SUSTAINABILITY
Sustainability as a primary driver of innovation Innovation can and must play a critical role in helping to simplify the problems and break the trade-offs between economics and sustainability. BY VED SEN, BUSINESS INNOVATION AT TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES
never be enough to simply address it through policy and behavioural change. Innovation has a huge part to play in helping us think about sustainability, in science, technology, design, and creativity. One of the core premises of innovation is that it breaks the existing trade-offs between inputs and outputs - or between a zero-sum model and a win-win environment. It’s becoming clear that the only way we will collectively achieve our global climate change goals will be with a significant layer of technological innovation across 12 important areas:
Energy AFTER COP 26, the consensus is that global efforts to tackle climate change are still falling short of where we want them to be, due to conflicting interests. It’s easy to ask a country to stop cutting down its trees or reducing palm oil production, but more difficult when their economy depends on timber or palm oil exports. Through the IPCC, the 2015 Paris Agreement, and many other global initiatives (such as NetZero), we are attempting to claw ourselves back from the precipice of irreversible climate change but it will
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Renewables contributed over 40% of the UK’s total energy production in the first quarter of 2021 but innovation’s job is far from complete. There are plenty of firms who have dedicated themselves to the broad problem of sustainable energy production, including companies like Drax and Velocys, who are producing sustainable energy from waste wood and feedstock. Enel is another global player, generating almost 50 giga watts of energy globally from solar, wind, hydro-electric, biomass, and geothermal means.
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