The world’s leading authority on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had not delivered a major report in seven years. But the installment released in August 2021 paints a dire picture of our future.
On our current path, we will likely breach the Paris Agreement’s stretch target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels in the next two decades, and we may breach the fallback target of well below 2°C around mid-century.1
For these goals set just a few years ago, the 2020s will truly be the decisive decade. This year’s scourge of wildfires in California and Siberia, floods in Germany, and deadly storms like Hurricane Ida remind us of what is to come.
The IPCC report tells us that climate change isn’t a problem we should solve for the next generation; it is a problem we must solve immediately, for ourselves. The impacts of a 1.5°C and 2°C world — extreme heat and weather, species loss, crop yield reductions, fishery decline, disrupted supply chains, public health crises, and displaced communities — would arrive during our own working lives. We, not our children, would see how the dice are loaded. The heatwave that happened once every 50 years before industrialization would happen nine times at 1.5°C and 14 times at 2°C.2
So the staggering rise of corporate net-zero commitments comes at an auspicious time. Over the past three years, more than 3,000 businesses, large and small, have made net-zero commitments now aggregated under the UN’s Race to Zero campaign.3 All of these meet a set of criteria in force as of this June.4 This momentum from businesses to build net-zero value chains can change our global trajectory. But net-zero commitments are also increasingly subject to five criticisms, which implementation must address to be truly credible and transformative.
These criticisms point towards what climate leadership will look like in future. This includes:
This can be a lot to ask of a company formulating its next climate target and implementation plan. But debate over net-zero commitments is heating up as COP26 approaches and will not slow down anytime soon. Listening to these concerns from the climate community helps companies make their net-zero implementation commensurate to the crisis at hand.
1 IPCC AR6 WGI SPM, table SPM.1.
2 IPCC AR6 WGI SPM, p. SPM-23.
3 https://unfccc.int/climate-action/race-to-zero-campaign
4 https://racetozero.unfccc.int/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Race-to-Zero-Criteria-2.0.pdf
5 The Race to Zero criteria require that companies “[s]et an interim target to achieve in the next decade, which reflects maximum effort toward or beyond a fair share of the 50% global reduction in CO2 by 2030 identified in the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5C”.
David Wei is managing director at BSR. As the lead of BSR’s climate team, David works with companies to develop and implement net zero climate goals, manage climate risks, integrate climate justice into company action, and incubate collaborations to build the net zero economy. He strives to maximize the impact of our applied research, collaborative initiatives, and work with individual companies. This often means innovating how companies align with the Paris Agreement… Read More