‘I have a balance of concern and optimism’: A COP26 temperature-check with Christiana Figueres
Former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and WWF UK CEO Tanya Steele speak to BusinessGreen on the eve of the Glasgow Climate Summit
Six years’ ago Christiana Figueres was leading the UN’s preparations for what would turn out to be a historic moment for global climate action. As executive secretary for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) she was a pivotal figure in securing worldwide backing for the Paris Agreement at COP21 in 2015, and she remains a hugely influential and widely respected voice on the global stage.
A lot has changed since that crucial summit in 2015. More than 70 per cent of the world’s economy is now covered by net zero targets. Almost every country on the planet have developed national climate plans, albeit of varying degrees of detail and ambition. Clean technologies have become cheaper and more attractive to governments and investors, while public awareness and concern over the climate crisis has surged and fossil fuel companies are facing pressure to decarbonise like never before. In addition, a pandemic has shaken the world, taking millions of lives, wreaking havoc across the economy, and putting further crucial global climate talks on hold.
With some of the key aspects of the Paris Agreement still to be finalised, and the world on track to badly miss the goals agreed in the French capital to keep temperature increases ‘well below’ 2C, let alone a much preferred 1.5C scenario, the COP26 Summit which kicks off this weekend in Glasgow is widely regarded as the most important since the historic climate treaty was first agreed six years ago.
Having left her UNFCCC role in 2016, Figueres has remained steadfastly committed to the climate cause, co-founding the Global Optimism Group, co-writing a book, and co-hosting a hugely popular podcast, Outrage and Optimism, in addition to sitting on the boards of various businesses and organisations.
Ahead of the start of COP26, the Costa Rican diplomat joined WWF UK’s CEO Tanya Steele for a quick chat with BusinessGreen, offering their views on the chances of success in Glasgow, the crucial role for businesses, and their own sense of optimism at this pivotal moment.
BusinessGreen: How do you feel going into the next fortnight, are you optimistic there’ll be a successful outcome?
Christiana Figueres: I have a balance of concern and optimism. It really is a balance.
My optimism is because I know that countries are going to come in with improved collective commitments to what we have right now, because there are several big ones which haven’t said anything yet. So that will go forward. I also know that the sum total of efforts that they’re going to register is visibly and undeniably much better than where we were five years ago. So all of that is good because we’re moving in the right direction.
My concern is that it is not getting us to where we should go. The science is really very, very clear that we have to halve emissions by 2030. And the sum total of what we’re going to see at COP26 is not going to get us there. So I am thinking that is what is going to have to happen is that countries are going to have to come back in two years and close that gap, because we can’t wait five more years. That Paris Agreement establishes a five-year rhythm, and that’s fine, but the Agreement also allows countries to come back sooner if they think it is necessary. It is necessary. So I think at COP26 we can expect to conclude that important steps forward have been made, and homework hasn’t been fulfilled yet.
What would you like to see from businesses to help move the dial, which perhaps goes above and beyond what we have seen so far from the private sector?
Tanya Steele: I want to see businesses commit to science-based targets and to have the ambition to do that. And then to face into how they go about that transition. Because we know that transition is challenging – Scope 3 certainly is – but it’s only with a range of businesses doing that, that it will create enough of the coalitions and the shift that will need to underpin their efforts to do that.
We need a wholesale economic transition. This can’t just be about one or two businesses on the corner of the economy. So businesses need to set that agenda; to be ambitious. They know their employees want it. They know that shareholders are demanding it. Frankly, they know many of their business supply chains are teetering on the edge. They have to make this commitment.
And importantly, they need action plans. We’re littered with pledges. We need actual, transparent, open, published action plans, then they start to make that transition. And again: economy-wide.
Just here in the UK, WWF combined forces with Oxford University to assess pledges and look at how many businesses have climate action plans, and we found only 19 per cent of FTSE100 companies have an action plan in place. I don’t mention that as just a criticism, actually. We need to back, support and ask those business to make that shift. We know there is so much know-how and entrepreneurialism that can then deliver it.
