RMI

RMI recently contributed to the publication of the 2024 Breakthrough Agenda Report: Agriculture, helping to promote more sustainable agricultural practices to achieve global climate goals! 🚜🌾

In less than two weeks, leading investors, corporate executives, and policymakers will gather in New York at the FT Live Moral Money Summit Americas to discuss the sustainable business and finance agenda. RMI’s own Ije Ikoku Okeke, managing director of the Global South Program, will bring her expertise in mobilizing, scaling, and catalyzing climate finance in global emerging markets to aid in these discussions. Ije’s panel will focus on the deployment of blended finance for broad impact in the Global South, key challenges, and emerging innovative solutions in green and social financing. Learn more here: https://bit.ly/47uYZHy #FTMoralMoney

Aviation emissions have taken off thanks to rising demand for air travel. With aviation accounting for roughly 3% of annual global CO2 emissions, policy makers, airlines, and others across the aviation value chain are exploring solutions to reduce the aviation sector’s climate impact. Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is a cleaner alternative to jet fuel that can reduce lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 90% or more. Because SAF is critical to reducing aviation emissions, it’s important to understand how the market – including supply, demand, and policy – is progressing. RMI has created a global, forward-looking SAF market analysis to help stakeholders make investment decisions, understand the impact of policy, develop production and business strategies, optimize supply chains, and more: https://bit.ly/47TZThd #SustainableAviation #Aviation #Sustainability

RMI federal policy and clean hydrogen expert, Taylor Krause, is featured on the new season of the program Love Is Blind. We sat down with Krause and asked her about the show, her work, and the intersection of the two. https://bit.ly/4ePVbTY

RMI Believes in Innovative and Next-Generation Optimizations (BINGO!) to reduce emissions and advance clean energy to the forefront – at #ClimateWeekNYC and beyond. Thank you to everyone who turned out to join us for RMI Day on Tues., Sept. 24 at Scandinavia House in New York City. We hope you enjoyed our discussions about how RMI and our corporate partners are re-energizing climate action to cut emissions, how satellites and monitoring technologies are slashing methane emissions, how the Inflation Reduction Act (#IRA) and other legislation is benefiting communities in the United States, and how the clean energy transition is happening faster than people realize. #CleanEnergy #ClimateAction #EnergyTransition

How much are airlines willing to pay for sustainable aviation fuel? According to new research, more than you might think. Corporate demand for Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is expected to rise as more companies commit to transparent emissions reporting and ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals. To make SAF projects more attractive for investors, more information is needed to understand SAF demand and how much customers are willing to pay. To explore this crucial aspect of the SAF market, RMI and the Mission Possible Partnership conducted a survey of 23 companies, examining their willingness to pay for SAF and SAF certificates to shed light on factors influencing purchasing decisions. The findings reveal promising insights that could pave the way for a more robust and sustainable aviation fuel market in the future: https://bit.ly/47Q0Gzp #Sustainability #Aviation #SustainableAviation

#VERGE24, hosted by Trellis Group, brings together sustainability professionals deploying cleantech at scale to explore emerging trends, take stock of new technologies, and work to accelerate the speed and scale of impact. As a proud Convening Partner, RMI hopes to see you at the event on October 29-31 in San Jose, California. Register today: https://bit.ly/4drmC5o #Cleantech #Climatetech #Sustainability #Decarbonization #Electrification #ClimateSolutions #ClimateImpact

During Climate Week, my colleague Clay Stranger and I hosted an event on Mobilizing Financing for Electric Two- and Three-Wheelers. The transition to electric mobility is both an equity and climate imperative. Our research focuses on driver-owner operators, many of whom lack formal banking records and rely on their vehicles for their livelihoods. Unfortunately, interest rates for electric two- and three-wheeler loans can be double those of fossil-fuel vehicles, making it difficult for many to participate in this transition. To access how we can achieve affordable financing for these borrowers, we organized an event dedicated to the topic. Our discussion featured expert insights from Binyam Reja of the World Bank, Jacqueline Klopp of Columbia University, Ije Ikoku Okeke of RMI, Claire Markgraf of C40 Cities, and Nikki Rudnick of Uber. Attendees represented multilateral development banks, philanthropists, corporate fleet platforms, regional financiers, and creditors, all of whom have critical roles in advancing electric mobility globally. I left the event energized and confident that we have the tools and knowledge to equitably advance transportation electrification worldwide. Here are my three key takeaways: 1. There is a need to intentionally include popular transport in policy and financial frameworks, as ignoring this critical mode won’t reduce demand. 2. Philanthropists and corporations can and should play a key role by providing credit enhancements to mobilize initial investment in this transition. 3. The risk perception of electric mobility is still a challenge; implementing de-risking measures such as the use of telemetric data, extended warranties, and demand aggregation are actions industry actors can implement today to lower perceived investment risk. #Climatefinance #EVs #Mobility #NYCW

Need help deploying your first commercial-scale climate tech project? 🤝 Introducing Mark1 – a transformative new developer-as-a-service for capital intensive, first of a kind industrial climate technologies 🌟 Mark1 was created by Third Derivative, RMI, and Deep Science Ventures, alongside founding partners Builders Vision and Fluor Corporation, to bridge the gap to commercialization for critical emerging climate tech. “The gap between demonstration and commercialization is the deepest, widest ‘valley-of-death’ faced by our founders – and a critical bottleneck to the energy transition. Our back-of-the-envelope math tells us that we’re only seeing 1-17% of the funding the world needs for first-of-a-kind commercial climate tech projects. It’s a systemic challenge. Isolated success stories are not going to cut it, and neither is simply throwing money at the problem. We need a systemic solution – one that can methodically de-risk and attract market-rate capital to these projects – lots of them. We believe that Mark1 can be that solution, or at least an important part of it.” - Rushad Nanavatty, Managing Director of Third Derivative Learn more about Mark1: https://www.mark1.build/ 🚀 Applications for its first cohort will open later this year!

🌍 🏗️ The Sustainable Steel Buyers Platform — which includes big corporate buyers of steel, primarily from the renewable energy, construction, and manufacturing sectors. At #ClimateWeekNYC, SSBP called on suppliers for bids to supply at least 1 million tons per year of near-zero emissions steel by 2023. As RMI’s Chathu G. explains, "The initiative is making sure that corporate demand is being pulled effectively to speed up investment" in near-zero emissions iron and steel plants. This effort is a crucial step toward decarbonizing the steel industry, which currently contributes up to 11% of global carbon dioxide emissions every year. Learn more in Canary Media Inc.: https://bit.ly/4ekb4BZ #GreenSteel #Decarbonization #SustainableIndustry #RMI #ClimateAction