The seventh edition of the Suma Summit brought together today in Barcelona more than 300 professionals from the business, financial, institutional, and investment ecosystem, in a session focused on the challenges of competitiveness, resilience, and energy security facing Europe.
Under the motto Europe’s Hour: Transition and Competitiveness, the event — hosted by Jacob Petrus, geographer, climatologist, and science communicator — gathered national and international experts to analyse how Europe can advance in the ecological transition without losing industrial competitiveness or the capacity to deploy solutions at scale.
During the Summit’s opening, Enrique Tombas, President of Suma Capital, noted: Tombas highlighted “the crucial role of private capital in this new phase of the transition, helping to build more resilient companies and assets that reinforce Europe’s competitiveness and industrial capabilities, and thus enable the European Union to be a leading voice in the current geopolitical context.”
The day began with the keynote Competitiveness and Strategic Sovereignty in Europe, delivered by Francisco José Gan Pampols, retired Lieutenant General of the Army, who analysed the new geopolitical and economic context facing Europe, shaped by international tensions, pressure on strategic resources, global competition, and new security challenges.
In this context, Gan Pampols underscored the need to reinforce industrial competitiveness, energy security, and European strategic autonomy. The session highlighted the scale of the investment challenge facing Europe, in line with the Draghi Report on European competitiveness, which estimates the need to mobilise around €800 billion in additional annual investment to reinforce competitiveness, drive innovation, and reduce external dependencies.
The Summit then hosted the roundtable Net Zero in Practice: What Holds Back and What Accelerates the Transition, moderated by Marc Miralles, Sustainability Director at Suma Capital. Participants included Carles Navarro, former CEO of BASF Iberia; Jordi Sargatal Vicens, Secretary for Ecological Transition of the Government of Catalonia; and Marta Torres Gunfaus, Director of the Climate Programme at IDDRI.
During the session, the main findings of the second edition of the Suma Net Zero Index were shared — an initiative driven by the Suma Impact Foundation together with Salvetti & Llombart and with methodological support from PwC, based on an online survey of a representative sample of 2,061 Spanish citizens. The index is a strategic orientation tool on the potential for citizen mobilisation, based on declared behaviours and intentions, and not an exact prediction of the change that will ultimately take place. Nevertheless, it yields interesting data: 71% of citizens consider climate change a very serious problem. Furthermore, the study shows that the population reports a potential reduction in their carbon footprint linked to everyday habits of 5.1% over the next year, compared to 3.5% in the first edition.
The event then hosted the panel Financing a Competitive Transition in Europe, moderated by David Arroyo, Founding Partner of Suma Capital, with the participation of Joana Castro, Partner at Sagard; David González, Senior Regional Manager for Iberia at EIF; and Jorge Alcover, Managing Director of Financing at Goldman Sachs.
In a context marked by geopolitical pressure, fragmentation of supply chains, and greater demands on profitability, scale, and operational maturity, the panel addressed how the financing of the transition in Europe is evolving. The debate analysed where investor traction is strongest today — from established infrastructure to growth-stage projects — as well as the role of areas such as electrification, storage, circularity, and efficiency in the new economic cycle.
Participants agreed on the need to drive projects with greater scale and maturity to accelerate the mobilisation of capital, as well as on the importance of rigorously analysing risks, returns, and the real capacity to convert transition-linked opportunities into bankable and scalable projects.
The Summit concluded with the keynote The Future of Sustainability: Creativation or Extinction, delivered by Josep Lagares, Executive Chairman of Metalquimia and author of TIME-OUT, who reflected on the future of sustainability in a context marked by resource scarcity, competitive pressure, and technological acceleration.
Throughout his address, Lagares argued that time has become one of the most limited resources for organisations, and championed creativity and innovation as levers for adapting more rapidly to an environment of growing complexity.
The VII Suma Summit left a shared underlying message among all participants: the ecological transition will advance in Europe if it succeeds in combining competitiveness, capital, social acceptance, and the capacity to deploy solutions at scale.
Under the motto Europe’s Hour: Transition and Competitiveness, the event addressed how Europe can advance in the ecological transition while combining industrial competitiveness, energy security, and the deployment of solutions at scale.
