Shopify announces a 'Sustainable Fund' to mitigate climate change

With the slogan "building a company for the next 100 years," the e-commerce giant takes a decisive step in the fight against climate change with a very concrete goal: to remove existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

In this way, the company aligns itself with the interests and concerns of its customers (entrepreneurial digital natives), recognizing that it is no longer enough to “pollute less” or “produce more sustainable energy.” Instead, immediate and concrete action must be taken to extract the existing carbon dioxide.

This fund plans to invest $5 million in two highly differentiated portfolios. On one side is what they call the "evergreen" portfolio, with bridge solutions that temporarily reduce emissions or temporarily decrease carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and on the other is their "frontier" portfolio, featuring disruptive and innovative technologies that permanently remove carbon dioxide. The latter will receive the majority of the sustainable fund's investment.

In addition to this breakdown, Shopify distinguishes the size of the investment across the following 10 industries/verticals: Biomass (24% of the fund), direct air capture of carbon dioxide (23%), product design (15%), land (9%), forests and transportation (9%), collaboration (8%), renewable energy (6%), mineralization (3%), and oceans (3%).

While some of the verticals are well-known (biomass), others are quite new and unfamiliar to the general public. Examples include "mineralization," where carbon dioxide is solidified into mineral products for safe storage; "product design," where carbon is injected and stored directly in useful products like cement; and the "land" vertical, where Shopify plans to use horticultural techniques to improve soil quality and its capacity to store carbon dioxide.

If you want to learn more, you can check out Shopify’s sustainability page.