Humans have an innate desire to name things, but to be honest, we’re not always that good at it.
Take climate tech: it’s a category of companies and technologies that, broadly speaking, seek to minimize or reverse our impact on the climate while also helping us adapt to its increasing changes. As terms go, climate tech is actually not bad since it defines the sector’s focus in two words.
It’s certainly better than its predecessor, clean tech. It’s what startups that today fall under the climate tech banner would have likely called themselves just over a decade ago. It wasn’t a very good descriptor, though. To the uninitiated, clean tech just as easily could have meant robot vacuums or novel household supplies. Climate tech is much easier to grasp.
But climate tech is about a decade old, and humans also like to feel like they’re at the vanguard of something new. That, plus climate tech’s scope has grown to the point where it’s getting a bit unwieldy. Some have begun to explore alternatives over the past year or so.
Planetary health emerged as an early alternative, first coined in the medical journal The Lancet in 2014. Some investors embraced it, in part to address the problem of scope creep. Plenty of companies don’t seek to address carbon pollution, but are still focused on technologies that would address humanity’s impact on the planet. It has its appeal, but most people have stuck with climate tech.
Then Donald Trump was elected for a second time. “Climate” hasn’t exactly transformed from a buzzword into a dirty word, but people are actively talking about distancing themselves from the term. You can try to fight it if you want, but the migration had actually begun before the election. In five years, we’ll be calling climate tech something else entirely.
What’ll it be? People have started throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. Planetary health is an obvious alternative; it’s descriptive and has an early lead. The American dynamism platform contains a clean energy plank, but that term is associated with a single VC firm — a16z, whose partner Katherine Boyle coined it and runs a practice under that name — and there’s a lot of other stuff packed into it, including defense, public safety, education, housing, and more.
Frontier tech is another, though if you thought climate tech was too broad, you definitely won’t like how much frontier tech encompasses. Critical infrastructure? That overlaps with climate tech, but the Venn diagram isn’t a perfect circle. Deep tech is another that wraps around climate tech, but involves a lot more like AI, robotics, and quantum computing.
The most recent proposal was growth tech. It’s not my intention to throw stones, but I just can’t see it catching on. It’s too generic — aren’t all venture-backed startups seeking growth? — and it doesn’t capture the gist of what these startups are pushing for. Is it likely that climate tech will unleash a wave of growth and industrial innovation? You don’t have to look much further than China to understand that. But I think there are better terms.
Since I’m not one to critique without offering a solution, here’s mine: If we really need a term, I’m going to suggest resilience tech. It’s not perfect, and I’ll probably think of something better in the future. But for now, I think it’ll do. It captures the gist of what climate tech is driving at: to make both the world and humanity more resilient.
