A healthy dose of hope for Earth Day

Small Steps Vol. 98: More people care about climate change than you think 💚; the safest sources of energy are also the cleanest ⚡; and how tech can change the world within a lifetime 🌎.

Kick start

👉 🌏 EARTH DAY. Monday 22 April is Earth Day, and if you’re reading this, we’re probably on the same page about the urgency of the climate crisis. It can be very easy to feel like your news feed is dominated by a seemingly endless string of bad news updates about how things are going from bad to worse – we know, it gets us too.

That said, one of the most important things you can do to fight the climate crisis is to talk about it. So, we wanted to share three great good-news points grounded in cold, hard data that you can use to fuel a conversation with anyone you know who needs some help coming over to the green side. 

The global-scale positive news below is sourced from Our World In Data – a leading non-profit think tank based out of the University of Oxford, whose mission is to publish the world’s research to make progress against the world’s largest problems. 

1. More people care about climate change than you think. 

This research by Hannah Ritchie at Our World In Data shows that the majority of people in every country support positive climate action, but this level of support is consistently underestimated by the public. 

What does the data say? People across the globe believe that climate change is a serious threat to humanity and that humans are the cause. 

In a 2024 paper published in Science Advances, a team of behavioural scientists surveyed 59,000 people across 63 countries. The results found that 86% of people “believed” in climate change – measured as whether action was necessary to avoid a global catastrophe, whether humans were causing climate change, and whether it is a serious threat to humanity. Even in the country with the lowest rates of agreement, 73% still agreed. 

Sourced here. 

In another paper published in Nature Climate Change, researchers found similar levels of popular support for political action across 130,000 individuals surveyed in 125 countries. 89% of people want to see more political action, 86% think “people in their country should try to fight global warming”, and 69% said they would be willing to contribute at least 1% of their income to tackling climate change. Support was strong across the world. 

Sourced here. 

Why does this matter? Governments and policymakers, at least in healthy democracies, will change policy if they have sufficient public support, companies will be swayed by consumer demand, and individuals are more likely to change behaviours if they think others are doing the same. A common argument against climate action at a policy level is that other countries aren’t stepping up to the plate – so understanding global levels of support are essential to kick us all into gear. 

Where does this leave us? It means the debate is now squarely about the merits of different solutions, and not whether we should act. That’s great news. 

2. The cleanest sources of energy are also the safest.

Energy is critical to human progress and as the UN rightly says, “energy is central to nearly every major challenge and opportunity the world faces today.” But have you thought about how the energy transition intersects with your health? 

Millions of people die prematurely every year as a direct result of air pollution. The leading cause is burning fossil fuels and biomass – wood, charcoal and dung. The second is accidents in the mining and extraction of fuels – coal, rare metals, oil, gas and uranium – as well as in infrastructure maintenance and transport. The third is indirect through greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with fossil fuels being the primary source of GHGs and the primary driver of climate change. 

The good news here? The lowest-carbon energy sources are also the safest for our health. On both the health and climate fronts, rapidly shifting to renewable energy is the best thing we can do.

Sourced here. 

3. Tech will fundamentally change the world within our lifetimes. 

Tech can fundamentally change the world in ways that we can’t even conceive of until they happen, so it’s exceptionally easy to underestimate how much the world can and will change within our lifetimes.

Your great-great ancestor could hardly have imagined having electric lights in their home or flushing toilets, let alone smartphones or WIFI. The exponential rate of technological progress should give us a lot of hope that we will be able to develop the solutions we need to keep tackling the problems we face – so let’s zoom out and put the pace of progress into perspective. 

This graphic shows us humanity’s progress from the first use of stone tools 3.4 million years ago. Each dash in the spiral represents 200,000 years of history. Compare this to the fact that we went from the first steam engine around 1800, to the first plane in 1903, and from there to the first multinational space station in 1998. The developments we will see in our lifetime will no doubt be similarly inconceivable from where we stand now. If that’s not fuel for hope, I don’t know what is. 

Sourced here.

🌱 In some more climate and nature news this week… 

• 🇦🇺 Albo announces the Future Made In Australia Act, as Australia’s response to the US Inflation Reduction Act. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced plans to revitalise Australia’s manufacturing industry by producing more things here using clean energy and resources, which will include targeted finance for clean industries. While the details will be announced in the coming weeks, the three key goals are supercharging clean industries, building on existing progress toward renewable energy, and slashing climate pollution.

• 👩‍⚖️ A historic win for the planet as a group of 2,400 Swiss women in their 70s won the first-ever climate law victory in the European Court of Human Rights. The ECHR ruled that Switzerland’s failure to address climate change violated its citizens’ human rights, which paves the way for future plaintiffs to sue their governments for better climate protections – check out the details in this article and this podcast episode.

• 🌬️ The world’s largest offshore wind project to date has been approved, to deliver up to 5.5 gigawatts of power in the Baltic Sea off the Swedish coast.

• 🥩 The State of New York is suing the world’s largest meat company for misleading consumers as to its climate commitments. This could be a tipping point for greenwashing and have far reaching implications, in how it may impact how all kinds of big businesses approach their advertising on sustainability. Read more here and here.

