Firing the starting pistol on climate action

As a one-time fac­to­ry man­ag­er, Nigel Top­ping isn’t some­one to mince his words. For busi­ness own­ers tip­toe­ing around cli­mate change, he has a sim­ple two-word mes­sage: “Wake up!”

He doesn’t labour the sci­ence. Sev­en of the planet’s warmest years have occurred since 2014. If that’s not enough to per­suade com­pa­ny lead­ers, then no amount of peer-reviewed research will either.

Instead, the Unit­ed Nations’ high-lev­el cham­pi­on for cli­mate action goes straight for the jugu­lar: “If you think you can be a late fol­low­er, then you’ve decid­ed to give up mar­ket share and be a slow los­er.”

Like it or not, the tran­si­tion to a low-car­bon econ­o­my is “inevitable”, he argues. Social expec­ta­tions, reg­u­la­to­ry demands, even invest­ment trends all point to the inex­ora­bil­i­ty of a low-car­bon tran­si­tion. 

Smart com­pa­nies, more­over, are already on the case. Just look at Tes­la. A decade ago, the idea of an elec­tric-only car­mak­er seemed bizarre. Now every oth­er major auto-man­u­fac­tur­er is des­per­ate­ly play­ing catch-up.

“We have to avoid any fram­ing that says, ‘Oh, maybe we should do a green thing on Fri­day after­noon’. This has to be front and cen­tre of busi­ness strat­e­gy,” Top­ping insists.

Hard targets, not empty words

So the direc­tion of trav­el is set, but what then? First, get seri­ous about tak­ing action, says Top­ping. That starts with set­ting mean­ing­ful tar­gets. By which he means hard num­bers and firm dates, not wishy-washy pledges of good intent.

“You can’t be at the start­ing line talk­ing wist­ful­ly about how fast you’re going to run,” the UN taskmas­ter argues. “You have to start run­ning.”

Enter the Race to Zero. Designed to drum up momen­tum ahead of the UN cli­mate sum­mit in Glas­gow this Novem­ber, the glob­al cam­paign urges com­pa­nies of all hues to com­mit to going net zero.

The con­cept derives from the land­mark Paris Agree­ment, which puts a 2C rise in glob­al tem­per­a­ture as the absolute lim­it that the plan­et can safe­ly absorb. To align with net zero, com­pa­nies need to bal­ance out their car­bon emis­sions by 2050, either through aggres­sive reduc­tions or via off­sets.

Top­ping sees the pur­chase of car­bon cred­its as very much a last resort, to be turned to only when com­pa­nies have tried every­thing in their pow­er to cut their car­bon foot­print. 

Some indus­tries, such as cement and ship­ping, may lack the tech­nol­o­gy to rad­i­cal­ly decar­bonise right away, he con­cedes. Yet, even then, the idea of “buy­ing your way into the Race to Zero” remains anath­e­ma to him.

“Chief exec­u­tives need to be say­ing, “We’re going to get to zero emis­sions by 2045 and this is what we’ll do in the next five years in terms of cap­i­tal expen­di­ture, prod­uct devel­op­ment, mar­ket­ing and so on,” he says.

For those need­ing an ini­tial steer in set­ting tar­gets, he points them to the Sci­ence-Based Tar­gets Ini­tia­tive, a UN-backed scheme that helps com­pa­nies design robust car­bon reduc­tion tra­jec­to­ries. The Inter­na­tion­al Cham­ber of Com­merce Cli­mate Hub offers a sim­i­lar help­ing hand for small­er firms.

Beyond the factory gates

Sec­ond on Topping’s must-do list is for com­pa­nies to spark action beyond their own four walls. Vital as it is to “get their own house in order”, he says, the biggest cli­mate wins are typ­i­cal­ly to be had in busi­ness­es’ wider spheres of influ­ence, par­tic­u­lar­ly among sup­pli­ers and con­sumers.

He has no short­age of illus­tra­tive exam­ples. Apple is one. The Cal­i­forn­ian tech giant is encour­ag­ing all its sup­pli­ers to fol­low its exam­ple in becom­ing 100 per cent renew­able. Anoth­er is US retail giant Wal­mart, which is cur­rent­ly seek­ing to remove a giga­tonne of car­bon emis­sions from its sup­ply chain.

Big buy­ers hold sway, Top­ping insists. In his ear­ly days as a fac­to­ry man­ag­er, he recalls a large client ask­ing casu­al­ly about envi­ron­men­tal man­age­ment sys­tems. The fol­low­ing year, the same client inquired about timeta­bles for pos­si­ble imple­men­ta­tion.

