as the Paris marathon, and that only residents of the city were allowed to vote, leaving out those who live just outside the city but commute in.
The operators offered free rides to customers who voted Sunday and relied on social media influencers to try to get young users to vote, efforts that seem to have gone in vain. Parisians reported there were a high proportion of older voters in the queues.
The referendum isn’t binding, so Hidalgo can still make the unlikely decision to keep scooters in the city based on the low voter turnout. The numbers clearly show that scooters are popular. Lime has previously told TechCrunch that 90% of its fleet in Paris is used every day. In 2021, over 1.2 million scooter riders, 85% of whom were Parisians, took a total of 10 million rides across Lime, Dott and Tier. That’s around 27,000 rides per day.
The ban will not have an effect on the e-bikes offered by shared micromobility companies, which will remain in the city. Similarly, privately owned scooters are not affected by the ban, of which 700,000 were sold in France last year, according to transport ministry figures.
Paris votes overwhelmingly to ban shared e-scooters by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch
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It’s estimated that about a third of all food produced worldwide every year, which is approximately 1.3 billion tons, is estimated to be wasted. Aravita, a Brazilian artificial intelligence startup, thinks that supermarkets are the best place to start fixing this problem.
Marco Perlman, co-founder and CEO, started the company with Aline Azevedo and Bruno Schrappe in 2022 to tackle waste in the fourth-largest food producing country in the world where 33 million Brazilians have some type of food insecurity.
Aravita is developing an AI-powered solution for supermarkets that looks at variables, including climate, seasonality, consumer behavior and economic scenario, to manage the purchasing of fresh food — mainly fruits and vegetables — to reduce the instances of surplus items and lost sales due to waste. At the same time, the software increases the availability of items in demand.
“Supermarkets are our target audience because they are a great place to drive the first wedge of data availability,” Perlman told TechCrunch. “They have point-of-sale consumer data, and this is the data that we need to start making the predictions for low-demand forecasting. Unlike other parts of the supply chain, where the data is much harder to get a hold of, eventually we think that this will be digitized.”
Aravita is still in the very early stages: It has a conceptual prototype and started a pilot with a mid-sized supermarket chain near São Paulo and has the first set of algorithms developed. It is also in the process of integrating the first database of historical data into that model.
However, that first pilot didn’t come easy. Perlman recalls that potential customers were initially worried that startups were “having difficulty raising money, hiring and surviving,” and were uncomfortable giving store data to a company without financial resources that could stick around.
Aravita co-founders, Marco Perlman, Aline Azevedo and Bruno Schrappe. Image Credits: Aravita
So the trio started reaching out to investors and was able to secure a $2.5 million investment earlier this year, co-led by Qualcomm Ventures and 17Sigma.
“Fresh food management is highly fragmented and complex,” said Michel Glezer, director of Qualcomm Wireless GmbH and director at Qualcomm Ventures, in a written statement. “Aravita’s solution enables retailers to optimize inventory management, helping increase efficiencies and reduce waste.”
Joining those two firms were Bridge, DGF Investimentos, Alexia Ventures, BigBets, Norte Capital and a group of angel investors, including ClearSale partner and CEO Bernardo Lustosa and Flávio Jansen, former CEO of LocaWeb and Submarino.
Aravita is now in good company among other startups tackling food waste that also recently attracted venture capital, including Divert, which is trying to stop food before it reaches landfills; Diferente, also in Brazil, that is finding places for imperfect produce; and food resale app Recelery. They join other companies like Shelf Engine, Apeel, OLIO, Imperfect Foods, Mori and Phood Solutions.
The next steps are to develop the solution over the next few months and add a second pilot customer, Perlman said. He expects to have product-market fit next year and the ability to “step on the gas to accelerate” Aravita’s business model into other supermarket departments, including baked goods, pastry, cold cuts, fish and meat.
The new capital enables the company to hire additional employees and for future innovation, including inventory management, point-of-sale integration and technology development like AI and computer vision for process automation.
Qualcomm-backed Aravita wants to help Brazilian supermarkets control food waste by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch
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