For years we have been hearing voices warning us about the bleak future that awaits our planet, a world that is heading towards a climate crisis. Experts and institutions that watch over the preservation of our ecosystem continually warn us about the dangerous terrain we are entering and the need to take measures to reverse this situation. And, at last, we seem to have decided to take heed. Recently, we have seen the emergence of a host of companies whose mission is to make our world more sustainable by using technology to, if not stop, at least postpone the climate crisis. As reflected in the latest edition of our Tyto Tech 500, the number of authoritative GreenTech voices increased exponentially in 2021. This is not an isolated trend in any one country, it is something we have identified in all the countries we analysed in our study of the most influential personalities in the tech space in Europe. The number of GreenTech influencers increased significantly in the UK (+160%), from 15 experts in 2020 to 39 in 2021. In Germany, the number of influencers grew by 47%, from 17 to 25. In France, the number of GreenTech influencers surged from 2 to 32, a growth of 1,500%. 

Another finding that supports the growing impact of GreenTech experts is that out of the 17 technology sectors analysed, it is the fourth most prevalent in our pan-European ranking of the 500 most influential people. 7.4% of the people on our Power List belong to this category, which closely follows behind General, FinTech and ConsumerTech. Notable names on the list include Alok Sharma, Simon Evans, Peter Altmaier and Craig Bennet.  

In our next edition of the Tech 500 we will pay special attention to this sector to see if, as expected, it continues to gain relevance in society and become one of the main topics on the technology agenda. In the meantime, we have compiled, within this article, some of the main trends in the GreenTech sector that we believe will become particularly relevant in the coming years.

Renewable energy storage 

The current context of war in Ukraine has only served to underline how dependent we are on traditional energy sources and the imperative need to boost renewable energy generation. Although the cost of generating electricity using the sun and wind as energy sources has decreased considerably in recent times, the main barrier to adopting renewable technologies is their storage for long periods of time at low cost. Storage is critical because the generation of this type of energy only happens when the sun shines or the wind blows, and therefore we need an efficient and low-cost way to store that energy until it is needed. That is why we believe this will be one of the areas where most effort will be put in the short term. 

Carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) 

Reducing CO2 emissions is not enough to achieve carbon neutrality targets. It is also necessary to focus on technologies that capture CO2 from the atmosphere or other sources such as fossil or biomass-fueled power stations and store it for future use. Strengthened climate goals and new investment incentives are delivering unprecedented momentum for CCUS. In fact, in December 2021, the European Commission adopted the Communication ‘Sustainable Carbon Cycles’, which sets the long-term objective to restore sustainable and climate-resilient carbon cycles and depends in part on CO2 removal techniques based on CCUS. One of the main reasons why CCUS projects should be pushed forward is because it is complicated and costly for heavy industry (e.g. cement plants) to adapt to run on cleaner energy. But also to unlock the potential of hydrogen, a clean-burning gas that could replace fossil fuels, which can be produced by capturing carbon from fossil fuel gas before it reaches the atmosphere. 

Hydrogen-fueled vehicles 

As mentioned above, hydrogen has an important role to play in the transition to a decarbonised economy, particularly in the mobility sector. Battery-powered electric vehicles are not the only EV that exists. Although they are still in their infancy, it is very likely that we will see an increasing number of fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) in the future. These are cars that use hydrogen to power them and, in addition to being more efficient than combustion vehicles, do not produce environmentally harmful emissions. Car makers have been experimenting with this type of technology for years and the time may finally be ripe for this industry to take off. 

Circular waste management 

Waste management is far from new, but startups are now innovating to transform waste into new materials or products, upcycling existing waste into everything from fuel to clothes. There are already solutions that allow waste to be transformed into energy through processes such as gasification and anaerobic digestion. We will also see more and more solutions for wastewater treatment such as greywater recycling or electrocoagulation systems, which remove heavy metals, emulsified oils, bacteria, and other contaminants from water. Safe and sustainable waste management reduces the impact on the environment and will enable a greener future.

We will still have to wait a while to see if the efforts being made in these areas bear fruit and help us reverse the climate crisis. What is unquestionable is that it is necessary to bet on new GreenTech solutions because, as the wise Carl Sagan said: “Anything else you’re interested in is not going to happen if you can’t breathe the air and drink the water. Don’t sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet”. 

