to save the planet. and taking the battle for a cleaner climate into outer space. can the final frontier help us breathe easier down here on earth? wherever you'rejoining me from around the world. once again, a big hello and a warm welcome to the show. you know, the climate emergency, it's not new. but as global leaders gather for this year's united nations climate change conference or known as cop 28, it's in dubai. we wanted to see how business and innovators are tackling the climate emergency. so we've sent our crews and reporters around the world to find the cutting edge technology that could literally save the planet. we begin on a set of islands off the far north of scotland where theo leggett is exploring under the sea. bleak but beautiful. this is the pentland firth, the channel that runs between the north coast of scotland and the orkney islands. it's an area well known for vicious winds and ripping tides and that makes it the perfect location for developing new forms of clean energy. this narrow strip of water experiences tremendous tidal forces every single day. in fact, there's some of the fastest tides in the world, and that means there's a tremendous reserve of energy if you can tap into it. and that's what's going on just over there off the island of stroma, beneath the surface are four gigantic turbines which are generating electricity right here. the power generated in the murky waters of the firth by these vast turbines is already being sold to the national grid. the past five years have been spent testing the technology. now the company behind them says it's ready for a major expansion. so fraser, tell me what we've got here. so here we have a 150 ton, 1.5 megawatt tidal turbine. she's got an 18 metre rotor and a sail about 2.5 metres in diameterand about seven or eight metres long. i can tell this one has literally been hauled out of the sea because it's absolutely festooned with barnacles and it really does stink of fish. it really does. we really like our work environment. so yeah, unfortunately every time we bring them out, they are covered in marine growth. we scrape the marine growth off, get down to the bolts and get to work. you've had four of these operating for the past few years. now you're going to the next stage of the project. tell me about that. yeah. so at the moment we've got 41.5 megawatt turbines in the six megawatt array. we're moving now to the next stage, which is a 50 megawatt array. and instead of having 1.5 megawatt turbines, we're moving up to three megawatt turbines with a 2k meter rotor instead of the 18. and it's really kind of driving down the energy cost and moving on to the next the next stage of technology. it's driving down the cost. but at the moment you are feeding energy into the grid. you have a guaranteed price for that. but it's about double what we pay for the next generation of nuclear power, for example. so that's a problem, isn't it? it is a problem. so we — at the moment, we've got about 50 megawatts in the uk which have been consented and those arrays are coming online over the next four or five years. so it's really then increasing the scale, increasing the number of units to drive down the cost. we need to move down that cost curve. we need to make the power cheaper, meet the installations cheaper, and then overall get the wholesale price down for the consumer. lurking on the surface, a few miles to the east of orkney, a giant machine is trying to exploit a different form of sea power — wave energy. engineering firm motion is hoping it can succeed where many others have failed. people have been trying to develop wave energy machines for a long time now, but what they haven't been able to do is do it economically. so what we're doing as a company is we're starting small in markets where we can be cost competitive straightaway. so these are offshore industries where we can provide power to off grid equipment, and then we'll scale that up to address opportunities like islands. but what's the potential here? because you have one machine that's out there at the moment, it's being tested, and then you're going to build a bigger machine, a better one. what could we see in the long term future? could we see arrays of these things? yeah, that's absolutely the dream. we see deploying our machines in farms, ten megawatts, 100 megawatts. and these farms can be combined with offshore wind. so we can deploy devices, intersperse within the offshore wind farm, maximising the utility of that space. the motion project, impressive as it undoubtedly is, it's just one of a whole series of wave and tidal power projects that have been carried out here at orkney over the past 20 years or so. in fact, you could say that the entire region has been set up as a giant research laboratory for this kind of thing. eileen linklater works for the european marine energy centre, which provides facilities for offshore energy projects. i'm excited. we have subsea cables that fan out across the sea bed and a technology company would bring one of their machines, plug it into the end of our cable and then we use the substation behind us to gather data on how that's performing. and we can also monitor the performance in terms of electrical output and all the control systems. by demonstrating something here, you're reducing the risk for investors further down the line. we're very good at coming up with inventions, but we also have to think about how you make that invention a real part of the energy system. 70% of the earth is covered by sea and energy from waves and tides is reliable. it could yet play a major role in the voyage to net zero, and if so, the research being carried out around these rugged islands will have played its part. theo leggett, bbc news, orkney. so from the shores of scotland's beautiful orkney islands now to the farmlands of india because after the harvest farmers there have traditionally been burning the remaining crops which has led to terrible pollution. but now, instead of burning the crop, one startup has found a way of using what was just waste and is now making money from it as well. archana shukla sent us this. the air pollution is choking the whole of northern india. it's a story every winter. what suffocates primarily is the smoke billowing from the farmlands in the region. the crop waste burned to clear fields for the next harvest. but instead of becoming poisonous, smoke, straws and husks can be processed to make the main raw material for paper mills. these fully compostable pulp sheets. and then packaging for goods or cutlery. all the waste can be turned into your everyday furniture. in