Figueres: So I would take all that, and then I would build on it – because this is ‘impatience Figueres’ here.
In addition to doing everything that Tanya has so eloquently described – which I can summarise as: ‘stop doing damage’ – in addition to that, corporations need to begin doing good. To be not just net zero emissions, which is stopping doing damage, but to be net positive.
I’ll refer here to [former Unilever CEO) Paul Polman’s new book ‘Net Positive’, because he describes there the vision for corporations to be not just net zero and not just avoiding damage, but to actually contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals – across the board, whether it is gender, education, health, women’s issues, biodiversity, or climate change. The fact is that corporations actually have the deepest wallets, and therefore they can be the most powerful agents of change. The time to stop doing damage has really passed. We have to regenerate, we have to actually restore what we have damaged. It’s actually about humans putting our effort into the restoration of degraded lands, the restoration of oceans, the restoration of forest, because they need it, and we’ve pushed way beyond, in many cases, the capacity of nature to be resilient on its own. So at this point: net positive.
Do you think there are many businesses coming close to what you’ve just described?
Figueres: [After highlighting some of the efforts of IKEA, Interface and Unilever]. There are very few, but change starts somewhere. And Paul’s book is very worthwhile reading on this. He’s a visionary, and I think he’s definitely shining a light on where corporations are going to go.
Steele: I would endorse being net positive. It’s such a reductive thought to only be net zero. But as companies start to look at their climate goals and work through their supply chains, when they reach back into the Scope 3 environment, actually they start to see and understand their impact on nature. That’s where I think there’s also an opportunity to confront that in terms of not just halting destruction, but getting into a restoration agenda. Because otherwise they’re going to push some of those ecosystems, those environments, to an edge where they could serve as anyone’s supply chain, let alone thrive as something we all cherish.
When you look back at where the world was when the Paris Agreement was brokered in 2015, are you pleasantly surprised with the progress that has been made since, and where we are today going into COP26? Or do you feel disappointed, frustrated or underwhelmed about the pace of progress?
Figueres: No, I’m overwhelmed. Although governments got together and unanimously charted the path towards decarbonisation over the next few decades, I am actually very, positively surprised at what is now being recognised as the ‘Paris effect’.
And I’ll tell you where I’m most impressed is in the financial sector. The financial sector has moved incredibly in the past 12 to 18 months. The fact that we have $100tr of assets under management globally, and $70tr have already woken up and decided ‘we need to protect our assets, otherwise they are going to go down the drain’. They’re not doing it because they want to save the planet or anything like that – they’re doing it because they want to protect their balance sheets. And that’s a very motivating force.
The fact is that emissions go wherever money goes. If money goes into high emissions investments and technologies, up go the emissions. If money goes into no or low carbon opportunities, that’s where emissions go. So we have this incredibly wake-up in the financial sector that I could not have dreamt of five years’ ago. We don’t see the effect of that yet in the accounting of greenhouse gases because we are sort of upstream from that. We have investors making these decisions, and that needs to be trickled downstream until we then see that realised in the emissions of these companies, including all of their scopes. I have the sneaking suspicion that two years from now, we are going to be harvesting emissions reductions. The financial shifts that we have seen over the past 12-18 months – it is going to be a tectonic shift. But we’re late! So we better see it.
Steele: I think Christiana has just outlined it. For me, it’s back to the analogy of walking right back up to the source – we’ve got to get to the mouth where it’s splurging out into the ocean. That’s where the shift needs to happen. It’s underway, and I think it’s only going to get faster.
Fantastic to join @CFigueres at last night’s @wwf_uk #StateOfThePlanet address – an amazing speech calling for action ahead of #COP26. pic.twitter.com/MI9XjGhKl2
— Tanya Steele (@TanyaMSteele) October 29, 2021
BusinessGreen will be in Gasgow covering the COP26 Climate Summit over the next two weeks starting from Monday. To stay up to date with all the latest news and announcements, visit our COP26 Hub.