Featured image from Pexels. 

This Sunday will see the first round of the French presidential elections and the campaign has been all the rage for several weeks, if not months now. The candidates have been appearing on TV and radio, multiplying their public appearances and other interviews with the press.  

The ongoing electoral campaign has also been marked by peaks of online interactions, especially on social media, of candidates and their supporters. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine running a political campaign in 2022 without creating and amplifying a presence on platforms such as Twitter, TikTok or Twitch. It’s quite clear that this time around, a lot of debates have been occurring via 280-character-long societal analysis and critics of the other candidates.  

This results in an upward trend of the government and political influencers’ impact and visibility that the latest edition of our Tyto Power List also confirmed: in 2021, the number of government and political influencers increased by 57.1% compared with the previous year, the second highest increase behind academics (74.4%).  

In fact, Government occupies the fourth position in our ranking by type of influencers, with business leaders, journalists and academics making the top 3. Yet, Government is in third place in the pan-European Tech 500 Power List, the list with the 500 most influential people across the United Kingdom, Germany and France. 7.8% of the influencers on that list belong to this category and the higher we move up in the ranking, the higher the percentage of influencers from the Government category. This shows the great influence they have, whether we look at their influence within each individual country analysed on this report or across the three regions combined. 

However, looking at the France ranking, it’s worth noting that members of the Government category only occupy 3 positions within the top 100 – compared to 14 in Germany and 17 in the United Kingdom. Therefore, one can wonder: why are politicians so few in the France ranking in terms of influence and public presence while we are in the midst of one of the most important times for the country – that only occurs every 5 years, nonetheless?   

The different conditions required to enter the race for the Elysée as well as the strict agenda could be part of the answer: several candidates officialised their presidential ambitions relatively late – having between late January and early March to secure 500 Présentation signatures from elected officials and thus gain the right to appear on the first-round ballot. Concretely, this means that their only “required” campaign started in 2022, whilst our ranking analyses 2021. Even so more and more formal and official speeches did happen in 2021, most of them only occurred on the second half of the year, if not on the last quarter – which could explain their low ranking if we compare to other categories who have most likely been active all year long. 

When it comes to these elections and their influence (or lack thereof), another point worth mentioning is the fact that it all boils down to one thing: the candidates themselves and their electoral campaign strategies. Up until fairly recently, the conversation in France tended to be less about the candidates or their programs and more about the lack of unity among different political parties – and the length of time it took to only appoint their respective candidate, let alone provide sufficient support to the chosen one. 

When talking about politics in France, an issue that keeps coming back is how fragmented the current political ecosystem is. And this is having a direct impact on peoples’ interest in these candidates: it took a while just to agree on who to support even among citizens with the same political affinities, so it’s no surprise that politicians got the short end of the visibility stick. 

If we were to be a bit less pragmatic and a bit more hypothetical: some people have also suspected that French citizens simply grew tired of political speeches and content around them, especially after the last couple of years. 

All around the world (and France is no exception), the last two years has seen politicians and governments put even more under the spotlight to showcase their solutions and alternatives to the disruptions we have been facing in all parts of our lives – the pandemic since 2020 (and the subsequent quarantines, curfews, etc.) and the initiatives of the Health Minister (in terms of vaccines, covid passes and other sanitary regulations) have of course been at the forefront in every media channel. Could this explain why the people have started to reduce their inclination to provide echo chambers to politicians?  

The next edition of our Tyto Tech 500 Power List will most certainly reveal some interesting trends about influencers from the Government category: will there be more of them in the ranking? Will they gain higher ranks due to an increased visibility and media presence?  

In the meantime, you can find our latest Tyto Tech 500 Power List here. 

Photo by Hansjörg Keller on Unsplash

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a clear need for governments to communicate clearly and deliver effective messages, both in terms of how they were managing and preventing the spread of the virus, as well as updating the public on how different areas of society were affected, especially, education and health services. Throughout this worrying situation, at home, the public was listening, reading and scrolling attentively. An effective communication strategy was therefore essential to ensure that citizens viewed government policies, include national lockdowns and strict pandemic restrictions, as necessary to preserving public health.

