Climate Action - Assisting business towards carbon neutrality

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Climate Action is produced by Sustainable Development International in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme to encourage and assist governments and business to lower greenhouse gas emissions. This book and supporting website feature a range of articles that encourage the sharing of best practice and the development of new technologies and initiatives and illustrates the opportunities for business and governments to reduce costs and increase profits while tackling climate change.

There are a number of steps that you, as business and government leaders, can take to reduce your carbon footprint; the second part of this book is dedicated to these actions. Some require little investment in time or money, while others require substantial time and capital. What they all require is a commitment to succeed.

The year 2007 may well prove to be a defining moment in the international effort to combat climate change.

Across the world, countries, companies, cities and citizens are rising to the challenge of climate change and at a scale and pace which is truly unprecedented. Some are committing to big cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions with clear targets and timetables, while others are going that extra mile, pledging to be carbon neutral. Nations spearheading this include Costa Rica, Norway, New Zealand and the Vatican City and many companies have successfully risen to the challenge. As Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General, writes in this special edition of Climate Action, the United Nations is also stepping up to the mark.

A NEW CARBON NEUTRAL NETWORK FOR THE UN

In October UN agencies agreed to move to carbon neutrality too. UNEP, which is putting the final touches to its strategy, will be one of the ‘early movers’, cutting emissions in offices and operations and using UN approved standards to offset the rest.

This worldwide interest is one that we cannot simply allow to slip by. At the request of the Environment Minister of Costa Rica, UNEP will shortly be establishing a carbon neutral network – an Internet based information exchange service bringing carbon cutting and carbon shedding countries, companies and cities into close association. A central focus will be on strategies, policies, creative market mechanisms and technologies being tried, tested and piloted en route to lower carbon or carbon-free societies.

The relevance of the network to developing countries will be paramount including access to information but also to financing and suggestions on climate friendly and development-empowering projects. These will include projects ranging from renewable energy and forestry related schemes, to modern energy efficient factories, offices, homes and urban transportation systems backed under mechanisms like the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol.

Over the coming months and during the Bali climate  change convention meeting we will be looking to recruit  more pioneers to the network. The aim is to formally  launch the full system at UNEP’s Governing Council/  Global Ministerial Environment Forum in February 2008. We will also link this undertaking with follow up to the Caring for Climate initiative with business leaders that has been undertaken by the UN Global Compact, UNEP and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Readers of Climate Action, and its associated website, with carbon cutting strategies in place or in gestation are most welcome too.

The fact that a global carbon neutral network is being  called for reflects the momentum of an issue that has  become the challenge for this generation.

THE KEY TO THE FUTURE

The demand for global action reflects the milestones we have passed and the barriers that have been hurdled in this 10th anniversary year of the Kyoto Protocol and the 20th  year of the Brundtland Commission report, the report that first popularised the concept of sustainable development.

The momentum is in no small part due to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established by UNEP, and the World Meteorological Organisation and its series of fourth assessment reports. It has put the full stop behind the science; climate change is happening, it is ‘unequivocal’.

The IPCC’s  2,000 plus scientists have also outlined the likely impacts with greater clarity and certainty. Impacts that are likely within this generation, such as the melting of substantial numbers of Himalayan glaciers with huge ramifications for industrial, agricultural and domestic water supplies in Asia.

It is a veritable Pandora ’s Box with the lid just beginning to open. The link between climate change and instability has this year been implicitly recognised with the IPCC winning the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Al Gore, the former US Vice-President.

But the IPCC has also outlined the design of a key to another box, an escape box of opportunities rather than calamities. It estimates that overcoming serious climate change may cost perhaps as little as 0.1 per cent of global GDP a year for three decades.

In Bali, governments must begin forging that key. They must get down earnestly and urgently to agree the parameters for negotiating a new and decisive post-2012 treaty along with a timetable for when those negotiations end.

The existing Kyoto Protocol has achieved a great deal but it was only ever going to be a first step. Nevertheless, it has spawned new and novel markets in carbon trading. Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which allows developed countries to offset some of their emissions via cleaner and greener energy projects in developing countries, is set to channel US$100 billion from North to South. This in part is helping to drive new markets and new employment opportunities in new businesses.

Renewables may still only account for some two per cent of electricity generation. But according to a new study by the UNEP linked Sustainable Energy Finance Initiative, renewables now account for 18 per cent of new investment.

Studies in Germany indicate that more people will be employed in environmental technologies in 2020 than are employed in the car industry.

And it is not just in Germany. Two of the biggest and fastest growing wind power companies are in China and India. Brazil is the indisputable leader in ethanol fuels and is convinced it can boost exports without encroaching on the Amazon.

