Planet in focus: The technologies helping restore balance – and other news to watch in frontier tech

As COP30 gets underway in Belém, this edition of the Frontier Technologies & Innovation wrapper explores how collaboration and innovation can help bring our planet back within safe limits.

We spotlight the Forum's new report, 10 Emerging Technology Solutions for Planetary Health, produced in collaboration with Frontiers, which highlights breakthrough science tackling today's environmental challenges.

We also speak with Baseload Capital, a Swedish firm scaling geothermal as a renewable baseload and track the latest signals of change across frontier tech: from quantum hardware milestones to reinforcement-learning robots mastering factory tasks in minutes.

At the opening of COP30 in Belém, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that failing to limit global heating to 1.5°C was a "moral failure and deadly negligence". He described the target as a "red line for a habitable planet" and urged leaders to deliver a paradigm shift in both speed and scale of climate action. "Every fraction of a degree means more hunger, displacement and loss – especially for those least responsible."

It was a message underscored by the latest data from the World Meteorological Organization, confirming record greenhouse-gas levels and projecting that 2025 will rank among the warmest years ever recorded.

This realism is setting the tone for leaders gathered in the Brazilian rainforest city hosting COP30. The presidency has framed it as a mutirão – a collective effort to build together what none of us can achieve alone. It's a fitting metaphor for the decade ahead, when innovation must be matched by coordination and pledges by action.

Across the Forum's new report on the '10 Emerging Technology Solutions for Planetary Health', we see what this collective work can look like in practice. The selected technologies, which enable solutions ranging from methane capture to low-carbon concrete, remind us that progress rarely comes from a single breakthrough. It comes when policy, finance and innovation pull in the same direction.

As I've said before, the tools are in hand. The will is forming. What comes next is the collective work, as the presidency's latest letter acknowledges — a planetary mutirão to make growth and sustainability part of the same story.

Dig Deeper:

Geothermal energy, which draws on the Earth's natural heat, currently accounts for just around 2% of global energy generation. Most of it comes from about ten countries located in tectonically active zones, where heat lies close to the surface and can be captured to produce steam, drive turbines and generate power.

But with roughly 35 countries now planning or building new geothermal capacity, attention is turning to whether this reliable, low-carbon source can move from niche to mainstream. One company betting on it is Baseload Capital, which describes geothermal energy as "the world's largest untapped energy source." Founded in 2017, the Swedish firm invests in and develops geothermal heat and power plants around the world.

We spoke with the founder, Alexander Helling, about why geothermal energy has struggled to scale and how collaboration among investors, innovators, and policymakers will be key to changing that.

➡️ The challenge: The risk-return profile

Geothermal power plants have existed for more than a century, Helling says. "Since 1913, when it started in Italy... but it hasn't scaled up."

The issue, he says, isn't the technology but the economics. "If I were to invest in a wind project yielding 10%… or a geothermal project yielding 10%, then you would go for the wind… because the upfront risk is significantly lower."

➡️ The fix: Lessons from the oil and gas industry

How does the upfront risk translate? "If you take a single project in geothermal, you typically have between two and 20 wells," Helling explains. "If you have only one project and experience a very low drilling success rate (below 50%) in the first few wells, and if each well costs between 1 million and 10 million US dollars, will your investors want to continue investing? This is a significant challenge within the geothermal industry."

To help mitigate risk, Baseload Capital borrows its approach from the oil and gas industry. "The way that oil and gas solved this is by having multiple projects. They know that X amount of wells will fail, and then we will continue to invest and recoup our costs. You need a portfolio to be able to bear that. And that's something that very few in the geothermal industry have worked with historically."

Looking ahead, Helling also points to new frontiers such as enhanced and advanced geothermal systems (EGS and AGS). "They are still in pilot phase and can be commercially viable in a couple of years' time. That's one way you can reduce the resource risk significantly... when that technology is fully commercialized."

➡️ How they do it: Innovate and scale

Baseload Capital now operates or develops plants in the United States, Iceland, Japan and Taiwan. "All these markets have more than one gigawatt of identified potential," says Helling.

The locations aren't chosen only for resource potential but for their broader impact. "In Japan and Taiwan… more than 95% of all the energy is imported. For them, geothermal also adds a renewable baseload power and becomes important from an energy-security perspective but it also makes economic sense."

In Iceland, Baseload has established a centre of excellence for research and development. "That's where we do most of the innovation… and look at how we build up these projects in the most cost-efficient way and how we can transfer that knowledge into other markets."

➡️ Reality check: Collaboration will be essential

Even with technical advances, the pace of deployment remains slow. "If you take business development, permitting, verifying the resource, coming into construction, most geothermal projects are still in between five to ten years," Helling says.

That long horizon demands patience and partnership. "We need investors, we need innovators, we need technology providers, we need a lot more developers coming in so that we can see the same drive that we had in solar and wind," he says.

"It's not one single thing, it's a combination — policy, local legislation, understanding of the risks in geothermal, understanding how the return profiles will be, and getting acceptance from the general public."

Google unveils quantum breakthrough as computer surpasses the ability of supercomputers: The company has claimed a quantum algorithm running on its Willow chip outperformed the world's fastest supercomputers by a factor of 13,000. The breakthrough, published in Nature in October 2025, involves an algorithm called "Quantum Echoes" that can compute molecular structures with verifiable accuracy, meaning the results can be repeated and confirmed by other quantum computers of similar calibre.

AgiBot deploys reinforcement learning robots to learn and adapt on the factory floor: The Chinese robotics company has achieved 'the first application of real-world reinforcement learning' in industrial robotics, partnering with Longcheer Technology on a pilot production line. Unlike traditional industrial robots that may take weeks to program for new tasks, AgiBot's Real-World Reinforcement Learning system enables robots to acquire new skills within minutes. These robots reportedly autonomously adapt to variations in part placement, tolerances, and environmental conditions, all while maintaining a 100% task completion rate.

University of Chicago researchers unlock sodium battery progress: A team led by Professor Y. Shirley Meng has developed a new metastable sodium hydridoborate with ionic conductivity up to 10 times higher than previous records, according to Science Daily. It's a leap that was achieved by crystallizing and then rapidly cooling the compound using established industrial methods, which could bring sodium-based solid-state batteries much closer to matching lithium systems in performance and stability, even at sub-zero temperatures.