This 2023 report highlights the role of multistakeholder players in the continued growth of the Israeli climate tech ecosystem. This is expressed in both the private sector with entrepreneurs, founders, startups, investors and the corporates and businesses deploying the innovations; And in the public sector where the state fulfills several roles, acting as regulator, dominant customer, and financier.
Israel has yet to exhaust its potential for innovation, commercialization, and scaling up of climate tech solutions. Fully realizing this potential will diversify the Israeli hightech industry, create a world-leading hub, and promote global efforts for tackling the unmet needs of the climate crisis. Internally, it will support the attainment of Israel’s national climate goals, boost employment and the economy, and enhance resilience and adaptation to climate changes on various fronts, including energy, water, and food security.
The government is taking an active role in driving the climate tech ecosystem forward, and the Israel Innovation Authority has identified specific climate tech domains to which various government tools can be applied with the aim of ensuring significant growth and value. These domains were identified based on the local potential – in terms of knowledge base, existing startups, entrepreneurs, investments, and local strengths.
The identified climate challenge domains areas are: (a) Energy generation and storage; (b) Agriculture and food production – with a focus on precision agriculture, indoor (including vertical) agriculture/farming, and biotechnology, as well as alternative proteins (c) Eco-efficient water technologies; (d) Ecoefficient manufacturing, circularity, waste, and novel low-GHG materials and; (e) Carbon capture & storage, Carbon finance as well as Climate monitoring and forecasting.
These reflect the existing strengths of the local ecosystem as shown in this report (Clean Energy, Climate Smart Agriculture and Alternative Proteins), the domains which we identify as emerging and rapidly emerging (Circularity and Novel Materials, as well as Carbon Capture & Storage, Carbon Monitoring, Risk and Finance) and domains in need of further support such as Eco-Efficient Water Infrastructure – a mostly mature domain with past achievements in desalination and water treatment and Clean Manufacturing, currently showing stagnated growth.
The government actions to be implemented are the establishment of infrastructure, removal of regulation barriers as well as facilitation of knowledge transfer and collaborations. These are expected to provide a response to the barriers reported by the startups in this report and to facilitate growth and scale up.
This facilitation is complemented by the abundance of new initiatives from the private sector. Some examples are top talent moving into climate tech, new climate tech investment funds and verticals, the proliferation of new venture builders, accelerators and incubators, amplified focus in academia on technological solutions for climate, and a broader discussion within the general high-tech ecosystem on climate tech applications.
Climate tech competitions, hackathons, meetups, and events, for the most part collaborative efforts between varied stakeholders, are prolific, and bring in more and more individuals to climate tech, inspiring the creation of new startups. The existing collaborative spirit between all climate tech stakeholders (public, private and NGO’s) and the combined approach of “bottom up” and “top down” will undoubtably continue to drive the Israeli climate tech ecosystem to greater heights and success with growing global impact.