Business positioning
Many businesses have been prepared to advocate action on climate change in the knowledge that it will have an impact on their businesses. But if a 2015 target peak is agreed, their approach will need to move on from the world of Stern, on which several major business reports have been based. For example, in January 2007, the US Climate Action Partnership, a business and NGO lobby group, supported stabilising CO2e levels at the same levels as Stern. In the UK, the CBI Task Force in November 2007, reached broadly similar conclusions, saying that that emissions need to peak and start to fall in the ‘next 10 to 20 years’. This is Stern language again, and inconsistent with the IPCC’s scenario to keep the temperature rise to 2°C.
Just before the Bali talks in December 2007, 150 global business leaders brought together by the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change issued a statement calling for a comprehensive UN agreement on cutting emissions. It was call to action from a highly influential group, ranging from Shell to Coca-Cola and HSBC to the Pakistan State Oil Company – and it acknowledged important points such as the need for the greatest effort to come from industrialized countries. But the statement was a little ambiguous on targets – perhaps inevitably given the number of people who needed to agree to it. It quoted the IPCC as saying that “even an immediate peaking in global emissions would require a subsequent reduction of at least 50% by 2050..” which is another, tougher, way of looking at the Category I scenario. But it didn’t actually recommend any particular target, other than ensuring a new agreement can come into force post 2012 – hardly immediate and a date by which there would only be 3 years in which to bend the emissions trajectory to a peak.