The good news is that governments are incorporating green thinking into their Covid-19 recovery stimulus packages. Speakers pointed to China’s pledge of carbon neutrality by 2060, California’s 2035 ban on the sale of new internal-combustion-engine vehicles, and the European Union’s Green Deal.

Japan’s aim in hosting the six conferences of “Tokyo Beyond Zero Week” was to make a similarly impactful contribution to addressing climate change. And a little over two weeks after ICEF 2020, on October 26, Japan announced a goal of carbon neutrality by 2050.

Still, the road ahead remains challenging. Jon Moore, BloombergNEF CEO, pointed out that of global stimulus packages worth $12 trillion, just 1% was targeted at green initiatives–versus 7% for carbon-intensive industries. The financial sector is also lagging. Capital markets are failing to serve sustainable technology innovation because they see it as “too risky, too long-term and with transactions too small to generate big fees,” argued Mungo Park, chair of Innovator Capital. Meanwhile the fact that breakthroughs needed for deep decarbonisation have no “natural owner”–meaning there is no one pre-existing industry to drive technological change–is another bottleneck.

Against this backdrop, can the world innovate fast enough to stave off catastrophe? The solution, says Mark Lewis, BNP Paribas’ global head of sustainability research, is to find the right combination of public policy incentives to trigger a “virtuous feedback loop,” where policy attracts private capital, driving economies of scale and technological breakthrough, which in turn lead to falling costs and the setting of more ambitious policy targets.

“We already know how to scale up finance to achieve decarbonisation breakthrough,” said Lewis. “We’ve done it with renewable energy. We can apply the same lessons in the hydrogen arena.” Building up Europe’s hydrogen economy by 2030, he added, would cost around $400 billion–a figure equivalent to just 3% of the bloc’s annual GDP.

Innovations in nuclear power were also in the spotlight. Attention was drawn to the paradoxes in the nuclear debate. The environmental movement opposes nuclear energy because of the burden it places on future generations in the form of nuclear waste–something fossil fuels also do, albeit in the form of climate change. Since the energy transition to wind and solar represents an exceptional downward shift to less reliable and more energy-diffuse fuels, nuclear needs a place at the table. Park referred enthusiastically to new Japanese-American nuclear energy technology, where the GE Hitachi X300, using Lightbridge fuel, will operate at 300°C (“the same temperature as a pizza oven”), eliminate 94% of the pollution and produce 30% more electricity. “There’s a new nuclear age and Japan’s a huge player,” he declared.

Bold breakthroughs are often driven by government-funded research and international collaboration. This was the message of Akira Yoshino, Nobel Laureate and head of Japan’s Global Zero Emission Research Center. “We cannot solve climate change with a single technology,” he said. “We must fuse multiple technologies and cooperate internationally.” Yoshino pointed to RD20, a Tokyo- based conference that brings together leading G20 researchers, as a successful example of cross-border exchange.

Not every shift to net zero, however, has to be radical and non-linear. An example of more gradual change was given by Fiona Reynolds, CEO of PRI, who described how the European oil majors have responded to investor engagement by starting to invest in solar, wind and electricity generation.

Mobilising women is one key way to accelerate climate-change response. Laurence Tubiana, European Climate Foundation CEO, noted the effectiveness of women in building momentum by speaking “with determination and emotion to get us to act.” The Sasakawa Peace Foundation’s Ayaka Matsuno unveiled a study showing that achieving the critical mass of 30% or more women on boards makes a real difference to companies’ climate governance and ability to innovate. Other speakers pointed to women’s higher representation in renewables versus the traditional, male-dominated energy sector as another sign of their increasing importance in the climate-change battle.