Malta can be part of Europe’s green revolution

At COP30 last year, the world’s annual gathering where countries negotiate how to tackle climate change together, the EU as a bloc signalled that it remains committed to ambitious climate action. Many governments find that selling these international pledges back home is often difficult.

Some parts of climate science can seem nebulous and abstract. In reality, it is anything but abstract. Climate change shows up in infernal summers, now unbearable without air conditioning, and in torrential, almost biblical rainfall that floods entire areas.

Yet despite more intense storms, total annual rainfall continues to plummet. A 2025 Energy and Water Agency report found that 2008-2024 average rainfall was nearly a fifth lower than the 1940-2024 long-term average. Drought conditions hit in three of the last nine years and 2023-2024 hydrological year was the driest on record, giving Malta an arid climate.

But turning climate change’s effects into something tangible is only half the story. We need to turn its solutions into something concrete too. The political aim of the Green Transition remains decarbonisation. But for decarbonisation to happen, new technologies and companies need to be developed to replace all the current human activities emitting carbon.

The metaphor from the space race is that while reaching the moon was the Kennedy administration’s political goal, the technical goal was accomplished by a cadre of scientists and engineers and private contractors. Some of these technical leaps have already taken mature shapes, like solar photovoltaics, lithium-ion batteries and electrical vehicles. But many others remain significantly underdeveloped and currently still in research.

Here, human ingenuity is limitless, but some of these rough ideas, still being refined on drawing boards of three

to four person start-ups, are things like the next generation of batteries, green cement alternatives, building more insulated and energy-efficient buildings, a variety of direct carbon-capture technologies, more precise agriculture, smarter electric grids, and refinements to wind and solar power.

Besides these highly hardware-oriented activities, there also exists a niche of related green services like providing reporting software to track ESG goals, or a green auditing service.

Now the kicker is this: when I said three to four person start-ups, your mind probably drifted somewhere far away like Silicon Valley, a crowded Amsterdam apartment or one of France’s new chic incubators in Lyon. In reality, start-ups are founded in all sorts of places, the traditional business centres, yes, but also in rural towns and Europe and America’s periphery. There is no reason those start-ups can’t come from here too.

Developing green tech is exceptionally rewarding and motivating work- Eve Borg Bonello

We often view our size as a disadvantage, and for some things it might be. But in a world that’s constantly changing, agility becomes valuable, and as a rule, smaller things are more agile than larger ones. Because we do not have the burden of having sizable industries based on selling carbonisation like other larger and more industrialised countries do, we should have a much easier time pivoting towards developing the green solutions of tomorrow.

Pursuing incubating start-ups in this niche has several add-on beneficial effects. The promise of high-quality scientific and creative work in Malta would stem the brain drain of our most promising graduates leaving Malta to do these exact types of jobs abroad. Developing green tech is exceptionally rewarding and motivating work, and having these opportunities at home where they can stay close to their families and loved ones is a win for us all.

The global scale of green tech is also eye-watering. If just one solution is promising, it can be sold and licensed all around the world, singlehandedly improving our country’s whole GDP. With that come other benefits to the country as a whole.

But what I believe can truly be our secret sauce in all of this is our community. We see knowing everyone as a disadvantage, but that has a profoundly powerful networking effect in business. The climate solutions of tomorrow do not just concern applied chemistry and engineering; they are most potent at the intersection of creative endeavour, like how fashion can be carbon-neutral or how fishing can be more environmentally friendly. These intersections are most effectively explored when people from different backgrounds come together and mash up their ideas together, and we are prime ground for that sort of disruption.

Of course, all of this does not happen in a vacuum. Our country’s research and development spending remains abysmal and at just 0.5 per cent of GDP, it is right at the bottom of the EU, whose average is 2.2 per cent. Seemingly, the government has little ambition or vision to see the knock-on positive effects that such a strategy could bring.

The one thing that remains clear is: political will can only become reality when the green transition becomes inevitable because alternative and green energy is cheaper than conventional energy. To achieve that, a generation of tinkerers, innovators and dreamers are already building the world of tomorrow. We would be foolish not to at least try to be a part of it.

Eve Borg Bonello is the Nationalist Party’s spokesperson on climate change and public cleanliness.