Innovative technology solutions are urgently needed across industry, food production and construction in order to meet UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Food, construction and energy are some of the key areas in which impacts can be made to slash greenhouse gas emissions and make progress on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. In these sectors, proven technologies exist which have major potential to alleviate the climate crisis.
The challenge is to quickly overcome barriers and to scale up transformative solutions to climate change so that the global economy can be decarbonised by 2050 and societies can be made resilient to impacts of climate change including more heatwaves, floods and droughts. One way to do this is through intelligent matchmaking and coalition building between institutions, companies and governments.
At COP27, the UN Climate Change secretariat launched version 1.0 of the Virtual Hub site – a tool for collating government entities’ demand for innovative technology and sustainability solutions. Co-designed with the Amazon Web Services Innovation Studio and Open Earth Foundation, version 1.0 of the platform is designed to be a platform of global ambitions to tackle climate change.
The UN Climate Change Global Innovation Hub (UGIH) is a digital collaboration platform designed and built to meet core human needs alongside climate and sustainability goals. It seeks to connect demands by countries and cities to key solution providers including innovators and financiers.
The platform will be used throughout 2023 on the road to COP28 to demonstrate the benefit and impact of innovative technology that addresses specific climate and sustainability solultions. As a first pilot to be showcased at COP28, the UGIH Virtual Hub will focus on three key human needs for an expanded innovation on climate action: access (green hydrogen), nutrition and health (beans), and shelter (bamboo).
Three identified value chains – green hydrogen, bamboo and beans – are some of the first examples and the UGIH will continue collecting demands over 2023 to be showcased at COP28. The UGIH will also start working with solutions providers to start identifying transformative solutions that can help scale up a rapid deployment of the value chains.
The UGIH Virtual Hub will serve as a collaboration platform to connect countries to key solution providers including financiers such as technology providers, consulting institutions such as Deloitte, and other facilitating partners such as the Future Glean Architects, the UN Industrial Development Organization and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.
UN Climate Change hopes that in the run-up to COP28 in Dubai next year, the hub could be used to facilitate matchmaking between suppliers and consumers and attract innovators, potential off-takers and enablers such as financiers to upscale development and deployment of climate solutions across participating countries and cities.
