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Often, the free coffee at conferences leaves a lot to be desired. But last week at Lausanne-based climate tech conference HackSummit — an annual gathering of the world’s climate and foodtech founders, investors and enthusiasts — it hit the spot, with a catch: it wasn’t ‘real’ coffee.
The caffeine was provided by Netherlands-based Northern Wonder, a startup that uses non-tropical ingredients like barley and chickpeas to make coffee grounds and pods that taste like and give you the buzz of the real thing, but without the coffee bean.
While I (Sadia) was queuing for a latte its founder, David Klingen, told me how the increase in demand for coffee worldwide (traditionally tea-drinking nations like India are warming to it, for example) means that more rainforests are being cut down to make way for new coffee plantations needed to meet demand. At the same time, some of the world’s largest coffee producers are experiencing hotter and drier weather which is hurting the ability of their crops to produce, meaning less coffee is making it to market and the price is going up.
Northern Wonder’s product is part of an emerging category within climate tech known as adaptation tech. It includes solutions that help us to deal with the effects of climate change, rather than trying to prevent it (which is known as mitigation tech).
The category includes things like drought-resistant crops, tech to make housing more liveable as temperatures rise and watertech solutions to expand access to clean drinking water in areas where there are shortages.
A lot of VCs are keen to wax lyrical about the moral imperative of backing adaptation tech — but few have opened their wallets. A report last week suggested that 17x more funding is needed for adaptation solutions — that’s $1.1tn more compared to the $63bn invested in 2021.
One area of adaptation that VCs do seem comfortable with is the software piece. Startups are working on tools to help investors and companies quantify the risk climate change poses to their portfolios and supply chains, and offering insurance products related to that risk. Examples include London-based Climate X, which is raising its Series A round.
Though significant investment is missing, it was promising to see Swiss investment bank UBS, which has more than €3.1tn in assets under management (AUM), talking about adaptation in Lausanne. Sebastian van Winkel, who works for its impact team, spoke about his clients' interest in adaptation solutions; punters seemed buoyed on by UBS’s interest in the sector.
Read more on adaptation tech here and sign up to Sifted’s climate tech newsletter, where we follow the category in depth.
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