If climate tech is dead, what comes next?
Take climate tech: it’s a category of companies and technologies that, broadly speaking, seek to minimize or reverse our impact on the climate while also helping us adapt to its increasing changes. As terms go, climate tech is actually not bad since it defines the sector’s focus in two words.
It’s certainly better than its predecessor, clean tech. It’s what startups that today fall under the climate tech banner would have likely called themselves just over a decade ago. It wasn’t a very good descriptor, though. To the uninitiated, clean tech just as easily could have meant robot vacuums or novel household supplies. Climate tech is much easier to grasp.
But climate tech is about a decade old, and humans also like to feel like they’re at the vanguard of something new. That, plus climate tech’s scope has grown to the point where it’s getting a bit unwieldy. Some have begun to explore alternatives over the past year or so.
Planetary health emerged as an early alternative, first coined in the medical journal The Lancet in 2014. Some investors embraced it, in part to address the problem of scope creep. Plenty of companies don’t seek to address carbon pollution, but are still focused on technologies that would address humanity’s impact on the planet. It has its appeal, but most people have stuck with climate tech.
