Maritime UK has formed a partnership with Carbon13 to encourage technological innovation as part of efforts to cut emissions in the industry.
The parties announced they will launch the Venture Builder for the Climate Crisis, an eight month programme to support start-ups and investable ventures.
Each venture that is built and invested in must have the potential to reduce CO2e emissions by ten million tonnes. Collectively Carbon13, with Maritime UK, aims to reduce emissions by 400 million tonnes, the equivalent to the UK’s current annual emissions.
Maritime contributes around £46.1 billion to the UK economy and supports over 1 million jobs. Building a start-up that can reduce emissions by ten million tonnes means that in practice it needs to help 100 million consumers reduce their footprint by 1%, or 10m customers by 10%.
Ben Murray, Director of Maritime UK said, “There is no greater mission facing our planet than to decarbonise our economy, and that means massive progress must be made in an incredibly short period of time.
“That’s especially true for maritime – a sector responsible for enabling global trade, including some 95% of all imports and exports to the United Kingdom.
“Whilst the pace of change and innovation is quickening, there is much progress that needs to be made to ensure we have viable carbon neutral solutions by the end of this decade.
“Those solutions do not yet fully exist and that’s why we need to support the best talent to develop the most innovative of products and services, from wherever they come.
“We’re excited that this partnership with Carbon13 will help identify and realise truly transformational solutions and equally provide a talented pool of innovative companies to help respond to the challenges our sector faces.”
