We are facing a great countdown that makes it absolutely essential to march toward carbon neutrality. For this, politics and economics are called upon to define new business models and governance.
The carbon budget, which in Italian we could translate as “CO2budget,” is the amount ofCO2 humanity can still emit to have a chance of containing global warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels, as advocated by the Paris Agreement on climate.
Experts have published countless studies to figure out what carbon budget humanity still has. The think tank MCC (The Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change), based on data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says that as of the end of 2017 we have at most 420 gigatonnes ofCO2 left to keep us within 1.5 degrees, or 42 gigatonnes per year (or 1,332 tons per second).
Right now we are not on track at all, as the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reminds us. In 2020, the pandemic dropped greenhouse gas emissions by 7 percent from the previous year: looking at it closely, this is unprecedented, but in the long run it will be almost irrelevant. What we should do is cut global emissions by 7.6 percent each year, for the entire 2020-2030 decade.
By joining the Paris Agreement, each state has promised to make its contribution to this great challenge. Precise commitments have been put in black and white in the nationally determined contributions (ndc), documents in which each government explains how much it wants to reduce its emissions and what strategies it will put in place to achieve this.
In short, we are facing a great countdown that makes it absolutely essential to march toward carbon neutrality. Carbon neutrality, as defined by the IPCC, is achieved when the greenhouse gases emitted by humans are equal to those removed from the atmosphere over a certain period of time. This is why we also talk about net zero, or zero emissions.
It is no coincidence, then, that Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, argues sharply in his annual letter for 2022 that companies that fail to move away from carbon risk being left behind as billions of dollars are flowing into technologies to combat climate change. “Every company and every industry will be transformed by the transition to a carbon-neutral world: the next 1,000 unicorns will not be search engines or social media companies, they will be sustainable, scalable innovators: startups helping the world decarbonize.”
Sustainable investments have reached $4 trillion and will continue to grow. “The decarbonization of the global economy will create the greatest investment opportunity of our lifetime. And it will leave behind companies that don’t adapt,” Fink concludes; because “the future belongs to those who decarbonize.”