Another ClimateTech Podcast
Another ClimateTech Podcast is a weekly interview series that explores the fight against climate change through the lens of entrepreneurship, investment, academia, activism, and art. Join Ryan Grant Little, a seasoned climatetech founder, advisor, and investor, as he interviews the climate warriors trying to save us from ourselves.
#Climate #Climatetech #Cleantech #Sustainability #Environment
Another ClimateTech Podcast
A kayaker turns her passion into a startup, with Jessica Droujko of Riverkin
Jessica Droujko is a passionate kayaker and lover of rivers. So it’s fitting that she should combine that passion and her PhD from ETH Zürich to launch Riverkin, a startup that monitors river health.
In this episode we talked about:
🌊 How rivers shape landscapes and their importance in global ecosystems
🔬 How Riverkin monitors water levels and sediment flows
🏞️ Jessica's adventures on some of the world's most interesting rivers, including the Boiling River in Peru
🚣♀️ The balance between responsible tourism and river conservation. Think: Grand Canyon
🌍 The River Collective's mission to create changemakers through events like the Students for Rivers camp
🔌 Opportunities for citizen science in river monitoring through mini hydrological stations
#ClimateTech #Rivers #Water
Rivers actually shape the landscape and you have the tectonic plates that move and create these mounds on the earth. But the earth is really shaped by the rivers, and so without rivers you have no mountains, but you could have rivers without mountains too.
Ryan Grant Little:Welcome to another Climate Tech podcast interviews with the people trying to save. Climate Tech Podcast Interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. A passionate kayaker, Jessica Droujko, loves rivers so much that she's devoted her career to keeping them flowing. Her startup, Riverkin, tracks things like water levels and sediment flows in rivers to keep these ecosystems healthy. Did you know that rivers are host to way more species of fauna than oceans are? Well, neither did I. It just goes to show, as Jessica points out, that we tend to take our rivers for granted. I reached Jessica in Zurich. I'm Ryan Grant. Little Thanks for being here, Jess. Welcome to the podcast.
Jessica Droujko:Thank you Very nice to be here, jess. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, very nice to be here.
Ryan Grant Little:I read this quote about you and I loved the description. So quote Jessica Druchko is passionate about water, and rivers in particular. The Canadian scientist was born along the Niagara River, spent her summers on the Ottawa River and earned her bachelor's degree in Montreal, where two rivers merged to create the great St Lawrence River. So is it in your DNA? What is it about rivers that you love so much?
Jessica Droujko:I mean I guess it is in my DNA being born in Niagara Falls General Hospital, literally a few kilometers away from the falls. Yeah, I love that quote. I'm happy that they put it in there. What do I love about rivers so much? I think probably selfishly the kayaking is one big component, but the other thing is that I think rivers are kind of the underdog of ecosystems worldwide. Reefs get a lot of hype, which they should. I'm not going to talk down on reefs or on the ocean with plastic pollution, but there are so many more freshwater fish species in rivers than there are fish species in the ocean, for example. I can't give you the exact number because I don't have it off the top of my head and, as a scientist, I would feel wrong to give you a benchmark number.
Ryan Grant Little:I mean more is already fascinating that I never would have thought that.
Jessica Droujko:It's a lot more, and rivers act like biogeochemical reactors with carbon and they just have so many different functions and they're integrated into every single part of the landscape. It's funny, because so many people in the Alps are obsessed with climbing. They're obsessed with mountains, and something that people don't realize is actually, without rivers, there would be no mountains, because rivers actually shape the landscape and you have the tectonic plates that move and create these mounds on the earth, but the earth is really shaped by the rivers and so without rivers you have no mountains. But you could have rivers without mountains too.
Ryan Grant Little:It's like an Aristotelian syllogism.
Jessica Droujko:It's so Aristotelian.
Ryan Grant Little:And so I mean this has become beyond just a passion, it's become your career and field of study as well. But before getting into rivers academically you were studying engineering, specifically combustion engines and reactive flows, and so those are not topics necessarily, you know, closely connected to climate change, change what drove that shift away from that and from those, and were you able to kind of capture any of the approaches or knowledge from that as you apply it to kind of a more fluid experience looking at rivers?
Jessica Droujko:It's interesting because the group that I was at McGill, we were in Montreal, we were studying reactive flows, but the end goal was actually a climate related goal and it was. We were burning. It's going to sound very crazy, but we were burning metal powders like aluminum, iron powder to create a circular economy, so similar to burning fossil fuels. When you burn metals they convert from. You can say aluminum to aluminum oxides. Metals they convert from. You can say aluminum to aluminum oxides, and then you can recycle those if you can capture them.
