🎤 Scale Climate Action Talk #13 Recap: Closing the Climate Finance Gap

Climate adaptation 🌏, nature 🌲, and women 🚺 are especially impacted

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Climate starts with SEA
June 09, 2024

Hello! Halo! Kumusta! Xin chào! สวัสดี! မင်္ဂလာပါ! ជំរាបសួរ! ສະບາຍດີ!

Massimiliano, Matt (with mic), and Renato on stage

🗓️ This past Tuesday (June 4th), our very own co-founder, Massimiliano, had the opportunity to give a talk 🎤 at The Bridge at Green School Bali, which was put on by our friends at Scale Climate Action. Terratai’s brilliant Founder & CEO, Matt—who you might remember as the co-author of our nature-based solutions issue (#24)—also spoke.

💸 The theme of the talk was: “Climate & Nature Investments: how to bridge the funding gap and unlock vital capital”. If you recall from our previous issues, we actually covered climate finance as part of a series across 6 issues (issues #25-30, specifically).

🗞️ Similar to the Ecosperity roundup that we did a month-and-a-half ago on Earth day, we’re going to use this issue to recap the talk and share some relevant resources for those keen on diving deeper!

🏃🏻‍♂️🔽 Rundown

🧘🏻‍♀️ Jen, one of the co-founders of Scale Climate Action, opened the event at around 9AM Bali time with a much-needed grounding meditation…

Jen, our meditation guru!

👥 We were fortunate to share the room with ~70 folks interested to learn more about climate finance!

A highly engaged audience at The Bridge at The Green School Bali

🌲 Matt kicked the talk off with a recap of his journey over the past couple of decades working in forests & biodiversity. In spite of his role as an investor & venture builder now, he was actually trained as an anthropologist and environmentalist!

Matt showing an insect on his arm in the Borneo rainforest

💡 Highlights from his talk include:

🪚 Between 1985 and 2005, Borneo lost an average of 850K hectares of forest annually. This is a big deal not just for biodiversity but also for the climate as it accounts for 80+% of Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissions during this period (WWF, 2007)… Beyond these statistics, Matt even told an anecdote of how in the 90s his plane flight ✈️ from the airport to a research station in the rainforest used to be about an hour flying over primary forest but that figure dropped to around 5-10 minutes ⌚ in more recent years.

📢 Nature and the ecosystem services that it provides, such as creating clean water, pollinating and irrigating our fields, protecting our cities and towns from floods or droughts, providing materials for shelter, medicine and—perhaps most of all—our food, underpins every one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2017).

💰 Over half of the world’s GDP—equivalent to around USD58T—is dependent on nature (PwC, 2023).

🎤 Then it was Massimiliano’s turn to talk! While he of course represented our newsletter, he also was speaking on behalf of his role as Head of Platform & Venture Partner at Moonshot Ventures, an impact investor focused in climate adaptation & gender in Southeast Asia.

Our very own Massimiliano

💡 Highlights from his talk—which heavily references issues #26 and #29—are…

📈 Committed capital in VC funds is at an all time high, reaching $15.7B at the end of 2022 (eConomy SEA, 2023)

📉 Yet, seemingly paradoxically, funding to startups is at an all time low (and no, I don't mean the the pop-punk band🎸). This is largely due to the fact that VCs are treading cautiously with deploying capital during the so-called "VC winter" amidst some high profile startup failures (DealStreetAsia, 2024)

⭐ However, there's a bright spot with funding towards climate startups, which has increased 20X from a mere $50M to $1B between 2018 to 2022 (DealStreetAsia, 2023)

🪫 Regardless, this isn't sufficient to close the finance gap, especially when we layer on climate adaptation & gender on top of that, which both respectively only get 5% of funding globally (Climate Policy Initiative, 2023) & (DealStreetAsia, 2021)

🧑🏻‍🏫 The slides from his talk can be found here.

⁉️ Then it was time for Q&A!

Massimiliano, Matt (with mic), and Renato during the Q&A panel

💡 Highlights from the Q&A (courtesy of Renato):

  1. 🗣️ Question the companies you are a client of on what actions they are taking to be more sustainable or regenerative in their operations, or what they are actually doing with the money you give them. Matt shared the case of a major investment firm changing its strategy and divesting from fossil fuels because many of its clients started asking them to do so, and they felt the market was changing

  2. 💰 Investments in the space need “patient capital”, therefore finding the right investor for your business is key. Traditional VCs are not likely to be very positive for companies in the Climate & Nature spaces

  3. 🎯 Companies looking for funding in the space should have a scalable opportunity, coachable founders, and be open to different types of financing, not just equity-for-cash. The traditional VC model has become the most famous but is by far not the only means to raise capital

🎥 A recording of the event can be found here.

🎉 Shout-outs to Scale Climate Action & Terratai!

🔗 For more from our friends at Scale Climate Action, check out these links:

👏🏻 Also, a massive congratulations to our friends at Terratai for their new office opening! You can check out the nature-based solution office in the YouTube video below…

⏭️ Next week, we’ll be doing a bit of a recap of our 34 published issues (and counting). Given the amount of new subscribers we’ve received in the past couple of weeks, we felt it would be an opportune moment to summarize the top highlights since launching our newsletter.

🌊 SEA you next week!

Karina & Massimiliano