At the COP26, the EIT Climate-KIC co-launched a Global Innovation Hub and committed to the collaboration with the State of California.
At the Climate Change Conference (COP26), the climate-focused programme of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), Climate-KIC, has established two new cooperation frameworks to increase its impact beyond Europe. On the one hand, the EIT Climate committed to support the establishment of a new digital Global Innovation Hub. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) launched the hub at the COP26 to boost the effectiveness and scale of climate change and sustainability innovation as a driver of more ambitious climate action. On the other hand, EIT Climate signed a memorandum of understanding with the State of California’s Governor’s Office of Planning and Research.
The Global Innovation Hub aims to support the translation of commitments and pledges into demand for climate and sustainability solutions that will drive the identification or development of innovative responses and their effective implementation. The initiative was launched by the UNFCCC secretariat, UN Climate Change, and supported by core partner organisations such as the EIT’s Climate-KIC, the Research Institute of Sweden (RISE), the European Commission (EC), Mission Innovation, and the Open Earth Foundation. Similarly, the newly announced collaboration between Climate-KIC and the State of California aims at fostering peer learning between the partners to catalyse innovative solutions in support of California and Europe’s climate agendas.
These two recently announced Climate-KIC collaborations were not the first ones that EIT Climate sought beyond the European Union’s borders. In 2019, for instance, the EIT-Climate KIC established a partnership with the Silicon Valley Innovation hub, with the goal of building an alliance between California and Europe and helping to address climate change through innovation and entrepreneurship. A couple of years earlier, in 2013, Climate-KIC signed a statement of intent with the city of Tianjin in China to collaborate on a low-carbon city project.
Climate-KIC is working to accelerate the transition to a zero-carbon, climate-resilient society. Supported by the EIT, it identifies and supports innovation that helps society mitigate and adapt to climate change. The mission of the initiative is to turn knowledge into climate movements. It does so in collaboration with more than 450 global partners, with 54’000 participants across their activities since 2010 and with 5’000 citizens from over 100 cities worldwide participating in the Climathon each year. In its position paper “Moments matter”, the EIT Climate, as the largest global public-private partnership focused on climate, commits to using its experience to add to and amplify the energy already created by existing climate movements. They want to help channel this energy toward major global events (e.g. the COP or the World Economic Forum) and key decision makers, like they did at the COP26 by entering into the partnership with UNFCCC and the State of California.
Twenty Swiss actors are partners of the regional Climate-KIC hub, which covers also German and Austrian academic and industry players, and contribute the development of scalable high impact climate change solutions with its programmes. Prominent Swiss alumni include Carbon Delta, Climeworks and rePATRN.