Governments and public bodies across the UK have made commitments to Net Zero – a target to completely negate the amount of greenhouse gasses they have produced. Globally, governments have made commitments to protect our oceans and improve biodiversity. However, the paths to accomplishing the targets are not always clear. To get there, governments will need a strong understanding of where they currently stand, collecting their existing data as well as entirely new data to track impact and make informed decisions. It will need to pull on its lever of procurement, which drives 15% of global emissions. Lastly, it will need to upskill its workforce for the challenge at hand.

PUBLIC’s Climate team has recently worked with the government and the third sector to tackle issues of sustainable procurement and climate finance. Every team we have worked with is keen to find technical and skills-based solutions to allow them to tackle the climate emergency in a rigorous and measurable way.

The companies within the Climate domain in this year’s GovStart programme seek to address these needs. The solutions they offer include environmental data collection and processing, insight tools, biodiversity measurement and tracking, ocean health observation, sustainable procurement, scenario modeling and sustainable skills.

AgriSound - AgriSound is a agri-tech start-up specialising in IoT solutions to help reverse the decline in insect biodiversity. Its sensor technology enables users (beekeepers, farmers) to optimise management practices for enhanced bee health and productivity, leading to greater fruit and honey yields. The company has a core offering of hardware and software for remote beehive and wild pollinator monitoring.

Kando - Kando supports public’s health and the environment, providing with effective oversight of wastewater systems across the entire city. By collecting and analyzing data from sewage, Kando supports cities to manage public health events, improve water quality and availability, and optimize operational practices, all while lowering costs. Kando Pulse is a wastewater intelligence platform that analyzes data, and alerts users when health and wastewater quality indicators deviate from expected norms. By combining data inputs from key locations, Pulse can pinpoint the source of any deviation, estimating disease hotspots and identifying the causes of water contamination.

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ACUA Ocean - ACUA Ocean are developing a cost effective, scalable hydrogen powered uncrewed offshore platform to provide the geographical coverage and physical presence required to sustainably monitor and protect our oceans and waterways.

CitizenLab - The community engagement platform made for local governments: 

Uncover community insights to make inclusive and data-driven decisions in your city. CitizenLab’s centralised community engagement platform makes it easy for governments to engage their residents, manage input, and make informed decisions.

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Brainbox AI - BrainBox AI is at the forefront of the green building revolution with its unique application of artificial intelligence to create the world’s first fully autonomous commercial HVAC solution. Our AI technology is able to implement many optimization decisions autonomously back into the building in real time, on a much more granular scale.

We transform buildings into thermal batteries providing energy flexibility required to support a reliable and resilient energy transition. Our innovations enable cost-effective solutions to challenges posed by the rapid electrification of the economies. We bring sustainability solutions to the built environment to significantly reduce energy consumption and costs.

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Climate Essentials - Founded in 2019, Climate Essentials (formerly Climax Community) is a GreenTech start-up taking the UK by storm. We are a small, driven team with a proven record of creating and scaling start-ups, and we are experts in risk management, business resilience, sustainability, and climate change. 

We have developed an engaging and easy-to-use carbon management software, Climate Essentials, that allows for flexible data-inputting and estimation algorithms. We are demystifying the net-zero journey by helping users measure, track, and reduce their carbon emissions on one accessible platform. Our platform empowers SMEs, public bodies, and business ecosystems to enact real change and commit to carbon reduction.

Skenario Labs - There are challenges in decarbonising large portfolios of highly heterogeneous building stocks. Issues in accessing building data and modelling the impacts of retrofit scenarios across thousands of vastly divergent properties means that net zero pathways are obscured.

SkenarioLabs addresses these challenges by providing a flexible data platform enabling portfolio owners, investors, managers and advisors to make better, more informed decisions. We build individual building models of the entire portfolio, using multiple datasets and derived insights. We also overlay additional datasets, such as socio-economic and demographic data, local amenities, geographical context and weather to provide a true picture of an area.

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