Today’s Solutions: December 21, 2024

As an increasing number of industries are making ambitious climate commitments in line with the Paris Agreement, some companies have it easier than others to achieve those goals. While tech companies like Google can simply switch to renewables to significantly cut their carbon footprint, this is much harder to achieve for airlines and cement companies, for example. This is because such heavy industries burn a lot of fuel in their day-to-day operations and currently lack the technology to decarbonize at the same speed.

But a new coalition is aiming to overcome this problem by bringing relevant stakeholders together to find possible solutions. The group, called the Mission Possible Partnership, is now uniting partners in seven industries — shipping, trucking, chemicals, steel, aluminum, and cement — to accelerate their transition to net-zero emissions.

While the Paris Agreement is pushing countries to set climate goals to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, industries like steel or aviation don’t fit neatly within national borders, and it’s unlikely that they will take the necessary steps by themselves.

“These seven sectors are particularly ill-suited to being driven by a system that is kind of rigidly organized around national targets,” says Paul Bodnar, managing director at the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute, which is running the new partnership along with the Energy Transitions Commission, the We Mean Business coalition, and the World Economic Forum.

“They’re organized around global supply chains, global markets, global investor groups, shared technology pathways. They’re organized horizontally rather than vertically, which is the orientation of the Paris Agreement,” Bodnar added.

The new coalition will see companies, their suppliers, their customers, their regulators, and their funders, come together to make concrete plans on how to achieve net-zero emissions as fast as possible.

“Our goal is to drive each of these seven as far as we can,” said Bodnar, “and to show the world not just a set of discrete announcements, but to actually show a model for decarbonizing global industries.”

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