Past Summits | 2011 Europe: UK Working Tracks

Innovation is happening at lightning speed and a number of fuel buyers are eager to buy low carbon aviation fuels. However, customers are finding it difficult to evaluate renewable fuel options and producers in this rapidly changing space. Regulators and investors have limited knowledge regarding the impact of the fuels at scale. New fuel companies need long-term advanced market commitments in order to get project finance and are often forced to use expensive equity to finance refineries because they don’t have a clear idea on how to raise project finance, or can’t get access to it.

As the primary wealth generation and energy consuming engines of our economies, cities are critical to creating climate wealth while reducing carbon emissions on a gigaton scale. Climate mitigation/adaptation, resource management and the impact of rapid urbanisation are driving our need for improved city-level modelling and systems thinking for how we handle water supply, waste, transport, food, low impact buildings, health, crime and social disorder. Technological innovations such as sensors and the cloud; disciplines such as urban planning and design; and know-how such as integrated infrastructure project management and financing, are all areas of expertise that need to come together to deliver better systems and drive future economic growth.

The key question is how to stimulate business-led innovation in these specific areas of expertise to transform our capability to deliver systems-wide solutions and accelerate city-level low carbon growth. What will help city-level government become a better customer? What will help businesses develop better products and services? How can it support emerging technologies and how will it serve to be an attractive proposition for investors?

The built environment uses around half the UK’s energy, making it essential for major carbon savings – often with very short paybacks. Yet realising the savings is often complicated by conflicting interests. What new business models can shake up the sector and deliver change? What of the Green Investment Bank and Green Deal? How can these be structured to deliver for everyone from low carbon businesses to UK homeowners? What further wealth creation opportunities can be created through a reskilled workforce, able to deliver rapid retrofits to historic building stock alongside zero carbon new builds? Is the supply chain ready to respond to such top-down and bottom-up leadership?

What innovation in financial products might encourage widespread investment in a more low carbon world? This transition – spanning our building stock to transport, manufacturing and agriculture – needs affordable credit. How can we unlock this? What might encourage exponential growth in green ISAs, green bonds and green pensions? What market signals and investment criteria do entrepreneurs and businesses need to satisfy to help them scale, whilst helping to build low-carbon productive capacity for the UK, Europe and the globe?

Gigaton-scale savings through the combination of technology and behaviour change is as yet unfulfilled in both fleets and the broader wheeled-vehicle market. The opportunity is to leverage deep insights of land travel patterns, trends and behaviour and accelerate the impact of new in-vehicle technologies currently used by pioneering fleet companies to move goods and people efficiently through & between our cities, saving money and carbon emissions.

Within fleets, there are only 3-5% of the 280m commercial fleet vehicles on the road currently using in-vehicle technologies such as Mobile Resource Management; and total fleet numbers could increase to 400m by 2020. Beyond corporate fleets, a key question is how to accelerate this technology to help realise its potential. How do we secure UK Government as critical player with its £14bn annual road transportation budget? How can we target non-commercial fleet efficiency such as the 200,000 strong ‘grey fleet’ of NHS mobile workers? How can this technology also act as a catalyst for adjacent and future markets such as consumer club fleets? What market signals do investors need and where are we seeing the most entrepreneurial companies focus? What does procurement need, and what will tip the ‘pay as you behave’ models for insurance?’

Shipping is beginning a low carbon transformation as the market responds to open energy information, higher fuel prices and supply chain pressure from shippers considering environmental performance. How can entrepreneurs, the global shipping and finance industries, and leading ports work together to reap maximum financial rewards from the uptake of cleaner innovations? What of logistics, inter-modal and supply chain opportunities? What are the barriers that shipping stakeholders and entrepreneurs see to getting money saving ideas adopted by the marketplace? Finance, standards, inertia, information, training – how do we overcome these and other barriers to achieve gigaton scale savings and drive new opportunities?

There is no single solution to how we get more from less, yet there are immediate and significant opportunities to do so with many untapped or under-utilised technologies and practices that improve resource efficiency, boost yield and animal welfare - and will increase the UK’s competitiveness.

What are the wealth creation and carbon reduction opportunities for the UK in the agrifood sector? How can average yields of wheat be driven forward from 7.5 tonnes per hectare to 12.5 tonnes per hectare and beyond? What impacts can sustainable intensification, selective use of animal proteins, precision farming and smart data have? What are the barriers to their deployment, what is the capital required to accelerate uptake and what are the returns available? How can we also support decision-making, the transfer of knowledge and better public education to address the human challenge as well as the technological and finance challenges?