In today’s edition:
⚡️ For the first time, the UK announces pause on sponsoring licences for deep-sea mining projects
🚜 Scientists seek to selectively breed sheep & cows producing 20% less methane emissions
🌳 From 2018 to 2022, VC investments in nature tech startups amounted to $7.5 billion
⚡️ Energy (1-minute read)
Seas of uncertainty for ocean mining
What happened: The UK has said publicly for the first time that it will pause sponsoring or supporting licences for deep-sea mining projects until enough scientific evidence is available to assess its impact. The move brings the UK in line with Brazil, France and Germany. However, Norway, China and India favour deep-sea extraction; India is already exploring options in the nodule-rich Indian Ocean that promise self-sufficiency in nickel and cobalt.
Context: In July, plans to finalise regulations on mining minerals from the ocean floor were delayed by the U.N. body regulating the sector, the International Seabed Authority (ISA).
The resulting limbo has given countries the green light to apply for mining licences.
Two sides:
Mining companies believe extracting minerals from the ocean floor, like nickel and cobalt for electric vehicle batteries, could support the global energy transition and reduce global dependence on single nations with large reserves.
Environmental groups warn that deep-sea mining could cause damage to marine ecosystems and that stripping the seabed risks disturbing stores of carbon locked away for millennia, with unknown consequences. (Full story here).
🚜 AgriTech (1-minute read)
Methane makeover as livestock scientists breed for lower emissions
What happened: Projects in New Zealand and the UK are attempting to reduce methane emissions from sheep and cows through selective breeding. Scientists are identifying and propagating animals with more efficient gut microbes, resulting in lower methane emissions without compromising productivity.
The details:
Challenge: Ruminant animals like cows and sheep produce methane as a byproduct of their digestive systems, which is more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the planet.
Potential: Research shows that low-emitting animals produce up to 20% less methane without affecting milk or meat output.
Doubling-up: Combining the use of advanced genetic techniques to selectively breed low-methane-producing animals with other innovations like methane-blocking feed additives offers a strategy to reduce the global warming impact of livestock farming.
A scaling problem: Breeding for the low-methane trait requires genetic analysis and understanding of the intricacies of the animals’ gut microbes. So, developments are needed for the technology to become less complex and costly to enable herds of low-methane-emitting sheep and cows to become widespread. (Full story here).
🌳 Nature (1-minute read)
Nature VC’s betting big on NatureTech
What happened: Nature tech, a broad set of technologies that can accelerate and scale the implementation of high-quality nature-based solutions, is receiving billions in funding, according to a newly released report.
The details:
Growth: In the last five years, from 2018 to 2022, VC investments in nature tech startups amounted to $7.5 billion. Annual investments increased from $1 billion in 2018 to $1.5 billion in 2022, with a peak in 2021 of $2.39 billion.
Geography: The US market attracted 78% of VC funding between 2018 and 2022, totalling $5.80 billion.
Resilience: While the VC market declined sharply between 2021 and 2022 (-50% according to Crunchbase), nature tech funding was relatively less affected and fell by just 35%.
Maturity: Early-stage investments in nature tech startups increased by +130% in value between 2020 and 2022, from $0.46 billion in 2020 to $0.77 billion in 2021 and $1.06 billion in 2022.
Watchouts highlighted by investors:
Bridging the gap: Connecting nature tech companies to real-world opportunities that enable the scaling of a solution, including finding customers willing to pay for these solutions at scale. This connectivity is still lacking and presents itself as companies struggling to scale as rapidly as they had hoped.
Avoiding the hype train: In certain fields, the excitement and hype run ahead of market development. This can lead to credibility issues when project outcomes are later unable to support the original hype. It is important to find ways to ensure that nature tech solutions are scientifically sound before deployment.
Tech realism: Tech is often presented as a panacea, while there are often limitations to deploying tech in various landscapes and contexts. For example, drone seed start-ups have become more realistic about where they can be deployed.
(Full story here).
💭 Little Bytes
Quote: “It is still possible that warming will stay below 1.5C. But with every year that we continue emitting the kind of levels that we are at the moment, that is becoming less and less likely.” Jim Skea, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Stat: Sea surface average temperatures reached record highs of 21.1C in April. The previous record temperature of 21C was in 2016 — Copernicus
Watch: The company building 1,400 mini solar grids in rural Africa and Asia
🗞 In other news…
Countries home to the world’s three major rainforests agreed on Saturday to cooperate to overcome deforestation and safeguard biodiversity but fell short of a concrete alliance to protect the vital carbon sinks. (Full story here).
Zara owner Inditex, the world’s largest clothing retailer, said its suppliers would buy 2,000 metric tons of a raw material made out of cotton textile waste by Swedish company Renewcell — one of the world’s first commercial-scale textile-to-textile recycling factories. (Full story here).
Last week, Indonesia flew its first commercial flight using palm oil-blended jet fuel as the world’s biggest producer of the commodity pushes for wider use of biofuels. (Full story here).
Carbon offset developer South Pole has terminated its involvement in a project in Zimbabwe which has generated millions of carbon credits from efforts to prevent deforestation around Lake Kariba, the Swiss firm said on Friday. South Pole said it was not confident the Kariba REDD+ project – owned and developed by Carbon Green Investments (CGI) – met the standards it expected from its partners. (Full story here).
The presidency of next month’s COP28 climate summit and two renewable energy organisations on Monday urged governments to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 as part of efforts to stop global warming exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius. (Full story here).
The UK and EU will push the world’s richest countries to end subsidies for foreign oil and gas operations and coal mining at a closed-door OECD meeting next month. (Full story here).
🎣 Gone Phishing
Three of these stories are true, one we’ve made up. Guess which:
Prize-winning pumpkin goes missing from US farm in suspected heist
Italian woman wins court case to evict her two sons
Runaway tortoise found 5 miles from home, 3.5 years later
Large quantities of bull semen stolen in Northern Ireland
