Last year, David McGee set his team a challenge. 

PwC was working with SustainabilityWorks, the Dublin-based environmental consultancy, on an analysis of the opportunities for the Climate Tech sector in Ireland, and McGee asked his colleagues to identify indigenous Irish companies operating in the space.

McGee, the ESG leader with PwC, reckoned they would be lucky to find “a couple of dozen” Climate Tech businesses. After all, he figured the sector was relatively nascent and had attracted little publicity. 

Yet, by the time the report was published, PwC and SustainabilityWorks had found 200 companies. 

When the second edition of the report was published last month, the number had increased to 300. For McGee, it highlighted the potential of the sector.

“You can’t start a big movement from zero. And the beauty of this is we’re not at zero,” McGee said.

The report, ‘The Irish Climate Tech Opportunity 2024’, detailed the diversity of the sector. Some of the companies operate in the maritime space. Others are developing solutions for the built environment. A number are championing smart farming. A host deal with the food value chain. The list goes on.

But the way McGee sees it, all are unified by a greater good. 

“They’re actually trying to solve a massive, big, knotty problem,” McGee said on the latest episode of The Tech Agenda podcast.

The trouble, however, is that the Climate Tech space is often overlooked – by investors, by policymakers, and by industry.

But this is something that McGee and his team are determined to change. He believes that Climate Tech can be a “double win” for Ireland – it can help the country achieve its climate emissions targets while simultaneously developing a vibrant new economic sector. 

Before that happens, however, MacGee argues that there needs to be a change of mindset. 

“The first thing we need to do,” he said, “is recognise Climate Tech as a sector in its own right.” 

Developing a Climate Tech roadmap

David McGee’s background is in technology. 

Before PwC, he held senior tech positions with one of the country’s biggest retail and wholesale businesses.

Now, he spends much of his time helping his clients, a mix of multinational corporations and indigenous firms, navigate digital transformation and sustainability initiatives.

And the more he assesses the challenges they face, the more he believes there is an opportunity for Ireland to become a world leader in Climate Tech. 

“Climate Tech offers this massive advantage. It’s both a climate and greenhouse gas abatement issue, and it’s an economic opportunity for Ireland Inc,” he said.

To ensure that Ireland takes advantage of this opportunity, McGee said that Ireland needs to actually understand the opportunity on offer. 

While policymakers understand defined sectors such as Fin Tech and Ag Tech, he said that Climate Tech was different because it spanned multiple markets. 

“Climate Tech cuts across multiple sectors, and that’s why it’s getting ignored. Some of the solutions might sit in Ag and Food. Some of them might sit in the built environment. Some of them might sit in Financial Services,” he said.

McGee said that policymakers in the EU and the US were now advancing the sector through the EU Green Deal and the Inflation Reduction Act in the US. 

He said the next step is for Irish politicians to really push the sector, and give it the same focus and priority that was given to developing the Med Tech and Fin Tech sector in Ireland in the past. 

“We have created a real world-class centre for innovation, research, development and production of Med Tech. We can do the same for Climate Tech,” McGee said.

To make this happen, McGee said that Ireland needs to attract international pools of capital to propel the sector forward and to ensure the world works towards decarbonisation. 

According to McGee, funding and supports for developing climate technologies should be focused on areas where there is a competitive advantage, instead of trying to address decarbonisation challenges across all economic sectors.

“The problem is capital allocation and capital flows. We need trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of capital – and that’s where we already know the solution,” he said.

McGree pointed to the issue of energy transition. Outside of batteries, he said the industry broadly knew what technology was required. The problem, he said, was capital. 

“We broadly know how to sort it out, but the capital required to fix that problem – not to mention planning and regulation and other things – is enormous. Where I think Climate Tech comes into its own, is in those in those sectors and in those challenges in society where we don’t quite fully know how to bridge the gap. How will we feed ourselves? How will we move ourselves, personal mobility? How will we build big buildings without concrete? It’s those kinds of challenges that we need to try to address, and that’s where climate technology comes in,” he said.

McGee said that Ireland was well placed to take advantage of the challenge. Pointing to the PwC/SustainabilityWorks report, he said that the country already had a vibrant Climate Tech ecosystem.

“We have a really strong third-level institution sector – lots of the companies have spun out of third-level incubators. We have entrepreneurs out there, and we have state funding. We need to recognise it as a platform and say, ‘This is Climate Tech’,” he said.

McGee referenced several areas including grid technologies, energy management services, and decarbonisation in commercial building and food system innovation.

“The whole world is racing to solve this problem at the same time. We have created some fantastic global companies out of Ireland in sectors like food. We’ve hosted amazing companies that have grown really well here in the tech space and in the pharmaceutical space,” he said. 

“If we want to create Climate Tech companies that are world-beaters and world-class over the next 10 to 15 years, now is the time to get behind the sector.”

He said Ireland needed a Climate Tech roadmap that aligned the country’s industrial policy with its decarbonisation priorities.

“There are countries who are already staking out a claim for this,” he said. “If we can start trying to think generationally about some of these issues, whether that’s offshore wind or whether that’s Climate Tech as a platform, it’s trying to set out where Ireland can win in 10, 15, 20 years from now, and try to set those foundations in place.”

The Tech Agenda with Ian Kehoe podcast series is sponsored by PwC.