Eclipse Ventures has introduced an open source sustainability framework that assesses the environmental and economic potential of emerging technologies focused on reducing the 75% of worldwide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with physical industries like manufacturing, health care, supply chain, and agriculture.

The Eclipse Carbon Optimization (ECO) framework was developed in conjunction with climate advisory firm Rho Impact to target the modernization and parallel decarbonization of these industries while driving funds toward areas experiencing long-term underinvestment.

"All of the challenges the economy faces today, particularly supply chain shortages and inflation, are due to underinvestment in physical infrastructure. Left unaddressed, this underinvestment will make our global challenges exponentially worse," Eclipse Ventures partner Jay Knafel told SDxCentral.

And despite the carbon cost of physical industries and infrastructure, the world needs them, he said. "Net-zero goals are contingent upon investments in the decarbonization" of physical industries, even if those industries today contribute to climate change far more than they mitigate the crisis.

And as with investing in sustainable technology, financing environmental improvements in carbon intensive infrastructure is crucial, Knafel explained. "Mitigating the carbon intensity of our current infrastructure will make it that much easier for future-facing renewable energy and carbon capture to offset emissions and inch closer to net-zero," he added.

Knafel said his firm's vision is based on a revitalized physical economy and industrial evolution founded on modernizing legacy infrastructure.

This type of evolution will require what he describes as a "great divergence" where economic and enterprise growth is decoupled from GHG emissions growth. This will lead to "a scenario where global gross domestic product can still double every quarter century, but with a net-zero carbon economy," Knafel explained.

That's only possible, however, if stakeholders are able to quantify both economic return on investment and carbon reduction potential of various emerging technologies.

"Wide-scale adoption of sustainable technologies will be challenging if organizations cannot improve their bottom line" by adding revenue or reducing costs, he said. To that point, the ECO framework aims to guide and incentivize tech investments that can minimize the environmental impacts of carbon intensive physical industries.

The ECO framework is based on the open platform and soon-to-be open source tool CRANE developed by the nonprofit Prime Coalition. Eclipse uses this to "think about and analyze potential carbon intensity reduction over the long term," Knafel said, adding that the firm is "deeply committed" to expanding and improving CRANE by sitting on steering committees and helping out with new methodology releases.

The ECO framework came into play when Eclipse applied CRANE to its investment portfolio. "Any fast-growing tech company and its potential investors must be able to look at more than what that startup’s GHG emissions were yesterday or are at present. They need to be able to measure what the likely impact will be 10 or 20 years into the future, and to model those assumptions alongside economic assumptions to get to the heart of the true promise and impact of that technology," Knafel said.

And by combining environmental and economic potential, "we can calculate the projected carbon reduction potential of a given technology, and thereby encourage investment," he explained.

By developing the framework with accredited third party Rho Impact, it's now an easily-replicable tool across industries for investors and entrepreneurs alike. "For quite a while, startup financiers have had tools to calculate the economic return on investment for a given technology, but never one that could quantify carbon reduction in physical industries. This is an industry first and one that Eclipse wants to share with other investors," he said.

Eclipse Ventures estimates 11 companies in its portfolio can potentially reduce global GHG emissions by more than 200 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year by 2040, Knafel said. "Put in another way, we’re removing the equivalent of ~44 million internal combustion engine passenger vehicles from the road," he wrote.

Technology-focused manufacturing company Bright Machines, which operates in the US, Israel, China, Mexico, and Poland, shows potential to reduce the carbon intensity of electronics manufacturing by 5.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually as a result of improved yields, higher uptime, and greater reuse of the company's programmable microfactories, according to the results of the ECO framework assessment.

"The kinds of in-depth measurements made available via the ECO report help communicate the positive impact a new technology can and will have on climate change, while also capturing how much more efficient a disruptive technology is in comparison to existing incumbent offerings," Bright Machines CEO Lior Susan said in a statement.

"Too many factories, unfortunately, have not evolved alongside the products they make," Susan added. "What the report confirmed is that Bright Machines Microfactories, when delivered as a flexible and scalable full-stack automation solution, can help to modernize one of the world’s biggest industries by enabling  manufacturers to localize supply chains, which is both economically and environmentally advantageous over the long run."

Knafel also highlighted his firm's later stage investment in autonomous vehicle company Wayve, "which has the potential to remake modern transportation and logistics," he said, citing Wayve's artificial intelligence technology and camera-first sensing suite for its ability to ease adoption for fleet operators compared to traditional robotics. The ECO framework estimates Wayve's technology has the potential to reduce carbon emissions by 101 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, assuming 20% penetration of the technology.