CivTech 8 Demo Day kicked off at the Roxy Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh’s Old Town, gargoyles looming over the stage as presenters showcased their solutions to CivTech’s challenges. 

Scottish Minister for Small Business, Innovation, Tourism and Trade, Richard Lochhead, opened CivTech 8, remarking on the surroundings. 

Edinburgh’s Old and New Town serves as an excellent example of the meteoric rise of the Scottish capital during the industrial revolution, and showcases Scotland’s part in creating world-changing innovations. 

It also highlights the stark inequalities and dark history sparked by this transformative era – much of Edinburgh’s Old Town lies trapped underneath as riches ushered in new builds and new people, leaving much of the city’s inhabitants in decrepit damp. 

Lochhead says there’s a similar revolution occurring now, but we need not repeat the same mistakes as the 1780s, where industrial progress and inequality went hand in hand.

Even since the last CivTech Demo Day, just five months ago, the world has changed. 

The rise of generative AI large language models have created a flurry of new technological and ethical conundrums to face, bringing new hopes and fears to humanity’s problems. 

The Scottish government itself has changed – Nicola Sturgeon stepped down, and Scotland has seen its first change in First Minister since 2014. 

Still, many things are the same – the UK is still facing a cost-of-living crisis, energy prices are still strapping households and businesses, and the climate emergency has only become more urgent. 

“The world at the moment is facing many challenges the likes of which we haven’t seen before,” Lochhead said, “and we don’t have a lot of time to tackle these.” 

CivTech took a new focus this time round, facing some of Scotland’s, and the world’s toughest questions around the effects of climate change. 

Scotland’s netzero and biodiversity goals are some of the most ambitious in the world. 

By 2045, Scotland aims to be a netzero nation, meaning it will emit net zero carbon emissions. 

Also by 2045, they plan to have restored biodiversity across its land and seas. 

Lochead lamented the “sense of urgency” surrounding these issues, but noted that “Scotland has creativity and ingenuity in abundance.” 

CivTech’s unique approach – having public and third sector organisations challenge the private sector to use their skills and technology to solve problems facing the country – presents an opportunity to address these issues out with substantial economic pressures. 

While solutions need to be viable, CivTech allows a foundational step in addressing oft-forgotten issues plaguing the public sector, which has implications to benefit the economy – and Scotland – as a whole.

CivTech took an environmental approach this round, highlighting their new Innovate for Nature initiative to create solutions to some of Scotland’s toughest challenges, including achieving net zero and biodiversity goals.

A Circular Economy 

South of Scotland Enterprise and Zero Waste Scotland partnered to devise a challenge around how technology can support a more circular economy and Scotland’s NetZero ambitions. 

“A transition to a circular economy means a fundamental shift in the way we manufacture, use and view products, meaning we would have to recover and reuse as many products as possible,” Helen Laverty from Zero Waste Scotland explained. 

A key driver for this solution was the “increasing interest and regulatory pressure around managing coproducts,” Justin Ord of South of Scotland Enterprise said. 

Ord noted that increasingly, there are calls to classify waste as co-products, which would mean companies would have to consider the environmental impact of these waste products as part of their total production structure and strategy. 

To mitigate waste, Looper took up the challenge, developing a life cycle assessment software to track and reduce the climate impacts of individual companies. 

Many companies will publish their own statistics on their carbon footprint, but these can take costly and time consuming consultations, putting these reports out of reach for many SMEs. 

Further, these are not always accurate, easy to understand, and are often not product specific. 

About 95% of companies do not have the data to make accurate carbon footprint estimates of their products,” Looper CEO and Co-Founder Yiqiang Zhao said.

With Looper, however, companies can track the carbon footprint of a singular product throughout its lifecycle. 

The platform starts with a blueprint of the production strategy, CTO and Co-founder Shashwat Ganguly explained. This allows companies to upload their own data on what products, raw materials, and process they use, which Looper then analyses with their thousands of data points to determine the carbon footprint of each product. 

