MASCO Update November 2017

COP23 is history. It was a working COP. It lived up to its (low) expectations, and most importantly, it didn’t produce any big drama or negative surprise. Good. But the much bigger news is something else: At the beginning of the COP, UNEP launched its Emissions Gap Report. It suggests that even if Paris pledges are implemented, we are still heading for a 2.9 to 3.4 degrees world, and we would likely “lose the chance” to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. In parallel, the Economist calculates that a staggering 800 gigatonnes of carbon (=20 years of global emissions) would have to be sucked out of the atmosphere to keep global warming below 2 degrees. And the Global Carbon Project finds that global emissions from fossil fuels and industry in 2017 are 2% above 2016, after having been stable for a few years.

So what we need is nothing short of a true transformation. How can a company like South Pole contribute? One path on which we have now embarked is to put more focus on climate risks, resilience, and adaptation, in addition to our ongoing work on carbon mitigation. Our theory of change is that if we can engage corporates and governments in a discussion about real, physical climate risks, by mapping various climate scenarios to their business and their assets, we will engage them in much deeper and more serious conversations about “future-proofing” their business. This in turn should be an inroad on engaging them as well much deeper in carbon mitigation and deep emissions reductions, at their plants, in their supply chains, and through offsetting remaining emissions.

We call this “climate stewardship”.

Kind regards,
Renat Heuberger, CEO South Pole Group