Jessica Droujko:So the technology is quite far, but the idea was in very remote locations so none of it or in the northern territories, where you don't have a lot of these newer, what they called renewable energy technologies that are being implemented and that need money to be implemented. You can ship with trucks metal powders and burn them inside of an engine, collect that powder dust and recycle it, because we already have that infrastructure in place. So actually it was a climate related goal and so I think I've always been interested in the climate, but ultimately, when I started to actually work in the field, the reality is that the technology, even though we're always trying to save the amount of you know make the engines more efficient because you will burn less. In reality, you were never burning less, you were just saving money, and for me, this was not something that I wanted to be part of to make engines more efficient to make more money. So, yeah, that's really I've just started to explore and I wanted to somehow combine my passion with my tech skills.
Ryan Grant Little:Do you so? As someone who studied combustion engines, do you think there's still a future role for combustion, or does it really make sense to kind of electrify everything going forward?
Jessica Droujko:I would never give a black and white answer for something like this. And this also goes back to rivers, because when we start to, as you would say, electrify everything, the first thing that people look at is hydropower, because hydropower is the cheapest form of renewable energy, and I guess the people listening can't see us on the camera, but I'm doing air quotes here. It is renewable, but I would never say that hydropower is green energy, and so as soon as you stop burning, you start putting pressure, more and more pressure, on our ecosystem. So I would never give a black and white answer like this. I think everything needs to be a balance and, of course, I am always for keeping the rivers free flowing.
Ryan Grant Little:And it's not green because of the damming that's required, because of the way that it changes the flows of the rivers and therefore the ecosystems as well.
Jessica Droujko:It's multifaceted. From the first side, yeah, there's the ecosystem. So the amount of concrete that's needed to build these dams has a huge environmental impact, and most of the time in these assessments of how much carbon was saved, you're just looking at once the dam has been built, and so you're looking at how much greenhouse gases have you not burned because you've produced hydroelectric electricity. But most of the time in these assessments you don't take into account how much concrete was actually poured in order to build the thing. Second of all, you completely destroy the ecosystem, completely. You shave down the mountain, you deforest and a lot of that organic matter gets trapped inside the reservoir.
Jessica Droujko:So, thirdly, there was a study shown that or maybe multiple studies, but for sure at least one study that showed that dams in tropical regions than burning gases in that same region. So in alpine regions, where it's less tropical, it's not the same. But in tropical regions dams release more methane because of all of the organic matter that's being decomposed and trapped inside of the hydropower plants. So they actually have a huge environmental footprint. But then, on top of the environmental footprint, there's the societal side. People that are displaced because of dams end up in poverty, and that's also a huge issue. People are being displaced because some company needs to make money and provide electricity for us, probably in the city that are making a lot of money and this is not fair us, probably in the city, that are making a lot of money and this is not fair, interesting.
Ryan Grant Little:So if you look at it from a pure kilowatt hour produced standpoint, it looks great. But when you factor in kind of the lifecycle analysis of the whole thing and some of the factors that are not necessarily environmental, as you say, displacing people I know this has been in the news a major issue in China over the past decade or two Three Gorges Dam and that type of thing so yeah, that all makes sense. Can you talk a little bit about your shift from McGill and then moving to Switzerland and studying kind of things more closely related to rivers there, what you studied and then kind of how you took that from the academic side into the startup world with Riverkin?
Jessica Droujko:Yeah, I mean I got into a few universities for my master's a few were in Canada and then one was in Switzerland and for me I'm always the person that I try. Do you know this word? Happenstance? I learned about it recently, so I always kind of did it, but I didn't know what it meant and for the listeners it just means, basically, when opportunity meets preparedness. So I was just kind of open and I know if I would stay in Montreal, I knew exactly what my life would look like and that scared me.
Jessica Droujko:If I would move to Switzerland, I had no idea what awaited me and that's where the most opportunities come. And that's purely the only reason why I moved, just because there was a black hole and I had no idea what would come. And I moved to Switzerland, to Zurich, to again study combustion engineering. So I continued doing that. And then my transition towards rivers was more that I was sick of the field. I was kayaking. I was meeting a lot of kayakers asking them well, I have technical skills, what could I do? And then the idea of developing this product came about. I have no experience in hardware design and product design and electronics, but I thought, yeah, if other people could do it, why can't I? And that's just how it happened.
Ryan Grant Little:And so the idea came basically while kayaking and talking to kayakers on the river. I love that.
Jessica Droujko:As all great ideas.
Ryan Grant Little:The very few great ideas that I have usually come in the shower, which is, I guess, sort of a form of a river.