Looper also allows users to predict how changes in their product sourcing and strategies can change their carbon footprint, allowing them to make better, more informed decisions to achieve net zero goals. 

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Currently, Looper has about 24,000 carbon footprint data points, which is a good foundation, but admittedly “not enough,” Ganguly said. The company hopes that, as they expand and get more contracts, their carbon data will expand as well, allowing them to better and more accurately track carbon emissions for companies. 

“Our mission is to make lifecycle design accessible for any business,” Zhao said. “This is a great starting point to prove that human beings are capable of handling climate change.”

Biodiversity: Land and Sea 

Biodiversity was a hot button issue for two CivTech 8 Challenges, one dealing with land management of protected areas, and one dealing with the tracking and protecting marine natural capital. 

Informed Solutions took the approach to harness existing and new data to better understand how protected areas on both land and sea are managed, using predictive AI to provide insights into ecosystem health and management decisions. 

“The Scottish government is taking a world leading response to the climate emergency,” said David Lawton, Technical Director of Informed Solutions said. 

The team appeared to be taking a holistic approach to managing protected areas, harnessing and creating instant access to all data, combining historical documents with the latest satellite imagery, using AI to create sotry models for a standard and robust presentation of how natural areas have changed over time, and may change with different management practices. 

With three main capabilities, Informed Solutions are taking the very best of modern technology capabilities – the wrangling of massive data sets and coupling them with AI analytical and predictive capabilities, and underpinning them with local authorities, communities, and scientists to better understand how natural areas have been transformed by climate change, and how best to manage them going forward. 

Connected to this collaborative effort, is the solution put forth by AECOM surrounding a challenge of connecting nature networks across Scotland. 

Scotland has many protected areas, but these are often disconnected from each other, meaning animals and plants cannot move freely and safely between them. This can lead to a lack of biodiversity. 

AECOM created a collaborative tool called Eco-Uplit, which allows communities, governments, and private developers to work together to better understand nature networks and land management. 

By using available data, AECOM’s Eco-Uplift can inform stakeholders how to best manage and connect natural capital to allow for the free movement of animals and plant species.

What sets it apart from other platforms is the use of scientific research to understand how animals move through and use the landscape, providing insight into functional connectivity for more useful nature networks. 

The platform offers a nature-based project optimiser, finding the right place for the right project to improve nature networks and marine natural capital. 

It also offers a co-design hub, a collaborative platform for those interested in nature recovery, providing support for bottom-up grassroots environmental change. 

For the management of marine capital, things are often a bit more complicated, as seabeds are not as easy to study from satellite imagery. 

Tritonia offered up a solution to another CivTech challenge which wanted to track Scotland’s marine natural capital. 

“We now have the tech to position robots underwater, enabling us to rapidly map seascapes in 3D,” Andrew Mogg, the photogrammetry lead of Tritonia said. 

Using geospatial photogrammetry and underwater robots, Tritonia can map out the Scottish seabed, taking real pictures to track marine life, providing real-time tracking of marine natural capital like coral, oysters, and mussels. 

The maps provide millimetre resolution, allowing for even the smallest of changes to be tracked as our oceans respond to a rapidly changing climate. 

Tritonia is providing the underpinning data to better understand the amount of natural capital in Scotland’s marine environment, and how this changes overtime as they continue to investigate the seabed. 

Looking Ahead: CivTech 9 

At Demo Day, the challenges for CivTech 9 were announced, with many echoing the focus on Scotland’s natural environment. 

With interests in helping wildlife rangers identifying animals, to mitigating the effects of pests and stress factors on wild plants, to using technology to better manage deer populations, CivTech 9 is clearly reflecting the urgency Minister Lochead mentioned in his keynote address. 

Indeed as CivTech progresses into another round, Mark Elliot, Programme Director of CivTech, urges us to take action now: “Let’s not be there in ten years, trying to think of excuses.”