Climate Tech was just the beginning

From climate to planetary systems 

Climate Tech has achieved something remarkable. In less than a decade, it has mobilized hundreds of billions in capital, built a generation of founders and investors fluent in the language of decarbonization, and shifted clean energy from a niche concern to mainstream infrastructure. That progress is real and it matters.

But today, it is becoming clear that the category it created was always a subset of something larger. The companies that will define the next decade of sustainable investing are solving problems that a carbon-only lens struggles to capture fully, and the gap between where capital is concentrated and where the systemic risk actually sits is one of the most significant overlooked opportunities in venture investing today.

Climate mitigation remains essential. The energy transition is unfinished, the capital needs are immense, and the window for avoiding the worst outcomes is narrowing. But five years of investing taught us that some of the most interesting opportunities we were seeing were operating well outside the carbon column. We kept backing them. Eventually we stopped calling it an exception and started calling it a thesis.

Earth Tech is that thesis. Earth Tech: the companies rebuilding the planetary systems on which long-term human prosperity depends.

The scientific foundation for this view is the Planetary Boundaries framework, developed by Johan Rockström and a team of Earth system scientists. The framework identifies nine biophysical systems that together define the safe operating space for human civilization: climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, and novel entities such as plastics and synthetic chemicals. The latest assessment shows that seven of the nine planetary boundaries have already been crossed. Climate Tech, by design, primarily focuses on one. The others, many already under strain, remain undercapitalized despite being tightly linked.

Furthermore, we are no longer only in the business of prevention. Several boundaries have been crossed far enough that adaptation is now as important as mitigation. The next generation of solutions must do two things at once: slow the damage and help societies continue to function well within a more constrained planetary system. For investors, the EU Taxonomy translates this science into a practical framework: six environmental objectives that map closely onto the planetary systems at risk. Yet funding flows tell a different story. Climate mitigation, one of the six, attracts more than 30 times the private equity of biodiversity, and more than 20 times that of water.¹

The numbers tell a stark story. Over half of the world GDP, or $44 trillion of global economic value, is moderately or highly dependent on nature.² Meanwhile, for every $1 invested in protecting or restoring nature, $30 is spent on activities that degrade it.³ 

Meanwhile, AI is simultaneously intensifying demand for key resources like energy, water, and minerals, while unlocking powerful new ways to monitor and manage planetary systems. How this transition unfolds within ecological limits is a defining question of this decade.

This leads to a deeper shift in how we think about impact investing. The question is no longer whether a company meets a set of ESG criteria. It is whether it contributes to real system resilience. The most relevant companies are not competing for a fixed pool of capital. They expand it by offering clear, economically grounded entry points into problems that were previously seen as abstract.

A new operating reality

The geopolitical context reinforces this shift. As supply chains fragment and nations prioritize access to food, water, energy, and critical materials, environmental resilience becomes a strategic priority. Reducing dependence on fragile external inputs is simultaneously a climate, security, and economic strategy. Sovereignty is increasingly ecological.

Yet there is a paradox at the heart of this moment. The world is becoming more closed, more fragmented, more focused on national interest. And yet the challenges that matter most, soil degradation, biodiversity collapse, water scarcity, climate adaptation, do not respect borders. They demand cross-regional cooperation and capital flows at precisely the moment when both are becoming harder to sustain. The funds and firms that can operate credibly across these lines, that have genuine presence and conviction in both the Global North and the Global South, will be best positioned to be resilient in the new world order. This is part of what we are building at Satgana: a bridge between Europe and Africa, two continents whose ecological and economic futures are deeply intertwined.

There is also a behavioral reality to acknowledge. Humans respond to immediate and visible risks, not distant and diffuse ones. Biodiversity loss in a tropical forest or soil degradation in the Sahel can feel abstract to capital allocators in the Global North. The planetary boundaries framework describes risks that are real, material, and accelerating, but they unfold on timescales and in geographies that make them easy to defer.

The way forward is not to fight this, but to align incentives. We focus on companies that solve a planetary constraint by addressing a problem that is immediate and local. When the environmental and economic logic point in the same direction, adoption follows.

Europe’s energy security concerns and its climate goals converge on the same solution: distributed renewables and storage deployed at scale. Biodiversity degradation is becoming a direct supply chain risk that companies are required to measure and manage. Weak cold chain infrastructure in Africa represents both a major source of food loss and a large, addressable economic inefficiency. In each case, the long term imperative and the short term incentive are aligned.

The most investable companies are those where the long-term planetary imperative and the short-term economic incentive converge. That overlap is the thesis.

The strongest signals come from companies measuring success in units that go beyond tonnes of CO₂. On circularity, Back Market, now valued at over €5 billion, tracks kilograms of raw materials avoided and devices kept out of landfill. On biodiversity, NatureMetrics uses environmental DNA to measure ecosystems at site level and raised $25 million in early 2025 to meet rising demand from corporates disclosing nature-related risks. The same logic runs through our own portfolio at Satgana. Alongside our climate investments (such as in next-generation energy storage, contrails avoidance, and direct air capture), we back companies operating across the fuller planetary stack. For example, Sweden-based Flox Intelligence applies AI to wildlife protection. France-based Onima repurposes brewers' waste streams into a novel protein-rich ingredient. Ethiopia-based Kubik turns plastic waste into affordable construction materials. Across our portfolio, impact is increasingly happening well beyond the carbon column.

This framing matters most in the Global South, especially Africa, where the "green as sacrifice" framing does not resonate. Adoption happens when the sustainable option is simply the better one. Off-grid solar cold chains cut annual post-harvest losses while reducing methane. Waste-to-materials solutions create income, address housing shortages, and remove environmental burdens. Distributed renewables offer energy sovereignty and cost stability. In each case, environmental and economic logic align. These are no-regret investments: value creation does not depend on policy, but on fundamental needs like food, water, energy, and resilience.

In emerging markets, the sustainable path needs to be the most practical one. The task is to identify those convergence points and back them at scale.

It is also worth being direct about financial returns. If there is one lesson from the 2020-2025 Climate Tech wave, it is that moral imperative alone is not enough. The most durable progress has come where sustainability and economic self-interest converge. When a solution addresses a real constraint at scale and does so in a way that is economically superior, the market is significant. We invest where financial performance and planetary impact are tightly linked.

The shape of the next decade

Climate Tech built something essential and it is not finished. But the frontier is moving. The most resilient companies of the decade ahead share a common profile: they address planetary system under stress, they build solutions that do not depend on goodwill or policy continuity, and they operate where the sustainable path is also the most practical one. Earth Tech is where sustainability, sovereignty, and prosperity converge: the companies rebuilding the systems that make life on Earth worth living, and the economies built on top of it. It is the thesis we are building our next decade around.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Sources

1: https://stateofclimatetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/NZI_2025-State-of-Climate-Tech-Report.pdf
2: https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_The_Future_Of_Nature_And_Business_2020.pdf
3: https://www.unep.org/resources/state-finance-nature-2026