Scottish Resources Edinburgh and Climate Launchpad Estonia
Exciting times in October for Aurora, being at part of Zero Waste Exhibition at Scottish Resources 2016 with another 2 circular economy businesses, with Iain Gulland, Chief Executive at Zero Waste Scotland and Roseanna Cunningham the Minister of the Environment, Land Reform and Climate Change (who is now growing our mushrooms)
Then immediately afterwards we found ourselves rushing to the airport heading to Estonia for the Climate Launchpad Competition 2016 as per being one of the three Scottish winner teams of 2016 edition.
Confronted with the implacable details of today’s climate science, we draw comfort as best we may from the thinnest of thin pickings. The Scottish Resources Conference and the Climate Launchpad have accelerated decarbonisation trajectories for a part of our society, driven by more and more disruptive innovation, realistic carbon pricing and an end to all subsidies for fossil fuels, are politically complex. There will be surely winners and losers resulting from all of those changes.
As a matter of fact that’s where the idea of the Third Industrial Revolution comes into it — not just because of his analysis of the convergence between all things digital, all things connectible and all things renewable, but because it’s exciting. People aren’t going to be dragged reluctantly into tomorrow’s low-carbon economy, looking back mournfully over their shoulder at the familiar world they’re leaving behind. It has to be a world that is so enticing, so technologically cutting-edge and so affordable that they will want to be at the front of the queue, demanding that they too should enjoy the benefits of a sustainable world.
That’s particularly true of today’s young innovators, who have been the protagonist of all the Climate Change Innovations we have seen at the Climate Launchpad 2016 in Estonia. We were in fact one of the oldest teams: my business partner and I are respectively 50 and 44 years old, and even banging the walls about sustainability for about 40 years between the two of us we never seen such an exciting time for world change opportunity.
These youngsters know that the world we’re currently heading towards, on a business-as-usual basis, is going to be dumped soon hopefully. It surely will be shaped by debt and endless austerity, by accelerating climate change and collapsing ecosystems. What millennials ever heard from politicians was that there was no alternative but to grind on and on with today’s failed model of planet-trashing progress.
Everything that lies behind the this opportunity of a shifting economy model for our society, with its emphasis on high tech, information technology, personal aspiration, better services, collaborative consumption, the circular, sharing economies and so on, speak to a different part of the human spirit, with a message that is much more compelling than the old “we’ve got to do this, otherwise we’re all f...” narrative. It’s in this spirit that several dozen of the world’s largest companies have set out to appeal through the Climate Launchpad collective platform, celebrating the power of innovation and brilliant entrepreneurs seeking to bring this world alive. It’s all about more sustainable ways of meeting people’s needs and fulfilling their hopes and dreams — without ever mentioning the word sustainability.