central india's morena district, a siblings duo is doing just that with their company crust. we bought this corona beer packaging. what is the story behind it? so the corona beer is made from barley grains. what is left on the barley plant is the barley straw. so this straw has been used to create this packaging for corona, and it also benefits the environment because it's not made by cutting trees or no plastic has been used even to put barrier coatings. crust says that technology has helped cut water usage and heating in the pulping machines. the furniture boards can be crafted without carcinogenic chemical binders. government has been quite keen to promote companies that upcycle these agricultural wastes, millions of tonnes of agricultural wastes. but the problem is creating additional value forfarmers. crust is addressing this by paying more to farmers, cutting and collecting the agri leftovers takes time and money. a burden, especially for small farmers like rajpal silver. but it turned into a reasonable secondary income. rajpal was one of the first few in the area to stop burning his fields. as small farmers, we don't have the resources and the money to transport the waste, so we burn it. but if someone picks up the waste and pays us a good amount, it is good for everyone. crust has an ambitious target of building capacity to upcycle 100,000 tonnes of crop waste in five years. but the field to factory business is notjust about creating products but also a market to sell them. and that needs time. new age sustainability — entrepreneurs should not build this industry just because just on the emotional value of creating a sustainable world. the big challenge, of course, is of the market itself. they have to compete with the existing market. for example, they have to compete with the plastic industry, single use plastic products. for instance, these products are cheaper. they have all, they are already in the market. for crop waste, high transportation and storage costs pose a major hurdle in scaling up the business. crust says a decentralised model could be the answer. to startup micro factories, which can be set up in the village areas itself so that the cost of transportation is almost nothing. farmers can simply take it from theirfarms, put it into this decentralised factory where we can make these products, and that saves a lot of money. government has been rolling out subsidies to set up similar factories, but for india to find a solution for its massive crop burning problem, a lot more ambition would be needed. archana shukla, bbc news, modena, madhya pradesh. archa na shukla there. so, changing farming practices can help tackle global warming as well as pollution. did you know that food production, it's responsible for around one—quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. so, bringing down those emissions from farming, it's an important step towards achieving net zero. ai, artificial intelligence, it's been lauded as one way to help achieve this by helping agriculture become more sustainable. asjoshua thorp now reports. on a farm in kent, in southern england, an army of robots are picking the last of the season's strawberries, making sure only the ripest and best shaped berries get plucked. once picked, the fruit is packaged and sent to supermarkets across the country. the robot has two robotic arms and each arm has two cameras that see in colour on its end. and those cameras find ripe berries and they allow the robot very dexterously to pick those berries. when we picked each berry, we transfer it to this inspection system, which allows us to check quality and therefore place it into a punnet or if it's defective in some way to discard it. the robots are the brainchild of duncan robinson, the ceo of cambridge based robotics firm dogtooth technologies. the harvesting process is almost entirely automated, with humans only intervening if there are any safety issues or to take the robots back to storage. the fruit picking industry in the uk currently relies heavily on migrant workers who are becoming harder and harder to recruit. we can reduce food waste by eliminating recruitment risk and also help to mitigate the environmental footprint of large numbers of migrant seasonal agricultural workers travelling increasingly long distances to our farms. robotic automation also provides some other environmental benefits. one of the most interesting is the possibility of using the data gathered by our robots to help predict future yields. and that makes a very big difference to supply chain efficiency. it helps supermarket time promotions, for example, to coincide with gluts in production, and that can help to reduce food waste. these robot fruit pickers help farms like this one in southern england, reduce wastage and cut emissions that arise from fruit production. and these robots are getting more and more sophisticated. they're able to detectjust the right level of ripeness in the fruit and any small defects. and this is just one example of how artificial intelligence is helping farming and agriculture become more efficient and more sustainable. over in california's central valley, a favourable climate helps grow plenty of tomatoes. but in recent years, unpredictable weather patterns, such as heatwaves and wildfires, have posed massive challenges. to help address this, the largest tomato processor in the world, the morning star company, has been trialling new crop monitoring technology provided by the us based firm eos data analytics. the platform uses satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to help solve problems like wastage and over irrigation. we provide everything, let's say, from vegetation indices to weather patterns. weather parameters that tells you, all right, this is where you have the problem. this is what the problem is all about, and this is what you need to do about it in order to either save the crop or increase your yield down the line. by using ai powered crop monitoring the morningstar company say they have managed to cut irrigation costs on their tomato farms by up to 15%. these types of ai platforms are being used increasingly across the agricultural industry, and they have the potential to become an increasingly powerful tool in the fight against climate change. all the companies, even governments, ministries, ngos, when they reach out to us, they're always looking for solutions to that revolves, let's say, around the word "sustainability". how we can go about introducing ai? how we can go about green practices, right? less, lets say, providing more insightfulanalytics, more data driven