Business ‘irrelevant’ says UN’s climate head (COP 15)

13 Dec 2009 – Geoff Lye

Friday’s Business Day – organised by WBCSD and ICC – opened with a direct challenge to the business community from Yvo de Boer, the man charged by the UN to bring COP 15 to a successful conclusion. While businesses seem to be effective in policy engagement at the national level, he noted, they remain ineffective on the international stage. Frankly, he said, they are irrelevant in the current negotiations (he has made the same point at previous COPs and I would have to say that the messages I hear from business are unchanged).

The problem, as he put it, is that business representatives keep telling him what they want (certainty, carbon markets/pricing, clear mitigation targets etc) but fail to deliver positive contributions. ‘What are you asking me to sell?’ he kept saying and the audience responses failed to convince him that they understood his problem. One of the few non-business people in the room, Jeremy Hobbs of Oxfam, reinforced de Boer’s point by observing that the only significant message to come from the private sector at COP 15 last week was an insistence by European businesses that 20% – and not 30% – emissions reductions by 2020 were the maximum they could support. Overall, it does not feel as though the business community is going to rise to the challenge at COP 15.

Yvo de Boer made another interesting point which fits well with our own thinking and advice. He maintains that incrementalism is dangerous in the context of climate solutions. More and more is invested in yesterday’s technologies whereas, if business pushed not for 20% but 50% emissions reductions, then we would see real and fundamental shifts in thinking and investments. SustainAbility’s analogy is with putting a man on the moon. If efforts through the sixties had focused on increasing the distance traveled from Earth 50 miles at a time, the leap needed for space travel would have made irrelevant all of the investment up to the point of breaking out of Earth’s atmosphere and gravitational pull. It is notable that while the business associations plough the course of achieving least worst options from international negotiations, climate leading corporations (surprising perhaps, but in my opinion, WalMart is the best example) are moving so fast to reduce carbon throughout their value chain that regulatory standards are irrelevant as a business reference. In fact it is my belief that if the 1,000 most carbon intensive corporations (as measured through the full lifecycle) took the same steps as WalMart is now planning, we would only need a post Kyoto treaty to establish the supporting markets, frameworks and mechanisms to accelerate investment and transforming technologies. We are planning to dig more deeply into this perspective in 2010; if anyone reading this would like an internship at SustainAbility to undertake further research, please contact me.