The Climate of Business: Davos Special

This week WEF 2022 happened for the first time in person in a while. It was a rather interesting experience for me, where sadly I got the confirmation climate is a key topic for business and political leaders, but rather one of many. A key conclusion I drew from the event was people like me, working on climate and in particular enabling corporates to implement their sustainability agenda, needed to explain more utterly the correlations between climate change and all other disturbances in the economy. As the connection is not assumed.?

More on my impressions of WEF 2022 below.

Climate Change Reality

Goldman Prize: The activists who battled mining with drones (BBC )

Climate worries galvanise a new pro-nuclear movement in the US (The Washington Post )

Island states back Vanuatu’s quest for climate justice at the UN (Climate Home News )

Foresters hope 'assisted migration' will preserve landscapes as the climate changes (NPR )

Farmer sues VW over climate change; German court has doubts (AP News )

The coming food catastrophe (The Economist )

Climate Change Has Been Killing Rainforest Trees For Longer Than We Realized (Science Alert )

‘Perfect climate storm’: Pakistan reels from extreme heat (Al Jazeera )

The problem of global energy inequity, explained by American refrigerators (Vox )

Egypt promises to allow protest, push pledges as COP27 host (AP News )

Business Climate Reality

India power ministry seeks 2-yr extension to emissions deadline (Reuters )

HSBC saga reveals how much climate and financial risk are misunderstood (Financial Times )

Davos ends with Germany pushing global work on climate, war (AP News )

UK finance ‘faces ￡340 bn in losses’ without action on climate change (The Guardian )

SEC Proposes More Disclosure Requirements for ESG Funds (The Wall Street Journal )

The Most Important Force in Food Has Nothing to Do With Fake Meat (Bloomberg )

Big Tech is pouring millions into the wrong climate solution at Davos (The Verge )

Reality Check

The main topics the main and the side events covered?

• The War in Ukraine
• The Food Crisis
• Climate Change
• The Energy Transition
• Crypto, crypto and crypto

Other interesting topics I heard repeatedly mentioned?

• the great resignation?
• unification of ESG reporting frameworks?
• mandatory assessments on impact on nature
• businesses wanting to be regulated across a wealth of topics?
• pricing geopolitical and climate risks?

Here are some pearls of wisdom I gathered:?

• $25 trillion opportunity for businesses if they focus on the sustainable transition now. Market leaders tomorrow will be those that kick off the transition today.
• We need to tackle our future by design not disaster.?
• Businesses should move away from carbon to an integral view of impacts on planetary boundaries their activities have to anticipate costs.?
• Those protecting the most of our nature, indigenous people, are the ones that have negatively impacted it the least.
• The acceptance and appreciation of the language of the knowledge of indigenous people is missing. ?
• Seeing nature as a free resource hinders us from valuing it potential to offer us new solutions for diseases.?
• Bees never sent an invoice.?
• Businesses need climate science to develop an integrated view on costs related to climate risk.?
• The net zero pledges of countries and businesses won't be enough to stabilise the economy if they don't integrate a view on the social impacts of climate change.
• If we don't get poverty, societal empowerment and equality right, we wouldn't have the chance to transition our economy into a sustainable model.?

A highlight in Davos for me was having the chance to meet and spend time on multiple occasions with Johan Rockstr?m, joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

A few tips he shared across the various events to effectively tackle climate change as businesses:

1. Fix the food system and eliminate the dependancy on meat consumption and ban monocultures
2. Empower academia to influence business and apply proven solutions at scale?
3. Focus on supporting better land use
4. Support indigenous communities as they are the main protectors of Earth?

These pearls of wisdom gave me a lot of inspiration to explore in the coming newsletter editions topics such as: going beyond carbon in assessing business impact, bees & business - why should a bee matter to a board, nature as a financial asset, and science & business - if academia spoke the language of business, would businesses be more successful.?

Share your comments and ideas in the comments or PMs.?

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