There are many challenges to face in the fight against climate change, but the rampant scepticism that often prevails when considering solutions to the global crisis is one that needs urgent tackling if any progress is to be made. Private individuals feel powerless and unsure of how to help; corporations are weary of the lack of visibility and transparency around the actual impact of their conservation and mitigation efforts. Enter Pietro Pasolini (CEO), Zain Tarawneh (CGO), and Briano Martinoni (CCO), who co-founded Green Future Project (GFP) in 2020 out of Italy and are now active in Japan and the UAE as well.
The fast-growing startup guides companies on the corporate sustainability path, giving them access to its end-to-end climate solutions and empowering them to take on an active role in high-impact environmental projects, all through a single platform. Tarawneh explains.
How would you describe Green Future Project?
GFP is a SaaS – sustainability as a service, as we spin it – for businesses to manage their environmental impact.
Our platform is twofold. On the one hand, we help businesses with their energy management and carbon footprint accounting. Our solution allows companies to track their scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions as well as their energy consumption on key performance metrics, create a carbon budget, and initiate targeted actions in real time. They can generate monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports and thus be very proactive in managing their environmental data. We white-labelled and co-built the platform with Pilio Group, our scientific partners from Oxford University.
Our second component is our portfolio of over 15 climate solutions that businesses can invest in across the world, including in the UAE. All these restoration, preservation, renewable energy, and marine restoration projects are either nature-based or have carbon credits from recognised third-party registries such as Gold Standard and Verra. The platform is interactive, allowing businesses to track, trace, and visualise their support in real time through satellite imagery.
What kind of clients do you target?
We have two buckets of customers. First, high emitters – in real estate, development, construction, aviation, logistics, anything that’s supply chain-heavy. They can use our management energy tool for cost savings and to reduce their footprint internally, but they can also scale it up. For example, we’re doing an energy management pilot for Sharjah Sustainable City that they want to scale to the whole city and make accessible to their residents.
The second is more B2C, meaning companies with a more sustainability-conscious consumer base – fashion, cosmetics, etc. For example, we have an e-commerce plugin that allows a company to decarbonise or do a climate action per transaction or per item sold.
Why did you join Hub71 in 2022?
The only way to scale change is to have a global impact. Businesses need to understand that they’re not just investing in a project and doing CSR; their investments actually make a real difference. This is why the projects that we support are all in critically important climatic regions like the Amazon, Indonesia, Madagascar...
But something was missing in this equation. Where is the Middle East in all this? Where does it stand? I started doing a bit of exploration and met people from Hub71 who had realised that COP28 was happening this year but there were no Climate Tech startups, no climate scene at all. So, it just kind of organically came about.
How did you come to co-found GFP?
I’ve always gravitated towards the intersection of science, academia, knowledge, and practical action – there’s something that’s really fun and interesting and nuanced there – and I’ve naturally been drawn to entrepreneurial-esque ideas and projects.
Before GFP, I was working at a newly founded agency in London that focused on sustainability and impact communications, with a lot of entrepreneurial projects; and after I left the agency during COVID, I started consulting for startups – one of which was Green Future Project. I was supposed to help with positioning and branding but ended up joining as co-founder and CMO.
There was something about the founder – his vision, his charisma, his desire to make and scale actual impact, to imagine the impossible – that really attracted me without even looking at the business model and whatnot, because we were there to build it together from a white canvas.
What’s next for Green Future Project?
We’re finalising a pre-Series A round and we’re planning our Series A by June 2024.
We’re very close to breaking even and we’ll be growing our team in the UAE. The entrepreneurship ecosystem here is bubbling up. There’s capital, there’s talent, there’s vision, there’s leadership, there’s strategy; in the next five years, it will be one of the places to be for Climate Tech.
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