Is it possible to solve climate change here and now and make money in the process?

The answer is “Yes”, according to the organisers of the Creating Climate Wealth Summit that took place at UCL on 13 and 14 September, writes Javier de Cendra de Larragan, Senior Research Associate in Energy and Law at the UCL Energy Institute.

Private entrepreneurs, consultants, policymakers and academics came together, under UCL’s roof, to devise ‘gigaton-scale’, market-driven, solutions to climate change that should do just that.

And yet, the International Energy Agency has recently reported that 2010 won the dubious award of being the year with the highest greenhouse gas emissions on record.

While China and India accounted for most of the rise, emissions have also grown in developing countries. What are we going to make of this discrepancy? Of course, a cynic would say that it might be possible after all to make money with climate change, regardless of what emissions are doing.

Less cynically, one can argue that, while many firms are devising innovative solutions to mitigate climate change, none of these solutions have yet demonstrated a gigaton-scale potential. This is the nut that the Creating Climate Wealth Summit was intent on cracking.

Before coming to London and UCL, summits took place in Sydney and Washington DC. The London event started with a plenary session aimed both at providing the necessary background to participants and at rallying the ‘soldiers’ for the battle ahead.

Then, the participants broke up into seven working groups, each one focussing on a different sector of the economy, with the central goal of identifying three interventions of potentially gigaton-scale, the key barriers holding them back and possible solutions in the form of new business models.

The logistics necessary to enable such work to progress were of a significant scale; each working track had about 20 experts working over five sessions spread across the two days under the direction of the chair or co-chairs. All sessions were guided by a facilitator and supported by volunteers who ensured that all the valuable work was faithfully recorded.

At this point, the crucial question in the mind of the reader surely is: did the army win the war? Or at least, did it identify the winning strategy? The author, being a lawyer by training, is tempted to answer with the unavoidable: it depends… on what you understand by victory.

Obviously, the event did nothing in itself to slow down greenhouse gas emissions; furthermore, no clear strategy came out to slow them down in the future – let alone with gigaton potential. However, this does not mean that no progress was made. As a lawyer, one is well aware that progress in (environmental) law is measured in fractions of an inch per decade.

What the event did show was the drive of the organisers, the Carbon War Room and the Long Run Venture, to build an emerging community of entrepreneurs that is deeply engaged in finding credible entrepreneurial solutions to climate change. From this community, new business ideas, new partnerships and, perhaps, new joint ventures will emerge with (perhaps gigaton-scale?) mitigation potential.

And, thanks to the UCL Energy Institute, which jumped at the chance to be at the centre of this event – helping to organise and co-host it – UCL is better represented in that community. This is in itself a reason to celebrate, for the kind of solutions that the Creating Climate Wealth Summit is seeking to discover cannot come from businesses alone.

Gigaton-scale solutions require input and drive from many actors across society, among which universities play an important role, not least by pointing out the unintended (and potentially very significant) negative consequences that mega-solutions can bring, and by devising solutions for them.

Entrepreneurs should rightly focus on the business opportunities that mitigating climate change is generating; scholars can endorse those views while remaining at a sufficient distance to discern the clouds that a new dawn of climate change technologies will inevitably bring, so that they can design solutions – whether regulatory or otherwise – to minimise the potential damage.

The Creating Climate Wealth Summit that took place in London last week was not the first, and will not be the last; it is important that, while focusing rightly on wealth, it does not forget that wealth is more than maximising financial profits for a few innovators. The fact that the last instalment took place at an academic institution such as UCL is a good sign for the future.

At the end, the organisers asked all participants to remain committed, to be innovative, to seek change; now, it is for us as academics to respond to this call so that climate wealth is defined in such a manner that it works, as Jeremy Bentham would put it, for “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”.