10 Tech Innovations That Can Help Us Fight Climate Change

5 min readDec 30, 2021

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Earlier this year, India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman emphasized on the role of technology in fighting climate change and called for international cooperation in the G-20 High Level Tax Policy and Climate Change Symposium. Let’s have a look at the potential tech innovations that can help achieve this.

1. Vacuuming Gas From The Atmosphere

Climeworks is the world’s first commercial-scale direct-air capture facility outside Zurich. They remove tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year.

The concentrated CO2 is sent back to specific industries like fertilizers for farmers, building materials or oil recovery

2. Refreezing The Poles

The basic idea here is to pump seawater up to tall posts on uncrewed ships via tiny nozzles.This produces small particles of salt, which are injected into the clouds. This makes the clouds more widespread and reflective, cooling down the areas below them.

3. Ocean Greening

This means fertilising the ocean with iron salts, which promotes the growth of plankton and makes the water body take in more CO2.

4. CO2 Fighting Resilient Crop

Arborea has developed the world’s first BioSolar Leaf. Using photovoltaic-like panels, sunlight is used to grow microscopic plants in high concentrations within infertile and arid ground. These tiny plants, produce healthy food ingredients while generating O2 and removing high amounts of CO2.

These tiny plants produce healthy food ingredients while generating O2 and removing high amounts of CO2

5. World Bee Project

In collaboration with Oracle, this project uses cloud technology, AI and smart sensors to collect data about honey bee decline and uses measures to protect them. Their Hive Network helps researchers to ‘listen’ in on honey bee enclosures and analyze data like wing movement, temperature and honey yield.

6. Lab Grown Cuisine

Foods like Meat have a much higher energy footprint than any other food type — It takes 75 times more energy to produce than corn and an area size which is 7x the European Union, just to produce food for the region’s livestock.

So to satisfy meat lovers while keeping the planet’s emissions in check, start-ups like Impossible Foods are rearing fake meat in labs. Animals and plants share a common protein — heme. By taking heme from a plant and growing it in a lab, the product can be shaped, coloured, and even cooked like a piece of meat!

Then there is Solar Foods, which is a firm turning water into various foods. It does so by taking bacteria from soil and multiplying it using hydrogen extracted from water. Viola! Flour is made. Although the flour isn’t licensed for sale currently, it’s been tested to make an edible pancake. Eventually, the flour can be modified to mimic milk and eggs, and even create lab-grown fish with all those nutritious omega-3 acids.

7. Hydrogen Ships

Since Maritime shipping emissions burn tons of low-quality “bunker fuel” that fouls the air of port communities with toxic particulates, a partnership of Scandinavian nations is building a new type of ferry.

Powered by hydrogen fuel cells, these ships will release only water. Moreover, the hydrogen itself will be green, sourced from splitting water molecules with wind energy. The current plan is to connect Oslo and Copenhagen by 2027 and avoid 64,000 tons of CO2 annually. The U.S. Department of Energy is now calling it suitable to power “most vessels in the world’s fleet.”

8. Tree Corridors

Scorching pavements and sunbaked roads can create “urban heat islands”, making heat waves more deadly and increasing the demand for AC. To deal with this, Tropical Medellín in Colombia, has planted 350,000+ trees since 2016. They have managed to create 30 shaded “green corridors” and reduced urban temperatures by more than 3°.

With similar plans ongoing from Mexico to Paris, greening cities is one of the most inexpensive climate-mitigation strategies.

9. Tidal Energy

A largely untapped source of energy for coastal communities, tidal currents are hard to harness due to the turbulent ocean waters, which can damage the underwater equipment.

So Sustainable Marine has launched the world’s first floating tidal-energy platform in Canada, a barge (type of boat) with 6 submersible turbines. It has the ability to pivot with the tidal flow, creating steady power. Its initial project will power 3,000 homes. If tidal energy emerges as a reliable energy source, it can provide more than 5% of global energy needs.

10. Floating Solar Plants

Large solar installations are hard to site in densely populated countries with a rugged terrain or costly land. Thus, floating solar installations on hydroelectric dams make use of unused aquatic surface adjacent to hydropower.

In fact, a new floating solar plant in South Korea will be the world’s largest at 41 MW. It is set to provide power for 60,000 people, but with more than 241, 401 sq. km. of man-made reservoirs globally, floating solar has a “potential on a terawatt scale,” as per the World Bank.