Launching Sourceful Climate
I joined Sourceful in late 2020 as Head of Sustainability. Finding such an incredible team and mission still feels like I struck gold.
Today we launch Sourceful Climate and I’m pumped to tell you about it!
Sourceful becomes the first Europe-based tech company to offer permanent carbon removal to its customers.
The planet — specifically our atmosphere — is heading in the wrong direction. The level of CO2 in our atmosphere is much higher than it should be, but more critically, we continue to pump more in. We’re warming the greenhouse.
We are exceptionally close to hitting our carbon budget — the level required to keep global warming to an appropriate level (Climate Change Committee). 2 degrees, or better 1.5 degrees of warming for this century (IPCC).
“Avoiding a climate disaster will be one of the greatest challenges humans have ever taken on” (Bill Gates, 2021)
How do we solve for the climate crisis?
Fortunately a pathway exists and it involves everyone. Effectively it consists of 2 things:
- We need to drastically reduce our emissions
- We need to remove and permanently store CO2 out of the atmosphere
With Sourceful Climate we recognised that the carbon removal space needed urgent support, so we made an outsized contribution and set up Sourceful Climate to help others do so too.
We took the time to speak to the founders of some amazing organisations taking CO2 out of the atmosphere in all sorts of ways — giant fans to suck in CO2-heavy air and spit out clean air, natural minerals that when exposed to air remove CO2, treating seeds with fungi to increase uptake of CO2 into the soil, and the list goes on.
We found that the greatest barrier to these technologies reaching their potential is capital. The capital to take them out of the lab and grow them to a commercial scale. We know that attracting this capital will require a significant reduction in prices. Fortunately enough, these technologies exhibit similar scaling characteristics to what we’ve seen with other game-changing technologies, like Solar PV and semi-conductors. Below I’ve included the estimated price curve of the Sourceful Climate portfolio now and in 20 years — this shows that with scale and time the prices of these climate-critical technologies will drastically fall.
Sourceful Climate is all about access — access to capital to help these technologies scale and access to stand-out climate action for businesses, so they can be part of the solution.
At launch we’re proud to have a handful of forward-thinking brands onboard who saw the same urgency that we did — Stitched, Urban, Pitt Balm, Responsible, Eka Ventures and Venrex.
We believe that there’s significant brand value from taking stand-out climate action. Getting your business to carbon neutral, planting some trees, it’s table stakes (important, but doesn’t go far enough). There is an opportunity to drive customer stickiness and lifetime value from taking stand-out climate action, the kind that can be done through Sourceful Climate.
It’s exciting to see momentum building in this space. There is an emerging group of pioneering companies that recognise the need for more — Stripe, Shopify, Microsoft and Amazon.
Fast forward to 2040…
Imagine, you work tirelessly to reduce the footprint of your business. You make difficult decisions like moving to more expensive renewable electricity, you change your diet, you plant some trees, you go on fewer holidays, you slash business travel. Yet still we miss the targets set out in the Paris agreement, we compromise the planet’s liveability for future generations.
That’s why we setup Sourceful Climate. Get involved at climate.sourceful.io
For some deeper reading on the topic, here are some piece that have inspired me.
Bill Gates — How to Avoid A Climate Disaster
Rebecca Henderson — Reimagining Capitalism | How Business can Save the World
David Wallace-Wells — The Uninhabitable Earth
Various — CDR primer
