How business should respond to the COP24 outcome
It’s very easy to watch the UNFCC’s annual COP get together with a sense of dread. The wheels of international negotiation turn excruciatingly slowly and getting agreement makes passing kidney stones feel like a doddle. Forward the process rumbles, but like a glacier, not a river.
However, I am, as usual, optimistic. If you look across the corporate world, more and more big players are making big commitments on climate, the sort that blow Governments’ Nationally Determined Contributions out of the water. And the difference is, those corporations actually have their hands on the levers of control, whether by cutting their own emissions, by using their buying power to eliminate carbon emissions from their supply chain or bringing low carbon technology to market. They don’t have to wait for bureaucrats to painstakingly wordsmith legislation and then Parliaments to debate, amend and agree those clauses, they can just do it. Bish, bash, bosh.
So I think we should see the UNFCC process as incrementally raising the baseline for action. The fun stuff will happen above and beyond that baseline – and it is business which can and will make it happen. Let’s do it!