“By the third year, we were told that if we weren’t com­pli­ant in five years, we would­n’t be on their list. That sort of ratch­et­ing up is famil­iar to every­one in busi­ness,” he points out.   

His injunc­tion to work with oth­ers also extends to indus­try peers. Again, his log­ic is root­ed in com­mon busi­ness sense. Act­ing col­lec­tive­ly on sus­tain­abil­i­ty issues, he argues, is a means of ear­ly-movers avoid­ing com­mer­cial dis­ad­van­tages.    

It’s a del­i­cate bal­ance, Top­ping con­cedes. Push ahead a lit­tle and you can win a rep­u­ta­tion as an inno­va­tor; push too far ahead and the costs you incur could become “prob­lem­at­ic”.

In con­trast, if all the major play­ers in an indus­try can agree on a gen­er­al roadmap, then the risks of ambi­tious action reduce for every­one.

He cites the UK government’s recent pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion on the phas­ing out of petrol and diesel cars. Var­i­ous dates in the 2030s were moot­ed. Inter­est­ing­ly, among the most vocal pro­po­nents of a fixed date were the oil giants, Shell and BP.

Why? Not because of some Dam­a­scene con­ver­sion, he says. But because reg­u­la­to­ry cer­tain­ty enables the hydro­car­bon indus­try to invest and plan accord­ing­ly.

“Hav­ing clear, com­mon mile­stones gives busi­ness­es much more con­fi­dence as well as reduc­ing their invest­ment risks,” Top­ping explains.

Sector pathways

For­tu­nate­ly, moves are already afoot in key sec­tors. Notable exam­ples include the ship­ping industry’s Get­ting to Zero Coali­tion and aviation’s Clean Skies ini­tia­tive on sus­tain­able fuels.

Both instances build on a 2018 con­sul­ta­tion report by the non-prof­it Ener­gy Tran­si­tions Com­mis­sion, which laid out a series of viable path­ways for car­bon-inten­sive indus­tries to go net zero.

Topping’s enthu­si­asm for col­lec­tive action is also moti­vat­ed by a recog­ni­tion that a few lone lead­ers won’t cre­ate the break­throughs required to realise the scale of change required.

“Once you reach a cer­tain momen­tum, that’s when tip­ping points hap­pen and we start see­ing macro changes in the econ­o­my tak­ing place,” he says. 

To nudge indus­tries for­ward, Topping’s own team at the UN has mapped out a series of break­through moments across a range of sec­tors. Tar­get com­pa­nies range from banks and bus oper­a­tors to cloth­ing brands and con­struc­tion firms.

Ambition loop

Last but not least is Topping’s call to pro-cli­mate advo­ca­cy. For all capitalism’s talk of free mar­kets, the glob­al econ­o­my depends as much on pub­lic poli­cies as pri­vate enter­prise.

Cor­po­ra­tions and their lob­by­ists have long sought to stymie pro­gres­sive cli­mate poli­cies, he says. If busi­ness is seri­ous about tack­ling cli­mate change, that urgent­ly needs to change.

The chief cul­prits, in his view, are trade asso­ci­a­tions: “It’s almost as if it is built into their DNA to slow down the rate of change and argue that cli­mate leg­is­la­tion is dam­ag­ing to indus­try.”

A turn­around is pos­si­ble, how­ev­er. He takes hope from French oil giant Total’s recent with­draw­al from the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute. The move fol­lows last year’s deci­sion by BP to renounce its mem­ber­ship of the Amer­i­can Fuel and Petro­chem­i­cal Man­u­fac­tur­ers trade asso­ci­a­tion. 

Such moves not only send strong sig­nals to the mar­ket, Top­ping argues. They also strength­en the hand of pro-cli­mate leg­is­la­tors, result­ing in what he calls a pos­i­tive “ambi­tion loop”.

As he puts it: “Pol­i­cy­mak­ers can raise the bar, but they can only lead so far; they need busi­ness­es to dance along with them.”

Topping’s cam­paign to pro­mote cli­mate action is set to keep him plen­ty busy in the run-up to COP26, the UN Glas­gow cli­mate sum­mit. Assum­ing busi­ness heeds his call, he won’t be the only one run off his feet. The race to cli­mate equi­lib­ri­um is well and tru­ly on, and crunch time is already fast approach­ing.