COP30: Catalyzing climate action at ‘the implementation COP’

This year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Brazil arrived at a crucial time amid an intensifying drive to cut emissions and the failure of most countries to submit new carbon-cutting plans before the summit.

A UN report released ahead of the conference predicted progress in curbing emissions over the next decade, but stated that a major acceleration to deliver faster and deeper emission reductions is needed.

COP30 had been called the “implementation COP” by its Brazilian Presidency, and that sense of urgency was a theme running through discussions across the event.

Closing the gap between ambition and action

While world figures gathered at the main event in Belém to discuss updated national climate pledges, ending fossil fuels and more, global climate leaders and many of the world’s leading organizations met in São Paulo for the Climate Action Innovation Zone.

At its flagship event, the Sustainable Innovation Forum, leaders explored the private sector’s role in driving a move to a low-carbon, nature-positive economy by closing the gap between climate ambition and real-world action.

Bridging divides, unlocking collective capacity and innovation toward shared goals were high on the agenda.

Collaboration to scale clean tech

A panel session titled ‘Innovation in action: advancing scalable and transformative solutions’ delved deeper into business’ role in advancing these objectives.

Underscoring COP30’s ‘Global Mutirão’ concept — which is derived from the Indigenous Tupi-Guarani language and means “collective efforts”, highlighting the combined push required to respond to the climate crisis — speakers discussed the need for collaboration to catalyze decarbonization.

Strategic alliances and cross-sector co-operation will be vital, Takajiro Ishikawa, President and CEO, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) America, told the panel, which also included Eliot Whittington, Chief Systems Change Officer, Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and Nalin Agarwal, Founding Partner, Climate Collective.

“We can’t invent or reinvent everything,” he said of MHI, which has created a program to invest in start-ups and supplement its own research and development efforts.

Describing the range of companies the initiative supports, he gave the example of Fervo. The US-based geothermal energy start-up uses technology pioneered by the oil and gas sector to tap into reservoirs of hot rock beneath the Earth’s surface and turn them into 24-7 carbon-free energy sources for heat and power generation.

MHI’s financial and technological backing, he said, helped Fervo to commercialize rapidly.

This kind of collaboration, with different companies and sectors working together to pool knowledge and expertise, will be vital to achieve the speed and scale needed for decarbonization, the panel agreed.

Rethinking innovation to advance proven solutions

Many other transformative solutions that will sit at the heart of this effort are already within reach. The panelists discussed everything from self-healing concrete that extends the material’s lifespan to using pitch tar — a byproduct of oil refinery — as a feedstock for new material for the tire industry, a process pioneered by Monolith Materials, another company in which MHI has invested.

But as organizations including the International Energy Agency (IEA) have highlighted, many of the technologies that will help take so-called ‘hard-to-abate’ sectors to net zero — including hydrogen and carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) — are not yet available on the market at the scale needed.

For Ishikawa, part of solving this problem will be reapplying, rather than reinventing, key technologies.

CCUS, he said, is a solution MHI has been working on for the past 30 years and yet it has still “not captured the demand of the whole market”. But as AI hyperscalers look to balance robust environmental commitments with the need for reliable round-the-clock power for their data centers, gas-fired power with CO₂ capture is seeing renewed demand.

“So a 30-year-old technology may be coming to center stage,” he said. “That’s another example of how innovation finally meets the road.”

Bridging the clean tech ‘valley of death’

Speakers also discussed how partnerships between innovators, investors and policymakers can help decarbonization solutions move swiftly from pilot projects to global adoption — and avoid the commercialization gap that sees many promising technologies fail to scale due to a lack of funding and support.

There is a stark funding gap between proven and emerging technologies. BloombergNEF figures show established solutions, including renewables and energy storage, drew $1.93 trillion in investment in 2024. Emerging technologies, including hydrogen, CCUS and nuclear, reached just $155 billion.

That analysis noted the public and private sectors alike need to do more to de-risk these technologies to ensure they have a meaningful impact before the end of the decade. The panelists’ discussions underscored this issue.

Partnerships, as well as policy stability, are critical for bridging the ‘valley of death’ for clean tech start-ups, Ishikawa said.

“Although it may have been proven at pilot scale or demonstration scale, for any industry to adopt a technology as part of their mix, there needs to be somebody that has a balance sheet to stand behind it,” he argued.

He cited the example of Houston-based start-up Cemvita, which MHI has invested in, and uses synthetic biology to help decarbonize heavy industries such as chemical manufacturing.

The company has recently signed an agreement to develop a sustainable aviation fuel facility in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil — and the project highlights the transformative power of partnerships between innovators, business and policymakers, Ishikawa said.

At COP30, Brazil announced a commitment to quadruple production and use of sustainable fuels by 2035, along with Japan, India and other nations.

“This is company, local government and the will of the entrepreneur” working to create something new, Ishikawa added on the Cemvita project. “It really has to be all of the above to really get a technology off the ground.”

Ensuring promising technology has real impact

Closing the commercialization gap will be vital, with some estimates predicting that overall clean energy investment will need to rise to $4.5 trillion a year by 2030 if the world is to have any chance of bringing warming down toward figures stated in net zero scenarios.

Innovation alone won’t be enough, panelists concluded. Real impact, they said, will depend on aligning technology readiness, market demand and enabling policy.

The spirit of collaboration on display at the Sustainable Innovation Forum demonstrated that many private-sector organizations are committed to ensuring we succeed.