decisions without going out there in the fields. we havejust, i think, touched upon a small piece of what ai can do. the challenge that remains with the use of artificial intelligence in agriculture is one of scaling up data is still relatively scarce and robots are costly to produce. but with the growing need to reduce the environmental footprint of farming, ai innovation is rapidly gathering pace, and it's surely just a matter of time into it starts to bearfruit on a much wider scale. joshua thorp, bbc news, in kent, southern england. so, as we've seen so far, some of the biggest innovations are around reducing how much carbon dioxide we release. but there's also a wave of technology which aims to actually take the carbon dioxide already there out of the atmosphere. adrian murray has been to iceland to find out more. trillions of tonnes of greenhouse gases have already been pumped into the atmosphere. but what if we could put some of that carbon back where it came from? this otherworldly landscape is 30 kilometres from iceland's capital, reykjavik. it's home to a project capturing co2 from the air and turning it into stone. we're getting a little closer now. and that steam just ahead is coming from the nearby geothermal power plant. and it's this that's supplying clean energy for those carbon sucking machines that we're about to see. called orcutt, the plant is owned by swiss firm clime works and consists of eight container—sized modules. this is the world's first direct air capture and storage plant in existence, so it's the only one that's operating on a commercial level. it is a plant that captures carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. fans draw air across a special filter which separates the co2. it's then heated to 100 degrees and sent to a processing hall before it's piped across. department card fix for storage. direct air capture is expensive technology. these machines need round the clock power to remove 4000 tonnes of co2 a year. that's similar to the emissions of 900 petrol cars, so not an awful lot. this is the first of its kind, but it is here to prove a point that this is commercially viable. now our plan is to scale up, because we need to be capturing at gigaton levels by 2050. and in order to do so, we need to start now. close by, a new installation is being built. called mammoth, it's almost ten times bigger. big tech firms are among the clients and individuals who sign up online. the climeworks insists this is no silver bullet. we're not here to replace the reduction of emissions. we need to be active also in cleaning up all the mess that we've been making since the industrial revolution. all these pipes zigzagging around and silver domes — it really looks like something from a different planet. so what makes this place well suited for carbon storage? well, the answer lies in its geology. iceland sits on the boundary at the north american and eurasian tectonic plates. that means it's prone to lots of geothermal and volcanic activity. we're heading inside an ancient lava tunnel formed when magma cooled. all of this rock they surround us here is so—called basalt. you can see here the basalt has so many tiny pores with volcanic eruptions. there comes a lot of gases up with it and they become bubbles. and if the lava cools down before that can happen, they get stuck in it. iceland has an abundance of basalt bedrock, and that's what makes this area a good store for gases and liquids deep underground. and that brings us back to that captured co2. it's piped across to these space age domes where another firm, carbfix, pumps it two kilometres underground. so here is one of our injection well. this captured gas dissolved in water goes into this injection well. so basically, it's sparkling water with sort of geothermal flavor, if you will. when the fizzy water meets the basalt, it reacts to form solid calcium carbonate, locking away the carbon for thousands, if not millions of years. we're fighting climate change by taking co2 that's been captured from the emissions orfrom the atmosphere, injected into basalt formations, where it turns to stone in two years, and is out of the picture forever. so here we've got sort of samples showing the basalt before and after. so it's a piece of basalt, lots of pores, i can see. and then this one looks pretty solid. it looks like it's all filled in. yes, exactly. cofix has ambitious plans. it wants to take co2 off the hands of industries in europe, ship it here to iceland, and store it. we will be taking the technology to the megaton scale. we have the one joint atmosphere, so cross—border collaboration is vital. is there any danger that countries that are bigger emitters will shirk their responsibility and just ship their co2 to iceland? i don't look at it that way. it's rather the hard—to—abate sector like cement, steel — where the emissions are not coming from the energy supply itself, but from the production process. capping our emissions won't be enough alone to slow global warming. un climate experts warn that will also need to remove billions of tonnes of carbon every year. dozens of new technologies are trying to do that, but so far, these efforts are tiny. we both need to mitigate as much as we can and then we need these removal techniques. but they're definitely not at that scale yet. there are many limitations. they're mostly about land use, scalability, price, resource use as well. carbon removal may seem like a moonshot, but if it can be scaled up, it could yet prove to be a crucial weapon in the fight against climate change. adrian murray reporting there from iceland. so from capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to, well, going beyond, could space be the final frontier in the fight against global warming? well, my next guest is at the cutting edge of what's going on above the planet to save it. he's the director general of the norwegian space agency. christian houghley hansen, a real pleasure having you on the show. and kristian, let's just start with this. the basics, i mean, how is the space industry facilitating and helping the fight against climate change? first of all, the space industry, we're supplying the sensor, the satellites, and they orbit the earth. so they have a great view from up there and they are able to get a more holistic overview. they actually take pictures of the earth. they can take pictures of agriculture. they can use what we call spectral cameras in order to look at what is actually in the ground. they can monitor the moisture and drought. so there are a lot of different data and service that you can provide from tho