Getting it done—together—at Climate Week NYC
By Eva Koehler, Fellowship Manager, Activate New York
Climate Week NYC is billed as the biggest climate event on Earth. This year’s event, focused on the theme “Getting It Done,” brought together experts from around the world—including Activate Fellows, for the first time.
“We will only reach net zero by mid-century if we band together, and that’s what the Activate community is all about.”
Activate’s participation in Climate Week NYC coincided with its recent arrival on the New York innovation scene. The Activate New York Community opened its doors in June 2022 as part of the $19.5 million Carbontech Development Initiative, administered by NYSERDA. Through this support, New York will attract climate-tech leaders and build a global carbon-to-value innovation ecosystem.
Activate co-hosted several events throughout Climate Week, including three industry-specific roundtables, a fireside chat with Capricorn Investment Group, and a deep-tech happy hour co-hosted with SOSV.
At our final event on Thursday evening, we gave the stage to the entrepreneurs for our hard-tech showcase, co-hosted by the Consulate General of Canada in New York, the Urban Future Lab, and Collaborative Fund, in partnership with Planeteer Capital, Third Derivative, SOSV, and Impact Science Ventures. A room full of interested investors, academics, and innovators came to see 22 hard-tech entrepreneurs give lightning talks on how their technologies are revolutionizing hard-to-decarbonize sectors.
Garrett Boudinot, founder and CEO of Vycarb and a Cohort 2022 fellow in the Activate New York Community, highlighted how Vycarb will create stable, verified, and ecologically restorative carbon dioxide removal.
Garrett Boudinot, founder and CEO of Vycarb.
Amanda Hall, founder and CEO of Summit Nanotech and an alumni of the Women In Cleantech boot camp hosted by the Consulate General of Canada in New York, detailed how her company’s direct lithium extraction process addresses critical lithium supply constraints in a way that’s economically and environmentally superior to current methods.
Amanda Hall, founder and CEO of Summit Nanotech.
Andee Wallace, co-founder and CEO of Robigo and a Cohort 2022 fellow in the Activate Boston Community, shared how Robigo’s first-in-class, pathogen-specific biopesticides are more effective, better for the environment, and faster to adapt to emerging diseases than the pesticides currently on the market.
Andee Wallace, co-founder and CEO of Robigo.
Throughout these energizing events, one lesson stood out: the only way to go about “Getting It Done” is together. As Alex Brussell, investor at Collaborative Fund, said, "In climate, we talk endlessly about overcoming the collective action problem by building products so fast, sleek, strong, cheap, and reliable that even a villain would buy them. But there's no getting around the fact that bringing those solutions out of the lab and into the mainstream will take a village. We will only reach net zero by mid-century if we band together, and that's what the Activate community is all about."