Google's Climate Tech Partnership With British Bank HSBC - Sustainability Magazine
Google’s Climate Tech Partnership With British Bank HSBC | Sustainability Magazine
Google’s Climate Tech Partnership With British Bank HSBC
Tom Swallow
The technology giant Google is a powerhouse for sustainable innovation, namely climate technologies that reap benefits in unknowing places.
From the integration of energy into a digital ecosystem to global weather and traffic insights that reduce fuel consumption and travel disruptions, the company shows just how valuable data can be if leveraged in the right way.
Desirability shows as the company gains the attention of HSBC to drive its Google Cloud initiatives forward.
The bank’s Global Head of Commercial Banking Sustainability Natalie Blyth told The Fintech Times that “a step change is needed to scale up the new technologies that will play a crucial role in supporting global decarbonisation”.
This is where she also notes the cruciality of partnerships to drive finances in the right direction.
“By combining financing support, cloud technologies and connectivity to partners across our combined footprints, we will help climate tech vendors accelerate their growth, and develop the solutions we urgently need at scale,” says Blyth.
A partnership driving more climate tech opportunities
HSBC is backing Google financially as a powerhouse for climate tech opportunities. The British bank launches a venture debt financing package, which will provide funding for renewable energy traction systems for buyers, sellers and financiers of clean tech projects. This will be done through LevelTen Energy, which has already facilitated US$5bn worth of clean energy transactions in the past and, with HSBC’s support, will scale this further.
“The scale of climate challenge requires a global ecosystem of technology providers bringing solutions that drive impact,” says Justin Keeble, Managing Director for Global Sustainability at Google Cloud. “This is why we launched our Google Cloud Ready sustainability ecosystem, which—one year in—includes leading climate tech companies. Many of these partners need access to finance and we are excited to partner with HSBC to support firms key to climate action.”
Google’s climate tech innovations in action
At Sustainability LIVE London 2023, we had the pleasure of learning more about Google’s climate tech offerings, such as its latest Google Maps functions and weather predictions that leverage data from various points of infrastructure.
In this session at Sustainability LIVE, Adam Elman, Head of Sustainability at Google, showcased these great works and emphasised the impact that climate tech can have on the world we live in—especially with major disruptions impacting countries globally in the wake of climate change.
As he explained at the event, “Google has been focused on this for a long time. We're actually in our third decade of climate action and we think about our work in three different buckets,” says Elman.
With this key collaboration, we expect to see expansion in this area as businesses create more intelligent solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.
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Related Knowledge Center: Climate economics
Climate change is now a driver of the world’s economy. The impact is profound:
- Catastrophic weather events — hurricanes, floods, droughts, high temperatures — are more frequent and more extreme. The cost can be measured in both the initial damage caused and the longer-term impact on the economy.
- Vulnerable communities are increasing climate-related investments, hardening infrastructure and taking other protective measures.
- Investment in carbon capture and storage technologies is increasingly rapidly.
- Governments are making investments and crafting regulations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
On top of all of this is the cost of uncertainty. As the Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2018 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, says, “The assumption that current and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer valid.”