• 🛰️ New tech is mapping environmental crimes in the Amazon Basin. Illegal deforestation, land grabbing and poaching hinder climate action and nature conservation around the world, but are notoriously difficult to track in practice. Governments, private companies and NGOs are now making progress through leveraging geospatial and predictive analytics to predict where certain environmental crimes are most likely to take place. Read about it here. 

New paths

🤩 We’re hiring! Join the Giant Leap team as our new Investment Analyst (Australia, remote). Make sure to get your application in by the deadline on 21 April! 

🔋 Amber Electric is hiring a number of roles including a Senior Performance Marketing Manager (Melbourne), Battery Channel Manager (Melbourne/Remote), Software Engineering Manager (Melbourne/Remote) and a Senior Software Engineer (Melbourne/Remote). 

🩺 MoreGoodDays is hiring a GP & Health Advisor (Australia)

📦 Sendle is seeking a Senior Product Designer (Remote)

🔥 Want to work for an impact company? Fill out our expression of interest form for roles across our portfolio. There’s even more jobs at ethical companies on the global B-Work job board.

Giant leaps

🌳 Who Gives A Crap has launched its No Deforestation Commitment. You can check out the full pledge here. 

For the road

🌴 People-powered nature markets. How do you manage what you can’t measure? This is the key argument behind putting a price on nature to help the world more equitably manage its natural capital. Wedgetail’s Nature Positive Notes newsletter does it again with this really interesting take on an escalating debate on the intersection between finance and nature — we highly recommend this read.

💸 How to avoid drowning in VC cash. How much money should a founder raise? At an early stage, more cash may seem like a blessing. But Ben Armstrong from Archangel Ventures contends that excessive funds can actually defocus a startup and lead to mistakes. His advice: raise what you need, not what you can. 

👐 86-years later, here’s what the longest Harvard happiness study says about living a good life. The secret sauce? Relationships. People who had both a breadth and depth of relationships tended to live longer. So find ways to make yours complex and meet more people. One tip: Find ways to do things you love with others.

🚘 Tesla’s cancellation of its budget car raises questions. The global EV maker has axed plans to release an “affordable” model, triggering questions as to whether it will be able to compete in emerging markets. Meanwhile, as we mentioned last week, BYD has doubled down on its production of cars for exports, overtaking Tesla as the top global seller of electric vehicles (EVs) by volume in the final three months of 2023. 

💀 How can climate tech dodge the valley of death? The climate tech sector is piping hot, having received over $1.7 trillion in investment last year. But it's still not enough. Higher interest rates have hit hard, and the sector needs more venture capital at later stages to drive change and commercial success. BloombergNEF’s Claire Curry however, says that other forms of growth capital are moving in to fill the gap. 

🩸 Victoria’s public service to introduce paid period leave. An extra five days of sick leave is slated to be introduced for reproductive health issues for Victorian public servants. It comes amid a deal between the Allan State Government and Victorian Community and Public Services Union, which will also introduce hybrid and flexible work to the public service. This is a great example of the interesting progress happening in the DEI and HR space toward more inclusive leave policies. 

📆 PSA: Don’t set your SAFE maturity date for December! It’s a surefire way to ruin your holiday, says Warwick Donaldson from The Aussie StartUp Capital Nerd newsletter. Not all Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) arrangements have maturity dates – but if you are drafting one with this clause, check when it resolves. For your sanity, and your investors’. 

🤝 Gender equality is everyone’s problem. Lucy Wark, co-founder of Fuzzy, has pulled together this great, concise primer on workplace discrimination, designed for men and how they can move towards genuine allyship. Her best tip? Progress is better than perfection. Send this one to your male colleagues.

🥫 Our current food system is sending us backwards. A combination of food waste and inefficient farming practices are destroying more value than they create, a new report from the Food System Economics Commission has found. The finding accounts for the medical costs from malnutrition and the impact the current system has on climate change. But with the right tweaks, the report found we can create a system that generates $10 trillion in value a year and eliminates global malnutrition by 2050.

Save the date 

📅  April 29: Applications close for the Remarkable Accelerator. This unique accelerator is focused on disability tech and aims to not only give founders expert guidance, but also exposure to the US market. Apply here. 

📅  April 30: The Startup Network’s Advanced Tech, AI and Web3 pitch night. Apply for your chance to pitch your business to a panel of expert judges! It’s being held at 6pm at The Commons, Gipps St, Collingwood. 

📅  May 1 - 2: Sunrise! Come say hi to the Giant Leap team at one of the biggest startup events of the year - this one’s not to be missed! 👋 On at the Carriageworks in Sydney. 

📅  May 2: Applications close for Press Play Ventures’ second cohort. This is a 12-week pre-accelerator program for aspiring female founders and women-led business teams based in Victoria. Thanks to LaunchVic, 25 women can access the program valued at $4,700 through a scholarship. Participants will gain access to a $50,000 Alumni Cash Pool, the community of past and current Press Play founders, and a comprehensive program focused on mindset, startup fundamentals, and networking.

📅  May 7-8: The Digital Health Festival, Melbourne. Learn about the latest trends and issues in the digital health sector at this massive event held at the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre. Discounted tickets finish sale at the end of this week. You can read more here.