We Are Still In launched with more than 20 Fortune 500 companies on board, including Google, Apple, Nike, and Microsoft, as well as a host of smaller companies. The statement was coordinated by a large collective of organizations including World Wildlife Fund, Rocky Mountain Institute, Climate Mayors, Ceres, and Bloomberg Philanthropies. It has now grown to include more than 1,500 businesses and investors, as well as nine U.S. states, more than 200 cities and counties, and more than 300 colleges and universities.
In recent years, a number of initiatives and collaborations have sprung up around the world focused on private sector action on climate change. And it’s not alone. In recent years, a number of initiatives and collaborations have sprung up around the world focused on private sector action on climate change. With Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement, these initiatives have raised an intriguing question: In the absence of political action, can business save the world from devastating climate change?
...“The simple answer is there’s no saving the world without business, but business can’t do it on its own,” says Nigel Topping, CEO of We Mean Business. “The reason we need these kinds of coalitions is so that both business leaders and political leaders hear loud and clear that actually the majority of businesses understand that we’ve got to change, and actually are on board and already in motion.”
We Mean Business is a global coalition of many of the same NGOs that initiated We Are Still In — CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), The B Team, The Climate Group, and others — and the two initiatives are closely connected. We Mean Business’s role is to provide a framework for corporate commitments on climate change and a platform from which to make those commitments public.
Science-based Targets
One such commitment is to adopt science-based greenhouse gas emissions targets. This is where Science Based Targets comes in. This global collaboration among CDP, World Resources Institute, the World Wide Fund, and the United Nations Global Compact encourages and helps corporations to align their climate change policies with scientific evidence.
“What we could observe is a majority of companies were setting targets, but at least from a CDP perspective, we had many challenges to understand what targets were best,” says Pedro Faria, technical director of CDP and member of the Science Based Targets steering committee. “Talking with companies and other NGOs, we realized there was no method, so companies were setting targets based on what was feasible and not what was needed.”
“It has been extremely important to just make people aware of this concept: Set your ambition according to what the best available science tells you.”
Science Based Targets helps companies determine what actions they need to take to contribute meaningfully to the global target of remaining below 2°C (3.6°F) warming, a level above which experts say irreversible changes become locked in. These actions will vary across industries, so targets must be tailored to individual companies while still meeting global needs. Nearly 300 companies have signed on from every continent except Antarctica.
“It has been extremely important to just make people aware of this concept: Set your ambition according to what the best available science tells you,” Faria says. “Our mission is to make science-based targets a new norm.” Sixty-two companies have now set approved science-based targets for emissions reductions. For example, Coca-Cola HBC — a leading bottler of The Coca-Cola Company — has committed to a science-based target of reducing its emissions by 50 percent per liter of drink by 2020.
Energy For Renewables
Another corporate commitment We Mean Business advocates is the goal of 100 percent renewable power. More than 100 companies, including Ikea, Walmart, Nestle, and Unilever have committed to this, but in a complex energy market like that in the U.S., buying this much renewable energy isn’t always easy. So in May 2016, Business for Social Responsibility, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the World Resources Institute, and World Wildlife Fund started the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance, or REBA, which helps steer corporations through the energy market maze. The end goal is facilitating the deployment of 60 gigawatts of new renewable energy in the U.S. corporate sector by 2025.
Read more at Can Business Save the World from Climate Change?
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