Addressing climate change will require a lot of sustainable infrastructure investment. In 2024, we can “expect finance to take center stage in climate conversations,” according to Time, which notes that “for decades, finance has been the (often unspoken) lynchpin of climate action.”
This week we look at some tools and news items that provide insights about climate investing and investing is being funded.
- Climate news outlet Cipher this week launched the Clean Technology Tracker, which offers cool maps of climate-related tech. “The Cleantech Tracker map is a window into the transformative technological landscape, illustrating where innovations are taking root,” says the team at Cipher, which launched in 2021 with backing from Bill Gates and Breakthrough Energy.
- Much of the data for the Cipher tracker is sourced from The Clean Investment Monitor, a research effort from Rhodium Group and MIT that tracks quarterly investment in climate and clean energy tech across the U.S. The monitor found $225 billion in new investment over the past year, a 38% annual increase.
- CTVC (short from Climate Tech Venture Capital) is a newsletter that tracks VC investment in climate tech (including sustainable infrastructure investment ), with more than 60,000 subscribers. The success of the newsletter’s datasets led to the creation of the Sightline Climate intelligence platform, with funding from veteran climate investors John Doerr and Tom Steyer. The newsletter is a great resource for tracking innovation in the climate sector.
- Just 6.6% of climate tech funding rounds in 2023 went to female-founded companies, GreenBiz reports, citing an analysis by Pitchbook. An analysis from CrunchBase was only slightly better, placing female-led startups at 10% of funding rounds. “Why does the gender divide exist, when the need for climate tech is greater than ever?,” GreenBiz writes. “Put simply, the world of venture capital is dominated by men, and historically men have invested in other men rather than women.”
- Transition finance is “shaping up to be one of the new year’s most important subjects for anyone professing to care about the climate crisis,” according to Bloomberg. The phrase “transition finance” is loosely defined as investments mainly in industries and infrastructure that help drive efforts to achieve a net-zero economy. It’s distinct from green finance, which generally targets so-called climate solutions like wind farms or battery plants.
For more information about sustainable infrastructure investment, check out our Climate Finance coverage.