The last year or so has seen numerous “Net Zero” targets hitting the headlines. Seven countries have enshrined them into law, financial institutions and companies vie to keep their plans in the spotlight. Yet experts now say that these targets are no longer sufficient to address concerns about climate volatility and extreme weather.
The Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG) has released its third report, claiming that global governments are at a critical stage and warning that net zero targets are insufficient to avoid wide-spread climate disaster. The IPCC physical science report released earlier this month made clear that the decade to 2030 will be critically decisive in tackling climate change. As things stand today in terms of policy, finance and behavior, the chances of achieving the overall Paris Agreement goals remain uncomfortably low.
The CCAG are calling on global leaders to commit to net negative strategies and technologies ahead of COP26. The report says that even if countries achieve net zero by mid-century, this will not consider atmospheric CO2 equivalent levels which could continue to climb as high as 540 parts per million (ppm)–well above the “safe” range of 350-450 ppm. This means there is little to no room for maneuver, with only a 50% chance of keeping global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Dr Klaus Lackner, director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions and member of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group said, “Roughly half of the CO2 emitted remains in the atmosphere for centuries. Natural, geological processes eventually remove the excess carbon from the mobile carbon pool on the surface of the planet, however this is over tens of thousands of years. On a human timescale, the fossil carbon emissions are permanent.” He added, “The world will be net negative once removal exceeds emissions. If it takes us more than a decade or two to lower the level of CO2, we definitely will have overshot our targets and will need to maintain net negative emissions for decades into the future. Therefore, time is of the essence.”
Net negative technologies such as capture and storage (CCS) have been a key part of many models that show a pathway to achieving net zero and addressing climate change. Indeed, the IEA’s recent Net Zero Scenario, which brought the institutions timeframe forward to 2050 as a matter of urgency, includes a significant amount of CCS. The challenge with CCS is that for decades it has been a “few years” from full commercialisation, despite support and funding, and has not followed the innovation and cost curve seen in renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar. Nature-based and technological solutions are both supported by the CCAG but it argues that insufficient focus, research and policy support have hampered effective action.
Lachner says, “Technical solutions like direct air capture followed by carbon dioxide disposal can scale, but only if they can manage costs. Here, learning by doing provides a proven way of cost reductions which could lower cost to a tolerable range, i.e., a cost which makes CO2 clean-up much cheaper than the current cost of energy. For that, these technologies will have to grow from today’s kiloton per year scale, to megatons per year. At this scale, CO2 capture would operate on the scale of today’s commercial CO2 demand, and still three or four orders of magnitude smaller than what will be needed to fix the climate.”
CCAG has a three pillar strategy for tackling the climate crisis and says that “agile international political and financial action along the lines of ‘reduce, remove, repair’ is required to mitigate the consequences of climate change.” The first call remains for reduction–that current targets for GHG reduction are not enough. With knowledge that the world needs to see annual emissions reduction around 8-10% annually from today, CCAG argues that nations need to triple their emissions-cutting pledges urgently in order to play their part. The key part of their approach lies in removal, calling for critical investment to develop, research and scale techniques to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. In fact, the expert group has called for the $30 billion in Mission Innovation R&D funding agreed in 2015 to include net negative technologies. Finally the group calls for a deeper research focus on repair, on the investigation of safe methods to repair and regenerate the ecosystem.
While the call comes at an important time in the run up to COP26 this November in Glasgow, it’s worth pointing out the implications of this call. Market focus has to date been on net neutral, then net zero, overall that the idea that emissions can continue if some way can be found to manage them, usually through offsets. What this call for action suggests is that movement towards this goal, on current trajectory, is doomed to failure.
As Lackner points out, “The challenge here is scale – natural processes need to operate on a natural scale. To harness enough sunshine for growing this biomass requires an area larger than today’s available agricultural lands. This will compete with food production and have a large environmental footprint.”
Understanding the difference between carbon neutral, net zero and net negative is going to be critical in the coming years. Governments are increasingly going to be asked about the coherence of their policies. The U.K. for example has a climate change target in law, yet allows large scale methane emissions from North Sea oil, allowed plans to move forward for a new coal mine in Cumbria (now under review) and is allowing the license for the development of the Cambo oilfield, which is expected to result in over 132 million tonnes of CO2. Greenpeace has said its emissions will be equivalent to the emissions of 18 coal-fired power stations running for a year.
In business, the same issues will arise. Stuart Lemmon, CEO, EcoAct Northern Europe (an Atos company) explains that the difference between carbon neutral and net zero. To be carbon neutral you can buy offsets which result in a lack of emissions growth, for example through investment in a clean cooking program in emerging markets. To achieve net zero you have to ensure that the amount you offset is cut somewhere else–you have to ensure that those residual emissions are physically removed in some way. He says the biggest challenge lies in understanding that “net zero involves transformation of every part of the business.” If net negative gains salience, that transformation will get even harder to achieve.
There is currently a growing backlash in the ESG markets, especially in Europe as stricter guidelines and regulations come into play. Experts such as former head of sustainability at BlackRock Tariq Fancy have argued that ESG is nothing more than spin. If the market is going to evolve, and if targets are going to be met, this is going to need to change rapidly and dramatically.
To date there has been a tendency over time for ESG to be used as an assessment of component parts, whether a company engages, has a carbon footprint identified and a management plan. That is no longer going to be enough. Lemmon says, “We’re going to see the focus more from how a company is assessing its date to how it’s performing.” And that means that governments, financial institutions and companies alike are going to have to pick up the pace in terms of education, goal-setting and action.