The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also called the COP26, kicks off today in Glasgow, Scotland. Israel’s Prime Minister Naftali Bennett leaves today for the conference, at the head of a delegation of 120 representatives from government ministries and the Knesset, civil society, academia, the business sector, and local government. Israel’s Minister for the Protection of the Environment Tamar Zandberg and Energy Minister Karine Elharrar will be among them.
The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference will be held from Sunday, October 31, to Friday, November 12. The COP26 summit will bring parties together with the intention to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
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The organizers of this summit boast that it is poised to be one of the most consequential climate events since the negotiation of the Paris Agreement in 2015. ”In order to build a more sustainable, resilient and zero-carbon future, we need a whole economic transformation in which non-state actors will play an increasingly vital role,” they say.
Israel has always been at the forefront of agtech since the early days of the first Zionist settlements. The country may now be known more as Startup Nation for all of its success in the high tech world. But until recently it was best known for its agricultural innovations.
Israeli agtech startup Fieldin has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round, led by Fortissimo Capital, with the participation of Zeev Ventures, Icon Ventures, Luxembourg-based Maor Investments, and Akkadian ventures. Fieldin has raised a total of $50 million to date.
Founded in 2013 by Boaz Bachar and Iftach Briger, Fieldin offers a smart farm control center that it says gives specialty crop growers unrivaled visibility across all field operations.
The company boasts that its dashboard” seamlessly reports a full range of field data points (monitoring tractors, implements, operators and in-field sensors) to provide managers with actionable data that improves production, transparency and efficiency in the field.”
And, being in the Middle East and going through increasingly hotter summers in recent years, it makes sense that Startup Nation would be looking for ways to not only provide people shade and protection from the heat, but to also use the energy from the sun for electricity.
Last year Anai Green, an Israeli inventor, was named one of the winners the Women4Climate Tech Challenge for her new green tech called Lumiweave. She will split a $50,000 prize with three other finalists. Lumiweave creates solar powered fabric.
Lumiweave not only provides shade during the day but uses the solar energy collected to provide light at night. This will help with the effects of climate change by both cutting down on the need for more energy for air conditioning but also using the Sun for light at night.
Then there is Criaterra, an Israeli firm that makes construction materials that can help with all of the world’s problems with climate change and waste disposal. It does so by creating sustainable building materials that can actually be reused, instead of just being thrown away and filing up space in garbage dumps. And they are made from natural components.
Criaterra boasts that it creates genuinely pure eco-innovative materials that embody the vision of a circular economy. It points out that the construction industry is one of the main sources of pollution in the world.
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Unlike ceramics or cement in which natural resources are burnt to become dead matter, Criaterra says that its eco-innovative manufacturing process creates “compacted ‘living’ products that may return to earth as nutrients towards their next productive cycle.”
Coating materials that offer resistance to fire, water, and severe temperatures are not novel. However, an Israeli startup called Socold does much more than shield surfaces from the light. SolCold really uses the sun’s energy to trigger a cooling process, delivering effective air conditioning without the usage of electricity.
Air conditioning is one of the major concerns facing humanity in a warming environment. The warmer our atmosphere gets, the more people will want to buy and use air conditioners. But the air conditioners’ electricity use, in turn, creates pollution and further heats the air surrounding the structure and adds to global warming.
Startup Nation Now is also merging all of its high tech know-how with the country’s need for alternative sources of energy, water conservation and desalination projects into new environmental efforts. Being in a desert, Israel has always needed to deal with water shortages and climate change is causing the world to suffer from more drought.
So some of its companies are finding ways to make drinking water out of the humidity in the air.
A company that is pioneering such tech is WaterGen. Researchers at Tel Aviv University working with Water Gen recently discovered that water formed from the air in the center of a metropolitan area, Tel Aviv, met all the drinking water requirements imposed by Israel and the World Health Organization.
According to the researchers, the growing global shortage of safe drinking water causes thinking creatively and creating novel technologies for producing potable water. The Earth’s atmosphere is a massive and renewable source of water that might be used as a source of drinking water. Our atmosphere includes billions of tons of water, of which 98 percent is in a gaseous condition,(i.e., water vapor).
In July, Israel’s Technion, one of the top ten science and technology research universities in the world, won the prestigious Water Europe Innovation Award for SMEs for an atmospheric water generator called H2OLL that it developed. Technion researchers are also working at harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle the world’s most-pressing challenges.
H2OLL is a spinoff from the Technion (IIT), a new propriety and innovative atmospheric moisture harvesting technology, capable of extracting moisture from the air by an absorption-desorption cycle. The new technology generates year-long pure and safe drinking water supply along with constant low energy requirements at all seasons and in any geographic area and time of the day.
One of the most heinous effects of climate change is probably all of the different species of animal life that are now endangered or have even become extinct, due to man made changes to the environment. And the most vital of the worlds’ forms of life when it comes to agriculture are probably the bees.
But today, with all of the problems from climate change, bees have been disappearing from the Earth. Without them, we will have a really big problem.
If the bees were to become extinct, then the world’s plant life would die out. Sure, most people think that bees exist to provide us with honey. But the honey is just a bi-product of the bee’s main function. Bees are an integral part of pollination, aiding in the reproductive process of all manner of flora and fauna.
The honey that they produce comes from the nectar of flowers that bees eat. When feeding, they disseminate pollen between plants, allowing them to reproduce.
BeeHero is, an Israeli agtech startup which develops technology to save the bees. BeeHero was founded by a team of veteran beekeepers, serial entrepreneurs, renowned biologists, and data scientists to ensure that everyone wins: farmers, beekeepers, and nature. The company explains that 70% of crops worldwide rely on bees, whose increasing mortality rate, coupled with colony collapse disorder, puts financial strain on farmers and beekeepers. This makes it harder to feed an exponentially growing global population.
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BeeHero explains that they built their platform and low-cost sensors to provide frictionless setup and operation for beekeepers and achieve the goal of increasing crop yield and quality while enhancing pollinator health.
Israel also has numerous startups that offer meat and dairy food alternative. Some are make their products from plants and some of the companies do so with 3d printers that shape cells generated in laboratories.
So of all of the nations taking part in this week’s conference, Israel clearly has the most to bring to the table as per new tech and scientific research that will help save the world.
