In the race against climate change, innovation is paramount. Emerging economies are brimming with innovative solutions to climate and development challenges, ranging from community-based resilience tools to locally produced clean technology. However, even the best solutions can stall and struggle to progress beyond the pilot phase without the right financial and policy environment, as well as a national innovation ecosystem to support them.
Both technology push mechanisms, which support RD&I to identify breakthrough technologies and long-term gains, and demand pull facilitators, which create a market demand that can de-risk green tech investments and encourage private sector scaling, are needed. But how do you align both? What policies are needed to enable a complete pathway that has both elements aligned in such a way that public finance can fund scaling up and unlock private investments to their fullest potential?
This session will examine the situation in South Africa. The speakers will focus on how to build an effective innovation pipeline with clear implementation opportunities, how to de-risk finance across the full innovation cycle and connect the public R&D agendas with private market signals.
Yashna Maharajh
Ereck Chakauya
Pierre Rialland