The CDM is also having other spin offs. One area of persistent division between the developed and developing world has been the singular failure of rich countries to meet the overseas aid commitments of the past. Few countries spend 0.7 per cent of their domestic GDP on this. The US$100 billion set to be delivered by CDM is in many ways helping to meet at least some of that unfulfilled promise.

Unfortunately, the benefits of the CDM are being spread far from evenly. The lion’s share of projects are going to the big rapidly developing economies of Brazil, China and India. UNEP in partnership with the UN Development Programme (UNDP) last year launched a new initiative with the twin aims of building the capacity of smaller developing countries while assisting to climate proof their economies. One of the key areas being targeted is sub-Saharan Africa.

The fact that so much activity is underway is also due to the anticipation that countries will indeed agree a treaty that engages post-2012 and one that delivers much bigger cuts than Kyoto. These cuts will put the world on track to the up to 80 per cent emission reductions deemed necessary by scientists to avert dangerous climate change.

UNEP’s role in Bali is to support Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and his team. It is they who are principally responsible for coordinating the negotiations. Part of that support involves looking at the wider landscape, economically, environmentally and socially.

It is about sensitising governments, but also companies, local authorities, civil society and citizens, to the threats and opportunities of climate change while also demonstrating creative and innovative solutions that can, in the jargon, be ‘scaleable and replicable’.

THE WIDER LANDSCAPE

The wider landscape was set out in the IPCC reports but also in UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook-4 (GEO-4), launched in late October 2007. The peer reviewed work of some 1,300 scientists, GEO-4 makes it starkly clear that carbon dioxide emissions have risen by 30 per cent a year over the past 20 years and that unchecked climate change will impact on the wider development aims including the Millennium Development Goals.

GEO-4 also points out climate change is happening against a backdrop of declining ecosystem services in many areas as a result of impacts, such as overfishing, air pollution, land degradation and rapidly declining biodiversity.

Combating climate change however may help reverse some of these declines. Standing forests, home to some of the world’s last biodiversity and important ecosystems for water supplies, land stability and livelihoods in many poorer parts of the globe, currently fall outside the carbon markets, including the CDM, despite the fact that they absorb significant amounts of atmospheric carbon pollution.

Conversely, deforestation currently accounts for an estimated 20 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. Financial incentives for standing forests, perhaps as part of the CDM, become increasingly possible under a new post-2012 climate regime and need to be part of the Bali discussions.

Some of the wider economic and environmental benefits of fighting climate change also remain largely unnoticed. UNEP, at the request of governments, is currently involved in discussions on how to reduce global emissions of the highly toxic and poisonous heavy metal, mercury. The fastest rising source of new mercury into the environment, where it can often spread as far as the poles, is coming from increasing coal-fired power generation in the rapidly growing economies of Asia.

Meanwhile there is some evidence that old mercury, deposited in the sediments of lakes in places like North America, are re-emerging as a result of rising lake temperatures linked with climate change. The increasing melting of ice in the Arctic may also be re-introducing old mercury back into the environment, entering the food chain and thus humans.

Combating climate change may therefore also assist in reducing new emissions and the reemergence of old deposits of mercury with significant economic, health and environmental spin offs. There are many more examples, from reduced health hazardous air pollution in cities to cuts in the costs of natural but climate-fuelled disasters.

TRANSITION TO A LOW CARBON SOCIETY

UNEP’s slogan at the climate convention talks will be ‘Transition to a Low Carbon Society – Bali and Beyond’ with the sub themes, echoing to the challenges and the solutions: ‘Climate Proofing Economies; Financing a Low Carbon Transition and Technologies for a Low Carbon World’.

A carbon neutral network fits into this strategy and will be underlined again in New Zealand, host of World Environment Day 2008, with the theme ‘Kick the CO2 Habit’.

I would like to congratulate this Climate Action initiative of Sustainable Development International which is very much embedded in this new thinking; thinking that is no longer just about the threats but about self evident (and often not so self evident) cost effective solutions.

Climate change offers the chance to transform the way we do business on this planet. All that is really required now is the political commitment of governments to unleash human ingenuity. This is a commodity that is freely available, extraordinarily versatile, in limitless supply and with an already distinguished track record.

Achim Steiner

Achim Steiner is UN Under-Secretary General  and Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). He has worked both at the grassroots level and the highest levels of international policymaking to address the interface between environmental sustainability, social equity, and economic development.
His professional career has included assignments with governmental and non-governmental, as well as international organisations in different parts of the world. In 2001, he was appointed Director-General of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), widely regarded as one of the most influential and highly respected organisations in the field of conservation, environment and natural resources management.
Mr Steiner serves on a number of international advisory boards, including the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED), and Planet Green, an initiative of the Discovery Channel.