Gathering on the field

Olivia Utharntharm

Jul 22, 2022

3

min read

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Main Sequence was created by CSIRO to address the ‘valley of death’ between research and commercialisation. It solves the world’s greatest challenges by turning our scientific breakthroughs into the next century’s giants. Main Sequence has been a firm supporter of Climate Salad and is a 2022 Climate Tech Industry Report Partner. Phil Morle, partner at the innovation fund, reveals the importance of supporting climate tech to provide innovative solutions to the climate crisis.

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"Many will look back on these times and say: “That was when a surge in human ingenuity swarmed around an existential problem for every country on Earth and defined the next two hundred years of growth.”

The problem is huge. We’re not trying to streamline workflow in the office or making it a bit easier to buy books. We’re fixing a planet that we broke.

The good news is that we have the technology that can fix it. Instead of brute-forcing nature by burning sequestered carbon and methane, we are starting to work with the natural world to produce a new platform of production.

This platform harnesses the wind, water, atoms and sun to generate electrons to power our industries and homes. It uses biological organisms to grow new materials that sequester more carbon than they emit. We can grow proteins, fats and carbohydrates to make delicious food without growing animals first. Over the next decade, we will start seeing quantum technologies come online to simulate and design the next generation of natural materials.

The 2022 Australia and New Zealand Climate Tech Industry Report shows the Australian climate army gathering on the field.

We can see the technology rising and the companies that will drive them to scale. As an investor, these are exciting times where there is no distinction between a decision to build something good for the planet and a decision that can generate the strongest returns. This is our job now and it is clear that venture fuelled technology companies can deliver impact quickly.

Now we need to work together. We need to tell our stories and listen to others so that we understand where our story flows into someone else's. Then we can elevate streams into the next compound uplift for Earth’s climate platform.

Specifically, we are going to need to get very good at de-risking our technology innovations to help a new generation of financial vehicles to fund our climate infrastructure. We’re asking financial markets to trust us to lay out trillions of dollars over the next couple of decades to rebuild energy grids, replace all vehicles, build cities differently and re-engineer farming systems.

This is the hard bit. In normal times, this happens scrappily. We build ‘First of a Kind’ (FOAK) infrastructure, prove it over decades and eventually convince project finance to back global rollouts of the infrastructure. We don’t have time for that now. New climate infrastructure vehicles are emerging and our companies need to meet them with a coordinated dedication to de-risking the system as we build it.

We do that by working together.

Temper the competitive silo mind that has contained Australian innovation in the past and surge into the future as a like-minded army of innovators building a common platform to grow humanity with the technology that nature has built for us."

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