Jessica Droujko:Yeah, I think most there's. Also, I think Rebecca Solnit wrote a book about walking and I think most people inspiration hits when you're walking, when you're outdoors, when you're or in the shower, which maybe kind of remakes that environment, but for me it's kayaking, yeah.
Ryan Grant Little:Amazing, and so talk a bit about what Riverkin is, who it's for, what it does. So you talked about you know you're new to hardware what kind of hardware is involved and what does that do?
Jessica Droujko:Yeah. So I guess, trying to be brief, like at Riverkin, we basically deploy ecosystems we call them of our sensors and we monitor the environment, and we monitor particularly river systems, river ecosystems, and what we monitor is the water level and water quality parameters, mostly because this is a huge gap in the market, and a lot of this data you need for modeling, for understanding the ecosystem, for flood modeling, for setting legislations and understanding ecosystem changes. For terrestrial ecosystems you can use satellite imagery to monitor ecosystem changes and landscape changes. But that's extremely difficult with freshwater systems because, first of all, they're too small most of the time to be captured from space and, second of all, they don't change really on a daily basis, but I would say on a sub-daily basis. So we really need more monitoring to understand and make political decisions.
Ryan Grant Little:And what kind of things are you monitoring for? What are the most kind of important factors to be testing for?
Jessica Droujko:So, of course, the most important thing is water level, so that you can infer the discharge is what we call it of the river. So that's how much water is actually in the river. That's the most important, and this is really starting to be built across Europe, but not the rest of the world Europe, but not the rest of the world, also in the US, but really nowhere else. And that's really just the water level. So other parameters like temperature what is the temperature of the water?
Jessica Droujko:Our company is releasing boiling water into the rivers. When dams are built, the water is super cold and they release this water. On most of the time, the rivers have a minimum flow. When they're dam controlled, that minimum flow is somewhat warm because it's so low, and then you have this ice cold water coming down, being released, and this. The ecosystem isn't adapted to deal with these changes. But temperature is not monitored and one thing that we're doing is, yeah, the level, the temperature, importantly, and the suspended sediments. So the sediments that, as we spoke about mountains that are being eroded from the mountains and that travel downstream, interact with the habitats, create the habitats and build up the coastlines downstream.
Ryan Grant Little:I can imagine there are probably major implications for society. In order to be able to know, kind of, what's changing about the rivers, that you know some of the positive externalities of being able to prevent things like floods or landslides or that type of thing. Has that been the experience so far? Like, can you use data to predict where these kinds of negative events are going to happen?
Jessica Droujko:You can certainly use data to create flood models and flood predictions for the basins. What sort of infrastructure you put in place? Is then the decisions from the models right? So what is the likelihood that such an event will happen? But of course you can't do that, you can't make those decisions, unless you actually have the model and the data to inform. The model For landslides, you wouldn't be measuring the signal in the water but more for, I guess, triggering processes.
Jessica Droujko:I didn't study landslides, but from what I understand, you have to understand the amount of water that's actually in the soil on the mountains and what is the likelihood of that being triggered.
Jessica Droujko:What we can measure in the water is early signals of large sediment inputs and large sediment plumes. So when we start monitoring more upstream, we can then see how, infer, how long these types of sediments would take to reach downstream, into our infrastructure, into hydropower, into cities, and that's especially important because now, with increasing climate change, we have much more glacial erosion, we have much more sediments that are being accumulated, and we're not prepared, we didn't build our infrastructure, especially in Europe, to deal with that. So in the Netherlands they're basically sinking right and they've had to start dealing with this problem very, very early on. In other countries, in Bangladesh, you have the Himalayas that are bringing so much sediment and you have the shipping industry that is trying to coordinate navigating all of this, and so there's really a lot of issues that are now coming with how we've structured really structured our river systems and how that's not compatible with climate change.
Ryan Grant Little:It's interesting. So I mean you can provide all the data now and then the question really is what people are going to do about it, right, and what governments or different stakeholders are going to actually do with that data now that they have it. You mentioned that you use sensors and satellite imagery, but you're also leaning into AI quite a bit on this. Can you talk a little bit about how you use AI in this?
Jessica Droujko:Yeah, so my co-founder is the AI expert with like 15, I think he was the. He was an AI and data science expert before the terms were coined in Switzerland, and what we I mean first we need the data right, so we're not really doing it yet, but the idea of what we would like to do is, from satellite images, from digital elevation models so the surface of the earth, from the data that we collect from land cover maps and from geological maps, really start to create our own models on top of this to help with that type of decision making that we were talking about. And exactly what kind of decision making? I think for us, it's interesting for us to help coordinate with water. So, once we start seeing how many industries are actually extracting water, how is that compatible with climate change and will people end up getting those concessions? Or, with less water available, will we need to keep the concessions for the population and not for industries? So more water coordination, I think, is something that's interesting for us.
