Context
‍
To date city/region climate and innovation agendas have focused mainly on improving existing systems and approached all stakeholders as sources of emissions. With the urgent need for 1.5 °C compatible solutions and the opportunities of the fourth industrial revolution, it is time to look forward and ensure a shift of focus on how to deliver on human needs and embrace cities/regions as providers of solutions. Cities and regions are central to a human needs-focused and solution-driven agenda.

Climate change requires rapid changes to ensure a future where humanity will limit warming to below 1.5 °C. The innovation ecosystem needs to transform to embrace the opportunities that rapid technological development, business model innovation, and value changes provide for delivering globally sustainable solutions. Exploring these opportunities requires new stakeholders, collaborations, and tools. Climate change is not just another problem that humanity has faced before. Its scope in time and space makes it uniquely challenging to address. It is also one of the very few existential threats to human civilization. The innovation ecosystem we have today has been great at optimizing the industrial system for the last 100 years but failed miserably regarding global equality and environmental problems. Now a new innovation ecosystem is needed. We need innovation of our innovation. What brings the climate challenge and the innovation ecosystem together is the focus of this project, i.e., human needs. Ensuring that the innovation ecosystem delivers on human needs will require collaborations where cities and regions worldwide come together.

Expanding, not substituting, the current climate and innovation agenda

‍The expanded climate and innovation agenda is an evolution where the work responds to the new situation we are in today. Many of the tools and initiatives aimed at addressing the climate challenge and innovation were born in the 1990s, focusing on optimizing existing system so the emit less emissions and are more productive. During the 1990s when the climate challenge became a political reality, we first had the climate convention in 1992 and then the Kyoto protocol in 1997, when the world was very different. Similarly, innovation was much slower back in the 1990s compared with today, and it is easy to forget that the internet as we know it was launched in 1993.

In the 21st century, the fourth industrialization will deliver transformative change, and rapid and profound changes are needed to meet the global and local sustainability challenges. It is worth noting that most disruptive solutions developed during the last 30 years, from dematerialization, sharing, new sources of protein, and teleworking to local vacations, electric mobility and even renewables, where driven by deep tech entrepreneurs and leaders with interest in new business models, rather than climate initiatives as these mainly focused on optimizing old systems with tools like environmental labels, best in class and taxes on certain goods. When the climate and innovation challenge is expanded beyond focusing on reducing emissions from existing structures and optimizing current systems, it adds a new perspective while keeping the existing. E.g., when the fundamental aim of the innovation ecosystem is not just growth, productivity, employment, etc., but to deliver on human needs sustainably, this adds a dimension to the current innovation work. The need for an expanded climate and innovation agenda was established in IPCCs 1.5 C special report an the SSP1 pathway (Low-Energy Demand). It is also now acknowledged by the UNFCC, including the UNFCCC Global innovation Hub and Paris Committee on Capacity-building (PCCB) that have published thought-leadership work such as the PCCB Technical paper “Enhancing the ownership of developing countries of building and maintaining capacity for climate action”