The world isn’t spending enough on climate change. But as government and corporate investments fall short–we spent around $280 billion globally last year, $2.1 trillion short of what a recent landmark climate report says is necessary–a new startup suggests that crowdfunding could begin to fill the gap.
“The reality is that when you read the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report that says we have 12 years to save the world, and the world needs to invest $2.4 trillion every single year to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius . . . it really makes you feel helpless and powerless and like there’s nothing you can do,” says Aoi Senju, CEO and cofounder of the startup Jumpstart. The startup is designed to point people to concrete action, with clean energy investments targeted at areas where the grid lacks renewables and other sources of funding.
“We wanted to make it more flexible for people to contribute to clean energy and actually make it possible for people to contribute to meaningful clean energy around the world,” Senju says. The startup also wanted to focus on markets that lack widespread access to electricity and are getting less attention from the clean energy sector, and where developers have less access to funding.
The website also plans to crowdfund some individual residential solar projects in communities that can’t afford solar panels on their own. In Texas, where some recent immigrants haven’t built up enough of a credit history to get a standard loan for solar panels, Jumpstart plans to use machine learning to evaluate potential customers’ creditworthiness itself. “We see that as being a very big market,” says Senju. “[There are] a lot of customers who want to go solar, but just haven’t had the financing opportunity to do so.”
As some governments pull back from action–the frontrunner in Brazil’s presidential election has said that he wants to follow Trump’s lead and withdraw from the Paris climate agreement–and others move slowly, the site aims to give everyone else a way to act now. “We just really want to give people hope again,” Senju says. “You don’t need to be a Google or a Facebook or the president of the United States to support clean energy.”
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