With this confidence boost, we launched the 2019 programme in 15 states in India this year, along with Sri Lanka and the Maldives, and supported the accelerators in Nepal and Mauritius, supporting nearly 200 amazing climate start-ups! What I learned confirmed my initial assumptions. We have significant talent everywhere in India and South Asia to solve many of our environmental problems through technology and innovation. Of course, innovation hotspots like Bengaluru, Delhi, and Mumbai will always yield substantial innovation, we have seen amazing innovation in the smallest of places, from natural pectin from fruits to reduce harvesting loss in Mauritius, to wooden shipping pallets from coconut waste in Hyderabad, to plastic plucking robots in Bhubaneswar, to waste-to-jewellery products in Colombo, and so on!

Of course, spotting early-stage innovation is not enough. There are no valuation games or easy funding in sustainability start-ups, but ironically only cash-flow. And climate entrepreneurs need more time than other start-ups to get to the market and generate enough revenue to sustain. So, Climate Collective has started building out follow-on accelerators, with the first one, Climate Runway, to be launched in Pune in partnership with Science and Technology Park, Pune in November. And we hope to set up three more Climate Runways in India by end-2020, as well as later in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, etc.

One thing that still needs to be strengthened is the connection between start-up and corporates. In sustainability, corporates often have many problems or needs to solve across the entire value chain from sustainable procurement to resource-efficient operations and all the way up to customer delivery. And often, due to internal structures and risk-aversion, corporates are not easily able to develop solutions to their internal sustainability problems or to address their customers’ new needs. This is exactly where climate start-ups, which have the speed, agility, and risk appetite, can innovate and quickly bring to market solutions to help clients. The Climate Collective is working here to develop an online database – Climate Pilots – to connect the growing number of cleantech solutions from start-ups to corporate clients who need the same.

By working together on regional platforms and in partnership with corporates, we can all help the amazing climate entrepreneurs currently out there or yet to emerge who are taking the risk, putting in the hard work, and surviving long enough to succeed in the market that will help us all survive and thrive in this world that was given to us as gift and that we should pass on as a gift.