The Impact Hypothesis: A Smarter Way to Talk About Climate Impact
Founder of Impact Forecast
What Is the Impact Hypothesis?
The Impact Hypothesis is a short, structured explanation of how a solution creates climate impact, supported by basic logic and rough, transparent numbers.
It helps founders articulate how their innovation reduces emissions (or improves resilience) and enables investors to evaluate potential impact without needing a lifecycle assessment or a data science team.
Instead of expansive ESG spreadsheets or expensive software tools, it’s built around five high level questions that investors should ask impact entrepreneurs.
Who It's For
Entrepreneurs
Investors, accelerators, and grantmakers
Impact programs
Why It Works
- What impact problem they solve
- How the innovation reduces (or avoids) greenhouse gas emissions
- What resources or activities it requires (and what emissions that causes)
- Roughly how much is avoided or emitted, at today’s and future scale
- And impact parameters specific to the fund or investor, e.g. SDG contributions, EU
Taxonomy alignment and regional climate pressures
It works across all types of climate solutions, mitigation, enablers, and adaptation, in the agritech, energy, transport, construction, housing, recycling, fashion or any other industry, at any technology readyness level, and allows them to be compared like-for-like.
Benefits
From Idea to Insight
Bioplastic cup
A bioplastic cup that increases emissions, despite being biodegradable
Plant-based burger
A plant-based burger that clearly outperforms beef with a lower footprint
Office energy-saver
An office energy-saver with automated advice to prevent idle use of computers and lights in offices
Smart grid optimizer
A smart grid optimizer with automated advice on the amount of renewables on the grid
Floating home
A floating home adaptation solution that protects people and property from flood risk.
It seems essential to me that the Impact Hypothesis should be accessible to any 21st-century entrepreneur with a project that genuinely has an ecological impact on the climate. Every entrepreneur should be able to use this tool to maximize and formulate a hypothesis about the impact of their innovation. This will help avoid assumptions that do not truly align with the project's goals”.
- Applicant, building ClimAccelerators with Climate-KIC and IDB LabWhy It Matters Now
As more capital flows into climate tech, we must avoid false positives, and false negatives. Strong ideas shouldn’t be dismissed for lack of certification. And weak claims shouldn’t survive on storytelling alone.
The Impact Hypothesis helps shift the conversation from "report impact in every detail" to "show your reasoning, provide a ballpark and let’s go from there."
It gives us a shared language to move faster, smarter, and with greater integrity.
Curious to learn more about the accuracy of an Impact Hypothesis? Feel free to explore the article: How accurate are Impact Hypotheses?