The Business Development Bank of Canada is launching a new $400 million fund for climate tech companies.
Climate Tech Fund II, as it is called, will invest in Canadian climate tech firms that are at the scale-up or commercialization stages. The goal is to scale and deploy low-carbon technologies to help Canada meet its GHG emissions reduction targets.
The BDC debuted its first climate fund in 2018, with $600 million that it invested locally over four years. The investment corporation plans to make its second, smaller fund last five years, even as climate change accelerates.
“Our investment strategy is not about market trends but GHG emissions reduction,” said Jérôme Nycz, executive vice president of BDC Capital.
To date, BDC says it has funded 50 climate- and clean-tech companies via the fund, which puts it in the same camp as other busy investors in the scene, including Active Impact Investments and Sustainable Development Technology Canada (which is also backed by the Canadian government).
The fund announcement comes just ahead of the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in early November in Egypt. It also arrives at a time when the UN has issued a report warning that the plans most countries submitted as signatories of the Paris Agreement to reduce GHG emissions are still not ambitious enough to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees celsius by the end of the century.
