Co-Action in 2020: Time for Citizens & Tech to Lead on Climate
It’s 2020, and the scene for the Climate Decade is set.
Last year, we saw the largest citizen mobilisation due to climate issues in history, with 2,500 climate strikes in September alone (thanks Greta). We saw a citizen-led shutdown of central London by Extinction Rebellion in response to the climate crisis. Many countries have announced a state of climate emergency, some, like Denmark, are taking bold action.
Relatedly, powerful forces in the tech industry are waking up to the climate crisis, and the considerable capital in this sector will hopefully follow suit. More broadly, we are seeing the impending wealth transfer from Baby Boomers to their more philanthropic Millennial children, which I believe will focus still more capital into the arena of climate action.
Something has shifted. The world is awake. People, tech, & capital are becoming mobilised and aligned towards these pivotal objectives.
Noticing these trends, we launched COACT in May 2019 to build a catalyst that would enable climate focussed technologies to flourish. We took note of the spectacular innovation happening in the startup sector and the growing culture of tech incubators — spaces helping startups develop and scale their products — but also a perplexing lack of focus on the BFPs (big fucking problems) related to climate change and ecological collapse. According to the 2018 UN Climate Tech Report, less than 2% of technology incubators are focused on climate technology.
In response, we launched an impact maximising tech incubator to facilitate innovators working on such issues. We provide space, tools and expertise. We connect innovators with financial support, de-centralising infrastructure like Fab Labs, and are activating a community of citizens to support, develop, and implement solutions. We are embedding open source principals, allowing anyone to build on and replicate the technologies, and participate in maximising impact.
As COACT begins 2020, we are proud to see these objectives materialising. Our Forest Innovation Sprint has kicked off, with two exciting startup technologies at our Valldaura Labs headquarters. Dronecoria- is the world’s first open source reforestation system. It develops tools to participate in seed processing and drone tree planting. The other startup, Hacking Ecology, is based on an IoT sensors system which allows citizens and scientists to monitor the ecological health of freshwater systems, and their surrounding environments to take action preventing ecological disasters such as eutrophication.
We are supporting the founders with accommodation, full access to our state of the art fab lab, and clustering them with highly skilled mentors in the areas of hardware, software and science (both remotely and in person).
This February, we will launch crowdfunding campaigns for both projects, enabling the public to support mass deployment of these technologies, while providing funding and exposure to usher each company into a next stage of success (join our community to keep posted on this and other events).
In the background, COACT’s pilot innovator, Daniel Connell, is making an impact with his low-tech water turbine. In September of 2019, Daniel worked with us to develop a clean energy water turbine that can generate enough power for a small village in the Global South (12kwh continuously) with zero emissions. The system is made from off-the-shelf and repurposed parts, costing a total of €40 to replicate. We helped Daniel raise funds to finish the job with a micro-crowdfunder, and released a promo video that went viral — reaching over 750k people and counting.
Thanks to the video and public response to the technology, Daniel has been invited to replicate his turbine with refugees in Greece, village communities in Tanzania, a land trust in Guyana, and missionaries in Haiti. His open source documentation will be published on Wikifactory in the coming weeks.
We continue to facilitate these deployments while supporting our two current innovators from Barcelona. Our objective is to launch both with ambitious crowdfunding campaigns, and begin development of our next innovation sprint later this year (watch this space!). With the right support, we believe COACT operations can expand to aligned labs in the Fab Lab network and beyond, scaling the impact and deployments.
As climate issues continue to affect our way of life, we see COACT innovators becoming the next generation of activists, and their technologies enabling a level of coordination and impact that was previously not believed possible.
We are seeking advisors, mentors, supporters and funders to join our growing effort, as well as concerned citizens who want to build, buy, spread, and deploy climate responsive technologies. This decade, we need all hands on deck to create the future we need, and the world we want.
Please contact me on tristan@coactlab.org with any collaborative proposals.
