Good morning.
With COP28 three weeks away, Fortune assembled a small group of CEOs yesterday, in partnership with BCG, to explore how the private sector can accelerate efforts to address climate change. A few excerpts:
“The bottom line is, whatever measures of progress you look at, we aren’t where we need to be…Only 20% of the top 1,000 companies have a target to get to 1.5 degree centigrade. If you say, well, any net zero target will count, then you get to 60% of companies. But you still have 40% of companies with no net zero target.”
—Rich Lesser, Global Chair, BCG
“We believe we are on a 2.4 degree centigrade warming trajectory…That’s better than the UN would say, but obviously a lot worse than the trajectory that, as a world, we feel we should be on…From an investment standpoint, we think that there’s around $700 billion per annum available right now. It should really be double that.”
—Richard Mattison, Vice Chair, S&P Global
“What we are trying to do now is help our suppliers, and in some cases also our customers, come along with us in this process (of getting to net zero)…Then we need to create a framework that excites our people and that gives them a reason to make all those trade-offs in everyday decisions…But I think we have the foundation, and what I am seeing is that we can now really accelerate fast.”
—Ramon Laguarta, CEO, PepsiCo
“If you’ve got to address climate, you’ve got to address the plastic waste problem in this world…We’ve got 350 million tons of plastic waste being thrown away every year, and only 9% of it is being recycled today.…Our technology can take low quality plastic waste, we can unzip it, back to the building blocks, which is the step before polymer, purify it, make the polymer, and create a continuous loop…with 88% lower carbon footprint than in the current process.”
—Mark Costa, CEO, Eastman Chemical
“The health care sector actually produces 5% of global carbon emissions, which is more than the airline industry…So it’s a big job, but it is actually happening, and it is mostly due to private-to-private collaboration.”
—Pascal Soriot, CEO, AstraZeneca
“We’d like to see the private sector play a more active role in adaptation to the impact of climate change. It is still vastly underfunded. We already have situations where communities have to change how they live or they work because, frankly, where they live now and what they used to be doing is not possible anymore.”
—Janti Soeripto, CEO, Save the Children US
We’ll explore these topics further at the Fortune Global Forum in Abu Dhabi Nov. 27-29, and then at a pre-COP dinner in Dubai the evening of the 29th. You can get more information here…or shoot me a note if you are interested in attending.
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Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
