By Kalyan Sarma, VP of Climate, Environment, and Sustainability Commercialisation at Ploughshare

As COP29 started this week, key leaders in climate, environment, and sustainability are coming together to share best practices in policy, technology, and movement forwards towards Net Zero goals. And, once again, it looks like this year’s discussions are going to have a few sticking points.

For the UK, this will be the first COP since a new government has been elected, and so it should be an opportunity to further push the UK’s expertise towards a wider audience – especially since the new Secretary of State has been so busy in ensuring that green energy is hurling a gale up and down the country. But infrastructure isn’t the only discussion to be had here.

Climate finance, Nationally Determined Contributions, Oil and Gas Emissions; these are just a few of the main points that are expected to take place in Azerbaijan this year. The key, however, between what we see as a successful COP and one that is less successful will be how the agreements are made, the speed at which they are made, and how well governments across the globe are willing to listen to industry and other experts when making those decisions and advocating for a greener future.

We know, at Ploughshare, the best successes that we witness when it comes to climate, environment and sustainability (CES) innovations are those that take into account and actively encourage collaboration between multiple parties. Government research, industry, and business leaders all must come together to ensure that any developments in technology that can help combat climate change will be successful – even if it is finding something that is not feasible.

As an example, Ploughshare currently is in partnership with both the Met Office and the National Oceanographic Centre – both areas of the UK government that have huge interest and huge resources invested in finding novel solutions to helping to combat climate change, and better understand weather that is becoming more and more affected by global temperature increase. The successes that these partnerships have tendered have made a positive impact to various areas of climate science and CES research – and have all come together because of collaborative efforts.

COP as a whole needs to embrace fully-fledged cooperative efforts that are similar to our work with other government bodies and our customers and licensees – it’s these collaborative efforts that actually ensure a positive change takes place, and impact is created. It might be looking to industry partners to ensure that a new system of systems is going down the right developmental route for renewable energy infrastructure. It could be partnering with industry to ensure scalability. It could even be looking to academia to sure up research methodologies that will make CES research and innovation be pre-tested before market launch, ensuring a much higher chance of survival. Perhaps it is cross-country governmental collaboration that make incentives available to early adopters in both business and the general public to ensure that costs are prohibitively high.

We don’t have all the answers – although we wish we did! – but we do know that from collaboration only good things can come. It’s this collaboration that simply must be at the forefront of discussions at COP29 this year. It’s all very well coming up with ideas and agreeing on them, but unless there is a cooperative of experts willing to lend a hand and develop proper solutions to problems – the agreements might as well be filed away under ‘didn’t get off the ground’.

As part of my remit at Ploughshare, I look to see how we can collaborate much more; discovering new ways to combat climate change, liberating those technologies to see the light of day, and then connecting the dots with other partners in order to scale those innovations up and, ultimately, positively impact the world. COP29 and its attendees also have the potential to do this, but there needs to be a positive attitude, a drive to really solve CES problems, and a desire to collaborate. I truly hope that all three will come together to ensure a prosperous and productive meeting for not just the big players across the world, but everyone.