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How green tech and collaboration between young companies and mature industries can help tackle climate change will be among the key focus areas at the COP27 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm El Sheikh November 7-18. New offerings that will be highlighted during the conference cover everything from new and improved ways to transform waste into petroleum-free materials to the use of Web technologies to incentivize farmers to turns soils into carbon sinks.

The need for innovation is more critical than ever. All three of they key UN agencies produced worrying reports about climate change this week. The UN environment agency’s report found there was "no credible pathway to 1.5C in place" and that “woefully inadequate” progress on cutting carbon emissions means the only way to limit the worst impacts of the climate crisis is a “rapid transformation of societies.”

Current pledges for action by 2030, even if delivered in full, would mean a rise in global heating of about 2.5C, a level that would condemn the world to catastrophic climate breakdown, according to the UN's climate agency. Only a handful of countries have ramped up their plans in the last year, despite having promised to do so at the COP26 UN climate summit in Glasgow last November.

Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business.

Next year is going to be tough. If pundits are right, we may be heading into an economic recession. What’s more, the geopolitical situation remains a wildcard – friction with China, Russia, and Ukraine could have a major impact on the economy and the tech sector. That said, key technologies will continue to ramp up to help countries and businesses adjust and thrive in an uncertain moment in time. As the world continues to go digital at tremendous speed, innovation will continue to evolve exponentially, and we’ll see several tech, business, and leadership trends start to take shape. Paying subscribers can read on to get former Cisco Executive Chairman and CEO John Chambers' predictions for 2023.

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New York City-based Odyssey Spaceworks enables corporates to conduct microgravity experiments in space at a fraction of the cost by replacing humans in the International Space Station (ISS) with robot-run laboratories located within low earth orbiting satellites,

“We want to make research in space easier, cheaper and more accessible,” says founder and CEO Shishir Bankapur, an engineer, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor. “We don’t need to go as far into orbit as the ISS to support humans. All we need to do is to go to lower orbit, making it cheaper to launch and cheaper to run.” He says Space Odyssey’s approach can reduce the cost of running an experiment from $10 million to $20 million to as low as $100,000.

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The amount shaved off Facebook’s market capitalization inthe year since chief executive and co-founder Mark Zuckerbergmade the bold maneuver to rebrand Facebook as Meta because he believes the future of the company is not in social media but in the metaverse, “The decision to place so much faith in such an unproven premise will go down as one of the riskiest bets any corporation has ever made, no matter what happens next,” notes a column by Ben Cohen in The Wall Street Journal. The column, which focuses on the science of success, quotes innovation experts on the right way for companies to experiment. Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor and author of the forthcoming book “Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well,” told the Journal the optimal bet size is hard to define but easy to describe. “As small as possible,” she said. “Just big enough to be informative. You don’t bet the company.”