When people ask me whether I’m optimistic about climate, my answer is unequivocal: yes. The reason? I spend my time with the people building the future.
As CEO of the Climate Solutions Prize, I meet founders, researchers and entrepreneurs from across Canada who are forging technologies that are not only cleaner, but better: superior products, superior economics and superior ways of solving entrenched problems.
They are not waiting for permission. They are already building the solutions the world demands. The next era of climate action will not be led by slogans. It will be led by builders.
Canada needs more of them. But we also have more of them than most people realize, and too often we fail to help them get from breakthrough to scale.
Opalia in Montreal has developed a way to produce real milk from mammary cells, without the cow and without the methane. In Kingston, Ontario, RXN Hub is building Canada’s connective infrastructure for green chemistry commercialization, providing the modular lab space, piloting bays and technical validation that climate ventures need. Dispersa, based in Toronto, has created biodegradable chemicals derived from wood waste that replace petrochemicals in cleaning and industrial products, cutting both toxicity and carbon footprint.
These are not concepts in search of a market. They are proven technologies, validated by independent experts, tackling urgent challenges across food systems, oceans and the built environment.
The bottleneck lies in moving solutions from validation to deployment, at pace. The issue is not talent; it is risk aversion. Too many promising technologies stall between proof of concept and market because our funding ecosystem remains too rigid and too slow at the critical stages. We need agile mechanisms to de-risk innovation in the eyes of investors, customers and strategic partners.
De-risking the path from validation to scale
What does connective infrastructure look like in practice? It starts with rigorous, independent validation: technical due diligence, third-party testing and feasibility assessment that de-risks breakthrough innovation for investors, customers and strategic partners.
This requires structured pathways where capital, innovation and government converge, not once a year, but as a permanent operating rhythm within Canada’s climate ecosystem. Initiatives like the Climate Solutions Prize are bridging that gap across seven innovation tracks, from energy to water to agriculture to the built environment.
The countries that lead the next economy will be the ones that not only invent breakthrough technologies but also create the fastest path from invention to adoption.
– Galith Levy, CEO, Climate Solutions Prize
The evidence suggests the model works. When catalytic capital meets validated innovation at the right inflection point, investment follows. More than $12 million in prize funding has helped unlock more than $111 million in subsequent capital. That ratio reveals something critical: for many climate ventures, the barrier is not the calibre of the technology. It is the confidence gap, the hesitation—among investors, customers and partners—to be first to deploy a validated technology at commercial scale. That is where most climate ventures lose momentum.
A pragmatic path forward
I often hear climate innovation framed as a trade-off: growth versus responsibility, economy versus environment. I see it differently. The most compelling solutions I encounter are not the ones that ask the market to make a sacrifice. They are the ones that win because they are simply better: cheaper, faster, cleaner, more resilient or more profitable.
The countries that lead the next economy will be the ones that not only invent breakthrough technologies but also create the fastest path from invention to adoption. Canada has more invention than we often recognize. Our weakness is what comes next. Too many promising technologies stall between proof and scale because they cannot secure a demonstration project or attract the catalytic capital needed to move from a promising idea to a real industry. The countries that win will be the ones that solve that challenge fastest and figure out what risks are worth taking. That is the real race now.
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What Canada lacks is not science, entrepreneurs or capital. It lacks a system built for speed.
The point is not innovation for its own sake. It is innovation that succeeds on its own economic merit and delivers measurable impact. What we need now is the willingness to move faster, take smarter risks and build the connective infrastructure that gets the right capital to the right technologies at the right moment.
This is not a uniquely Canadian challenge. But Canada has an opportunity few countries do: world-class research, extraordinary founders, and growing pools of capital looking for credible, high-impact opportunities.
The innovators are already here. The question is whether Canada will move fast enough to let them win.
Galith Levy is the CEO and co-founder of the Climate Solutions Prize. The 2026 Climate Solutions Prize Festival takes place June 8 and 9 in Montreal. For more information: climatesolutionsprize.com/2026festival.
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