The Climate of Business: FT Climate Capital Recap

Today I wanted to share a special edition of the FT Climate Capital conference, where I spoke at last week on climate change and AI, at a panel with BCG, Google, FT and Iteros. The conference was practical, it included top speakers whose domain expertise enabled anyone participating to enhance their knowledge and question their position on some topics, such as offsetting, nature-based solutions and involvement of Scope 3 in your decarbonisation efforts. I would highly recommend watching the videos on demand available here.

I wanted to enable those who couldn’t join but gathering some of the key insights I gathered at the event. My summary is a crossing of haiku and bullet points. Hope it helps! 

Short info bites from Financial Times Climate Capital in London last week.

Why are oil companies not transition to a sustainable model? They say they will lose their investors, as ESG is still a facade rather than a tangible KPI at large scale deals. Money is still a king. 

What are the hurdles to boosting renewable power? Finding sites and allocating these in collaboration with the governments - slow and complex process. 

Tech is moving faster - from carbon accounting, through to energy storage, waste elimination, carbon capture, tech is leading the way. Issues? Missing investments, lack of knowledge of investors on how to put money behind such projects, slow adaption by industry for large scale implementation. 

Industry needs to ask to be regulated as they would otherwise have to battle with competition that is using loopholes and loose standards for greenwashing and underreporting. 

Heat is a massive challenge for Europe. 

We need mandatory action plans and mandatory reporting / disclosure for all sized companies. 

When you eliminate populations of specifies you degrade their capacity to support the ecosystem at scale. A weak biodiversity means weak ecosystem due to the interdependencies. 

We are undergoing the sixth mass extinction. 

Nature holds about a third of the solution to climate change. Biodiversity is at the basis of the climate change project.

For all biodiversity interventions you should be able to demonstrate net positive gain for the planet and biodiversity itself.

Eliminating waste and inefficiencies in use of land and you will eliminate half of the emissions on the planet. The other half is dependent of fossil fuels.

We need to eliminate incentives around industrial overfishing and monocultures.

We need to think how natural climate solutions can support agricultural practices at scale, rather than dedicating land solely to agriculture.

Maturity of the ocean methodologies is significantly lower than of those for land.

The best way to be secure the future of your company or country is to be autonomous - no reliance on fossil fuels can help you have a safe future. Europe's dependence on Russia is a case in point.

COP27 should be about action - we need to move from commitment to action as enough has been said.

Egypt's 2050 agenda is finalised. How about yours?

We need more deals like the one in South Africa for 8.5 billion.

We need more blended financing - this is the only way to implement projects at scale today.