Ryan Grant Little:Let's just switch gears a little bit. I'm curious to hear a bit more about your transition from academia, which I think is not so long ago and you're still closely connected to the university there in Switzerland and moving from there and commercializing kind of this the work that you've been doing there into a startup. Can you talk a little bit about what that experience has been like, what kind of involvement the university itself has, what some of the kind of challenges and opportunities are of working so closely with the university?
Jessica Droujko:Yeah, First answering the first part and then the second part, I guess I only defended my PhD three months ago or four months ago, so it's quite recent. But I have to say, in the last year I haven't really been doing anything for my PhD. I'm very lucky that, yeah, I was able to take time and actually work on the startup in this last year. But really I would say I don't know if I was ever an academic, because when I had this idea I wanted to do it as a startup. But, being a Canadian, in Switzerland you need a visa and I wasn't really prepared to undergo a startup without, I don't know, at 24, 25 years old, not knowing anything about it. So my kind of hack was well, I'll just convince someone in Switzerland to hire me as a PhD student and I will work on this.
Jessica Droujko:So I pitched the idea to many professors across Switzerland and finally one liked the idea and he said it's a great idea but it's not scientific. So he wrote the scientific application and I wrote the technical application. We got the grant. It was labeled as high risk, but then I defended the PhD. So for my PhD, I built the sensors, deployed them across Switzerland, collected data, wrote papers, got the PhD, and now I'm like okay, now I can take the tech and apply it to the startup. Working with the university, they've been super supportive. We have a lot of infrastructure in place at the university really supporting startups. I got a small grant to work on it for 18 months, which has been phenomenal. We have incubators here, but we are also in tech transfer negotiations, which is something that I think is the reality for every spin out.
Ryan Grant Little:Interesting, and so what advice would you have for some scientists or PhD students who you know were in your shoes and are thinking maybe they've got the next big thing, but they're a bit nervous about doing a startup? Do you have I mean, that sounds like a pretty good path that you've followed. Do you have any advice for these scientists?
Jessica Droujko:Yeah, I would say, probably the most difficult part is thinking, oh, I have this thing, but I don't know who would pay for it, or I don't know what the business case is, and I think a lot of startups start that way, so it's not abnormal and my advice would be to find that incubator, find that support and start building a team. Start building a team with, find that other person that has this kind of business experience and you can explain that product to and they can help start applying that to different business cases and then just go through that process together. I think that's probably the best actionable advice that I could give.
Ryan Grant Little:Great yeah, Find someone who has got some experience on product market fit and bring them into the fold and find a way to monetize it. I think that's really good advice. You're an expert on rivers. You're a lover, an amateur of rivers. What are your favorite rivers in the world and why? So I mean personally, I'm waiting for my opportunity. I have no idea when it will come, but to travel a stretch of the Amazon. Is that a good starting point for me, or where would you recommend?
Jessica Droujko:Did you say that because you saw that I did that, or is that just something?
Ryan Grant Little:No, did you.
Jessica Droujko:Well, I mean just to answer your question. Yeah, I did a 14-day trip of the Marañón, which is a tributary of the Amazon. So we started in the high Andes and we traveled 550 kilometers to the cloud forest, which is it was like a hundred kilometers before it entered the Amazon. It was phenomenal. One of my favorite rivers, for sure.
Jessica Droujko:Your question is difficult because you asked me what are my favorite rivers and what are some of the most interesting rivers in the world, and I can tell you some of the most interesting rivers in the world I mean also in Peru is a river called the Boiling River. Have you heard of this?
Ryan Grant Little:No, sounds warm.
Jessica Droujko:Yeah, it comes out of a spring, which I don't know how it's heated, but I think for a few kilometers it flows at over 99 degrees Celsius and there's a TED Talk about it, and this is a river I wanted to visit when I was in the Amazon but couldn't. That's definitely one of the most interesting rivers that I've ever come across. For me, some of my favorite rivers are the Marañón. In Chile, there's the Futalafú Huge, huge, huge river flowing through Patagonia Just absolutely phenomenal. It's so difficult to get there. I went there once when I was 15 and it was a dirt road that we had to travel for seven hours or more. And then I went back a few years ago and now the road is paved, but you still have to take a ferry Stop at the McDonald's along the way.
