Investments in Cleantech May Slow, But Many Bright Spots Remain

Here’s an interesting (albeit disappointing) article predicting a slowing in cleantech investment in 2013.  On the bright side, it points to a number of areas of growth, for example, agriculture: 

Big ag steps up and cleans up: …. after evaluating hundreds of companies around the world, we found and profiled 57 with important new clean agricultural science aimed at improving crop yields and resilience, along with new controlled environment improvements (vertical farming systems, hydroponics and aeroponics), sustainable forestry, animal farming and aquaculture.

It’s certainly true that our current agricultural practices are manifestly unsustainable.  We cannot simply continue to increase the volume of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides we pump into our soils and spray on our food to mitigate the damage we’ve done over the past few decades with our ever-more aggressive farming techniques.  For that reason, there will come a time when these “new controlled environment improvements” become attractive in the marketplace; 2013 seems as good a time as any.

Here are a dozen or so other cleantech investment business concepts that I think are ripe for the picking as well.