The Climate Cycle

Nyla Ahmad is the COO at Alvéole, a company helping commercial real estate go nature-positive, starting with rooftop beehives. What began as a tool for tenant engagement has evolved into a scalable biodiversity monitoring platform, combining physical infrastructure with environmental data collection.

Nyla brings a background in media and telecom, having held senior leadership roles at Rogers and OWL Kids, before making a career pivot into sustainability. At Alvéole, she’s helping property owners prepare for the next wave of ESG disclosures, turn rooftops into biodiversity sensors, and reconnect people with nature.

Learn more at https://www.alveole.buzz/

In our conversation, we explore:

• Why biodiversity is the next frontier in ESG—and why it’s so hard to measure
• How rooftop beehives act as biosensors, collecting eDNA and pesticide data
• What’s driving commercial real estate interest in nature-based solutions
• The role of tenant engagement in return-to-office strategies
• What’s coming in the regulatory landscape (like GRESB and TNFD)
• How Alvéole is scaling across 70+ cities with 2,200+ hives and 80 million bees
• Lessons from customers, and why data and education go hand in hand
• Reflections on a career transition from telecom to climate

You'll gain insight into how real estate owners are starting to measure nature-related risk, how Alvéole blends tech and hands-on experiences to drive action, and why connecting people with nature might be the most overlooked lever in the climate fight.

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Alex Deslauriers is the founder and CEO at FireSwarm Solutions, a startup revolutionizing wildfire suppression. FireSwarm is developing AI-powered swarm algorithms that enable heavy-lift drones to fight wildfires.

Alex brings over 25 years of experience in aerospace engineering and aviation software (including work with the US Navy on F-18 programs) before pivoting to wildfire tech after losing his own property to the Gun Lake fires in 2023. Now, he’s applying his extensive aviation experience and a talented team to tackle this growing climate challenge.

In our conversation, we explore:

• How FireSwarm’s drone swarms can close a critical nighttime gap in firefighting
• The economics of drone swarms
• How drones perform on efficiency, precision and lifetime costs
• Why wildfires represent a national security issue and Canada’s opportunity to lead
• The regulatory landscape and FireSwarm's path to deployment with Canadian wildfire agencies
• Partnerships with First Nations communities and municipalities

You'll learn about how wildfire response works on the ground, how autonomous drones make fire suppression safer and more effective, and the intersection between climate tech and national security.

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Marc-André Forget is the founder and CEO of dcbel, a startup transforming our relationship with energy at home.

dcbel enables homeowners to easily manage their solar, EV charging, and battery storage, integrating them into their intelligent home energy system - Ara.

dcbel recently secured a $55 million funding round led by the Canada Growth Fund, and is now deploying dcbel across North America and Europe.

Marc-André brings over a decade of energy sector expertise to the conversation, and shares his perspective on building dcbel, how our relationship with energy is changing, and the transformation he sees on the horizon.

In our conversation, we explore:

• How dcbel is creating an "iPhone moment" for home energy management
• Why homes are becoming the new battleground in energy markets
• How rising electricity costs and blackouts are changing consumer behaviour
• The path to customer adoption
• dcbel’s recent $55 million investment from the Canada Growth Fund
• Why finding the right investor fit is critical for long-term success
• Scaling hardware manufacturing
• Marc-André's predictions for the future of home energy

📬 Subscribe to the Climate Tech Canada newsletter and get weekly updates on Canadian climate tech funding, industry news, and trends directly to your inbox. Sign up at climatetechcanada.ca

→ Check out the full show notes & resources mentioned in this episode

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→ Send feedback and episode ideas to [email protected]

Mike Kelland is the co-founder and CEO of Planetary, a carbon removal startup that’s aiming to draw down gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere by accelerating the ocean’s natural, carbon absorbing abilities.

While the world urgently needs to reduce the amount of carbon pollution going into the atmosphere, it’s also becoming clear that we need to remove our historic emissions if we want to limit the worst effects of climate change.

Planetary is working to draw down some of the 8 gigatonnes of CO2 we need to remove every year by 2025 to hit our climate goals. Ocean-based carbon removal is relatively new with lots of technical and measurement problems to be solved, but it’s one of the highest potential pathways for gigatonne-scale removal.

I sat down with Mike in person in Ottawa to talk about Planetary’s approach to carbon removal, the challenges of measuring carbon removal in the open ocean, and how they plan to scale physical plants on coastlines around the world.

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At this year’s Carbon Removal Day in Ottawa, we caught up with experts working across the life cycle of carbon removal to discuss the state of carbon removal, keys to scaling up, and Canada’s leadership potential.

Our Guests

[0:54] Phil De Luna is the Chief Science & Commercial Officer at Deep Sky, a project developer and owner-operator of carbon removal projects.