But political leaders also required scientific and technical advice in responding to the pandemic crisis, whether in taskforces, committees, expert groups or panels. Here we see the role of the academic or researcher gaining importance – whether these are independent researchers or affiliated to a specific government department – and as the public sector has relied on these personalities, both their offline and online influence (including social media, media appearances, interviews, etc.) has increased. In the fifth edition of our Tyto Tech 500 research, we have found that, with the advent of the pandemic, the influence of individuals within the Government and Academia sectors has grown significantly within the past year.

Public sector and Academia at the top of our Tech 500

Our research found that business leaders and journalists continue to be the most prevalent influencer types in the Tech 500, constituting 60.7% and 18.8% respectively. In other words, eight out of every 10 influencers in our study belong to one of these two groups. Nonetheless, in 2021, the number of influencers from the academic sector increased by 74.4% and those from the government sector rose by 57.1%.

In fact, Academic and Government occupy the third and fourth positions in the ranking by type of influencers; 7.4% of the people in the Tech 500 rankings belong to one of these two groups.

This trend carried over into the pan-European Tech 500 Power List, but in this case the positions switched, with Government in third place (7.8%) and Academic in fourth place (5.8%). The percentage of influencers belonging to either of these two categories increased to 13.6%, which shows the great influence they have, occupying very prominent positions whether we examine their influence within each individual country or combined across all three.

Another interesting fact is, if we look at the top 100 positions on a pan-European level, 30% of the influencers are either members of governmental organisations or leading academics. Furthermore, by looking at the top 25 influencers, the percentage of representatives from these two categories of Government and Academia account for more than half: 52% to be precise. This proves that, although these are not the categories of influencers with the greatest numerical weight or volume, their representatives are clearly very significant. As a result, they are positioned at the very top of our research.

The top three influencers from these two categories combined consist of people linked to the UK government: Alok Sharma, Chris Whitty and Rishi Sunak. Alok Sharma is a UK politician serving as President for COP26 and Minister of State at the Cabinet Office. He was previously a Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Chris Whitty, as we mentioned in our previous HealthTech blogpost, is a British physician and epidemiologist serving as Chief Medical Officer for England and Chief Medical Adviser to the UK Government since 2019. These two influencers – Alok Sharma and Chris Whitty – are also the most influential Tech 500 personalities in the GreenTech and HealthTech sectors, respectively. In the case of Rishi Sunak, his influence derives mainly from his position as UK Chancellor of the Exchequer since 2020, where he has an influence across various technology-related sectors, rather than on a single specific area.

The most influential member among the Academic category is French aerospace engineer, pilot, and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet. Pesquet, currently the commander of the International Space Station, is ranked 25th in the overall Tech 500 and is the most prominent leader in the SpaceTech sector. In the Academic ranking we can also find Dr. Simon Evans, deputy editor and policy editor at Carbon Brief, as well as Professor Karol Sikora, one of the UK’s leading oncologists, and Dr. Matt Morgan, an intensive care doctor, author and lead for critical care research for Wales.

These are the top 10 Academic and Government influencers in the Tyto Tech 500:

Academics

1. Thomas Pesquet – European Space Agency (FR)
2. Simon Evans – Carbon Brief (UK)
3. Karol Sikora – Rutherford Health (UK)
4. Matt Morgan – Cardiff University (UK)
5. Holger Schmidt – Netzökonom (DE)
6. Alan Woodward – University of Surrey (UK)
7. Charles Spence – Oxford University (UK)
8. Doug Parr – Greenpeace (UK)
9. François Balloux – University College London (UK)
10. Noel Sharkey – University of Sheffield (UK)

Government

1. Alok Sharma – UK Government (UK)
2. Christopher Whitty – Civil Service (UK)
3. Rishi Sunak – UK Government (UK)
4. Michael Gove – UK Government (UK)
5. Patrick Vallance – UK Government (UK)
6. George Eustice – UK Government (UK)
7. Jens Spahn – German Government (DE)
8. Kate Green – UK Government (UK)
9. Peter Tschentscher – German Government (DE)
10. Oliver Dowden – UK Government (UK)

Want to know who are the biggest tech influencers in the UK, Germany and France? Download the full Tyto Tech 500 report here.