When it comes to meeting Scotland’s ambitious 2045 Net Zero target there is a mountain to climb. A few minutes going through the numbers with Chris Stark, CEO of the Committee on Climate Change, soon clarifies the scale of the challenge. A step change in emissions reduction is needed across all activities – electricity, heating, transport and land use.

The investment required to deliver this is far beyond the reach of the public purse. Decarbonisation of heat in buildings for example carries an estimated price tag of more than £30 billion. The Scottish Government funds allocated to this work is £1.8 billion.

There is, meantime, a vast amount of investment capital available for the right opportunities. COP26, in Glasgow 18 months ago, was significant in bringing businesses and the investment community to the table at scale for the first time. Mark Carney’s launch of the Glasgow Finance Initiative seeks to align $130 trillion of investment to global net zero challenges. ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) investment is no longer a "nice to have" but is now core to most institutional investment decisions. Stakeholders and customers demand it. That message has come through increasingly loud and clear in my discussions with investors – here and internationally.

Understanding how best to leverage those limited public sector funds to maximise total investment, but to do so in a way that protects public assets and priorities, is a key part of the challenge.

Technology is critical to delivering Net Zero be that more efficient renewables generation, grid optimisation, demand management, development of transport solutions or realising the potential of the hydrogen economy. Scotland has a huge amount to offer – net zero infrastructure opportunities, innovative businesses needing growth capital to scale and provide the technology to tackle challenges on a global scale, and an enviable place at the cutting edge of renewable energy generation.

So given the central role of investment in delivering Net Zero I was delighted to be asked to open the investment stream this week at the All Energy Conference in Glasgow, the UK’s biggest annual energy and decarbonisation event, bringing together businesses, investors and policy makers.

Talking to those working to bring money to the table a number of key themes are apparent. The first is around pace and urgency.

Energy security, driven by the war in Ukraine, has seen rapid mobilisation of investment and acceleration of projects to secure supplies. We saw the same determined focus when addressing the public health and economic challenges caused by Covid. Those have shown what can be done when the will is there.

When it comes to mobilising investment to tackle the climate emergency that urgency is lacking. Injecting that pace is something investors and policy makers need to address.

All of this is happening in a rapidly-evolving global investment landscape. The impact of the US Inflation Reduction Act, and measures from the EU, risk pulling investment away from these shores. The second challenge is how to connect investment supply to demand most effectively.

Scotland benefits from an abundance of early-stage imaginative solutions. Our world-leading universities and innovation eco-system support these businesses at early stage. But the need to secure growth investment is essential, both to meet our climate targets, and to maximise economic impact and export potential.

Linking those businesses to investment flows and business opportunities is a critical part of the process. Meanwhile investors require help to validate technology, and to assess a start-up business’s capability to deliver it.

This is bringing to the fore some imaginative and necessary work on how to enable the required investments.

Glasgow-based Greenbackers Investment Capital is partnering with large Net Zero infrastructure developers, such as US global engineering firm TechnipFMC, to provide a "scouting" service, working with them to understand technology gaps in project deployment and then identifying early-stage investment-ready Scottish businesses that can plug those gaps.

Meanwhile Scotland’s Net Zero Technology Centre (NZTC) is providing a Technology Due Diligence service for investors. NZTC independently assessed the science behind a business’s technology along with its readiness and potential CO2 impact, helping de-risk investment decisions.

The countries that can position themselves intelligently to take advantage of the opportunities that Net Zero brings will thrive in the 21st century. Scotland benefits from having many of the necessary building blocks already in place.

The Scottish-based Global Ethical Finance Initiative (GEFI) is well on its way to positioning Scotland as a key global centre for ethical investment – with ESG and Net Zero at its core.

The Scottish Futures Trust provides the financial engineering skills required to imaginatively leverage in private sector investment to support public policy objectives, while maximising return on public investment.

And of course the Scottish National Investment Bank has a key role to play, as an investor in its own right, but also as a route for international investors to partner and channel additional funds through its activities in a way that is aligned with wider Team Scotland efforts, led by our enterprise agencies, to support development of the Scottish supply chain.

Local authorities, in particular Scotland’s cities, each offer their own investable propositions to the market. Further co-ordination and strategic alignment across those offers would help to enable scale for larger investors and de-risking through a portfolio approach as necessary. The Scottish Government’s Global Capital Investment Plan provides a good framework for this work – with its focus on making sure the pipeline of opportunities available across Scotland are investor ready. The almost £ 4 billion of opportunities in the Green Investment Portfolio provides a good start, but this needs to be scaled.

Meanwhile the former First Minister’s Investor Panel is pulling together its recommendations, as is the Green & Sustainable Finance Taskforce, including around how Scotland’s asset management industry can best engage with these opportunities.

Scotland has all the necessary ingredients – natural resources, skills, technology and the ability to leverage in the necessary investment to realise that potential. The investment eco-system is alive with a plethora of initiatives and some great ideas. Now is the time to pull all that together, give it some strategic coherence and direction, and to do so at pace to make sure we don’t get left behind.

Ivan McKee is SNP MSP for Glasgow Provan and a former Scottish Government minister