Jessica Droujko:No, so the Fouta, le Fou. I, of course you know, I grew up on the Ottawa River, so this river is dear to my heart. I was a raft guide, a kayak instructor, so the Ottawa River, of course, the St Lawrence, because I studied in Montreal and we have amazing waves that you can surf in a kayak and I will go back in about two weeks to go surf those waves again. And in Europe, I think my favorite rivers here are definitely the Inn, so the Inn travels from here in Switzerland as the source and then it enters Austria and flows into the Danube, which is such an important part of Europe, and the sections of the Inn upstream here are phenomenal for whitewater kayaking but they're also under threat of being dammed here.
Ryan Grant Little:I learned whitewater kayaking in the Gull River in Minden, Ontario oh nice, Very good kayaking there. And when I was a kid yeah, it's been a while since I've done it, but I think I was pretty good at it. And you mentioned the Danube, which is about a five minute walk from where I am right now, and I go there early weekend mornings with my dog and go swimming in the summer. It's one of my favorite things to do. It's one of the best things I think about living in Vienna.
Jessica Droujko:It's. I think rivers are so integral to everyone's life, in Europe especially and I think sometimes we forget about that, about I would not be able to live in Zurich if we didn't have the Limat. Just because we don't have AC, you need to go jump in the river A fellow landlocked country like Austria.
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah indeed, and in 2024, is it still possible to be a responsible tourist and do things like a river trip in the Amazon? Or is this kind of like becoming like Everest, where there's no right way to do it anymore?
Jessica Droujko:I think, again, everything is a question of balance and I can give one example, which is I went last year on the Grand Canyon, and the Grand Canyon is it was also a 14 day trip and it's extremely structured. Everything you bring in you take out, even your poo, like you have to carry everything with you. If you flip the raft, the poo is in there, so you take everything out. When we exited the river, we were in Las Vegas and that's where we flew out. Complete dichotomy, right? I don't know how many visitors Las Vegas has every year.
Jessica Droujko:Some of my friends that were with me they were making fun of it. They were saying oh you know, las Vegas, it's so fake compared to where we just came from. But I was walking through some of the hotels where you know it was beautiful flowers, but it was fake flowers and I thought this is really smart, because they're in the desert, they don't have that much water. So I think it's kind of beautiful that the way they did it without using that much. I mean, I don't know how much water you know Vegas uses, I'm sure a lot, but I just mean.
Jessica Droujko:I think a lot flowers were, I thought, a nice touch, instead of using real flowers. And it's not possible to have that many people in Vegas going through the Grand Canyon. I think they only released 23,000 permits a year, so I don't think, you know, it would never be possible to have that many people going through the Grand Canyon. So I think it's also fair to have the city of Vegas existing for other, for people, and somehow it has to be, yeah, a balance of. So my answer is I can't give you an answer.
Ryan Grant Little:As well as Riverkin, you're also part of something called River Collective. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and its mission?
Jessica Droujko:Yeah, I mean, the River Collective is an NGO that my friends and I started way before so, seven years ago, and we basically create changemakers. And these are people that love rivers and want to apply their knowledge, their art skills, sports, anything to river protection and to elevating the status of rivers. And so how we do that is we basically we're a network. We create events. Our events are online workshops or mapping sessions or, most famously, our Students for Rivers camp, which every year we organize at a different river. The first one was in Slovenia, on the beautiful Soča River. That's also an amazing river in Europe that you should go to.
Ryan Grant Little:Slovenia is amazing.
Jessica Droujko:And then we did it in Albania, then Austria. Now we are starting to hand over the organization to the local communities. So this year we're working with a local community in Bosnia and they're organizing the camp there and we're bringing students from all across the world to this camp and they basically learn about the local ecosystem, about the local issues and it's always different because every river system is different and they basically exchange knowledge and collaborate on the issues there. That's one of the events, yeah.
Ryan Grant Little:And for people who are listening, how can they get involved either or both, in Riverkin's mission and River Collective's mission?
Jessica Droujko:River Collective is very easy you just email us and join one of the events and become a member, because we have no money. Also, if people have money and they want to donate and support the mission, Also if people have money and they want to donate and support the mission For Riverkin right now, what would be interesting for us is we're exploring right now B2B a lot of different business cases so that means business to business cases. But we also see a lot of potential with working with citizens, so business to consumer and what we are looking at is also giving out mini hydrological monitoring stations to people. So if you have your backyard river and you want to do this kind of citizen science work, we would send a sensor, you would install it and if we would sell that data or provide it to someone, then there would be some profit sharing and so if people want to explore that, then they can also reach out.
Ryan Grant Little:As always, links to all of the relevant webpages, linkedin, etc. Etc. Will be in the show notes. Jessica, thank you so much for talking today.
Jessica Droujko:Thanks so much, Ryan.
Ryan Grant Little:Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech Podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. Find me, ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.