[7:12] Carson Fong is a Program Manager at the Business Renewables Centre Canada and the Pembina Institute’s Carbon Dioxide Removal Centre.

[12:20] Jane Kearns - Partner at Evok Innovations, a Canadian venture capital firm investing in the energy and industrial transition.

[18:30] Genny Shaw - Co-founder and CEO at Gaia Refinery, a carbon removal startup that merges direct air capture (DAC) with biomass carbon removal.

→ Go deeper with full show notes and links.

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Matt Loszak is the co-founder and CEO of Aalo Atomics, a company building factory mass-manufactured nuclear power plants, purpose built for AI data centres.

The explosive growth of AI is driving up data centre energy consumption, and big tech players are looking for reliable, low-carbon energy sources to step up. Aalo’s small, modular reactor systems are purpose built for the needs of data centres and use a mass-manufacturing approach to lower costs and project timelines.

In this conversation, we explore why nuclear power is experiencing a resurgence after decades of limited deployment, the advantages of small modular reactors versus traditional large nuclear plants, how nuclear safety has improved with modern reactor designs and fuel types, Matt’s journey from SaaS to deeptech founder, and much more.

→ Go deeper with full show notes and links

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In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Christine Gabardo, co-founder and CTO of CERT Systems, a climate tech startup working to produce essential chemicals without fossil fuels.

CERT's technology takes CO2 from industrial carbon capture systems and turns it into sustainable, high value chemicals like ethylene using water and electricity.

The CERT team brings decades of experience in electrochemistry, materials science, and engineering, and was the first in the world to demonstrate the conversion of industrial emissions into ethylene as a finalist in the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE.

In our conversation, we unpack how CERT Systems' technology works, how it could be a pathway for producing sustainable aviation fuel, lessons learned from the Carbon XPRIZE, scaling up 10,000x, why people underestimate the market for sustainable ethylene, building effective pilot partnerships, and more.

More info and show notes available here.

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Our guest today is Rashmi Prakash, founder of Aruna Revolution. Aruna is a sustainable fibre company making compostable menstrual pads that are better for our bodies and the planet.

We talk about the intersection of climate and human health, how they’re turning agricultural byproducts like stems into sustainable, high performance fibres, and Rashmi’s journey from medical engineer to startup founder.

Talking points:

• The impact and scale of single-use menstrual products
• Biodegradable vs compostable materials
• Balancing technology development with consumer product strategy
• Scaling up production to 1 tonne
• Creating sustainable supply chains through direct farmer relationships
• The transition from engineering to entrepreneurship

Episode Notes

• Aruna Revolution on Dragons' Den
• ISO's Menstrual Product Standards
• Scale Your Everest

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In today’s episode, we’re diving into the world of commercial building retrofits.

We're joined byChristopher Naismith, founder and CEO ofAudette, a decarbonization platform for commercial real estate asset managers.

Audette enables retrofits at scale by bringing data and software to what has traditionally been a manual, building-by-building process, turning it into a data-driven strategy and with the capital plans to make them a reality.

We cover:

• Christopher’s path from civil engineer to startup founder
• Audette’s data-driven approach to building audits
• The spread of building performance standards across cities
• Brown to green capital strategies
• Energy efficiency vs true building decarbonization
• How carbon taxes and fines are creating new financial incentives for building improvements
• Why workflows and business models matter as much as technology
• Audette’s ambitions as a marketplace for building retrofit solutions

Episode notes:

• Christopher Naismith on LinkedIn
• Audette

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In this episode, we dive into the complex world of climate risk and how it's reshaping global financial markets.
Our guest is Dr. Ron Dembo, founder and CEO ofRiskThinking.AI. RiskThinking.AI leverages their digital twin of the Earth to offer the only probability-based, integrating different climate scenarios, expert insights, and millions of data points to measure and model climate financial risk. See it in action atask.riskthinking.ai.

In our conversation, we cover

• Why climate risk requires new approaches
• How understanding climate risk can accelerate the switch to a low-carbon economy
• The impact of climate risk on credit ratings and long-term stability
• RiskThinking's collaboration with Canada's financial regulator
• Why more Canadian businesses should back home-grown innovators

About Dr. Ron Dembo

Dr. Dembo has made significant contributions to mathematical algorithms and finance, and is a leading authority on financial risk management. Dr. Dembo worked on methods for solving large-scale nonlinear equations as a professor at Yale and a visiting scholar at MIT, and was honoured as a Lifetime Fellow of the Fields Institute of Mathematics in 2007. Dr. Dembo previously founded Algorithmics (acquired by Fitch Ratings), an enterprise risk management platform for the world’s top banks, and Zerofootprint, one of the first companies focused on measuring and reducing carbon footprints.

Episode Notes

• Dr. Ron Dembo
• RiskThinking.AI
• Ask RiskThinking chatbot
• Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari
• OSFI

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