Techarena Zero, the sustainability-focused offshoot of Stockholm's Techarena platform, has shrunk significantly since its peak two years ago – and its founder says finding sponsors willing to back standalone climate events is getting harder.
Omid Ekhlasi, founder and CEO of Techarena, tells Impact Loop that this year's edition has accepted around 400 attendees, with 250 to 300 expected throughout the day. Two years ago, the event looked very different.
"We had around 800 people, 60 speakers, and participants from more than 50 countries,” he says on the sidelines of the Techarena Zero event in Kista, Stockholm this week. “We had three stages, a live broadcast, and a lot of partners."
Ekhlasi says the commercial model has proven difficult to sustain. Ticket sales don't justify the marketing spend required to sell them, and sponsors – beyond Techarena's existing annual partners – are largely unwilling to commit specifically to the sustainability event.
"Within sustainability, it's still the big companies driving the agenda. And they don't have this open-cheque mentality anymore – before they said, ‘yeah, I'll do whatever.’ But it's not like that anymore."
Speakers have been equally hard to attract. Ekhlasi says a particular reluctance to engage publicly with climate topics is making curation difficult.
"It’s harder to secure four panels at Tech Arena Zero than maybe 15 panels at the big one,” he says. “There are very few people who want to speak at our other events who are willing to come and talk about this."
According to the CEO, his event isn't the only one that has faced hurdles of late. "More and more events focused on climate, impact, and sustainability are being discontinued and this is something that is very tangible for us at Techarena as well," he says.
Addresses criticism about main event
The contrast with Techarena's flagship event, which drew some 12,000 attendees this year, is stark.
"While our event at Strawberry Arena [Stockholm] has grown in numbers of attendees, partners, and revenue every year, for Techarena Zero, that hasn't been the case," he says.
Impact Loop attended the flagship and noted a conspicuous absence of sustainability in the main programme – a view shared by others, as Impact Loop previously reported.
Climate communicator and Klimatkollen co-founder Frida Berry Eklund wrote on LinkedIn that the event was "in many ways fantastic" but that the planetary emergency was "nowhere to be found."
Ekhlasi pushes back. He told Impact Loop at the time that sustainability featured across nine to ten panels and numerous side events, but acknowledged the year's overarching theme had shifted.
"If you look at this year's theme, it was more: how do we become more competitive?"
At Techarena Zero this week Ekhlasi argues that sustainability has not disappeared from Techarena but has been absorbed into other themes – AI, data centres, energy infrastructure – rather than appearing under its own banner.
"Impact is not forgotten at Techarena,” he says. “It's just become more specialised and is included in many other topics like energy, industry and space."
It is a position that sits uneasily alongside his own account of Tech Arena Zero's struggles. If sustainability is now genuinely well-integrated into the main event, the case for a standalone offshoot becomes harder to make. If it isn't, the main event has a gap worth filling.
'We need to step up'
What he does say is that the sustainability events community cannot keep relying on corporate goodwill and public sector support to foot the bill. As that backing shifts towards AI and defence, he argues, the burden falls on the community itself.
"When that interest and support fades and their focus shifts towards other areas such as AI and defence, it's going to be up to us as a community to really step up," he says. “And that also means opening our wallets.”
Ekhlasi is direct about what that means in practice: the sustainability community needs to start paying for the events it says it values – buying tickets, committing sponsorship, and backing the infrastructure required to keep them running.
"Unfortunately, there aren't enough people willing to pay," he says.
Despite the declining numbers, Ekhlasi says he has no plans to stop. Techarena Zero is set to continue next year as well.
"We'll keep going with this event because it's important to us," he says. "We all know that climate tech is going to be vital for our future."