17 international experts to combat the climate greenwashing of companies | Climate and Environment

Rare is the large company that has not already joined a coalition that is committed to eliminating its greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades. Green and the fight against climate change sell, and it is difficult to find a large financial institution or multinational that does not announce that it will achieve net zero emissions by mid-century coinciding with an international summit against global warming. But the United Nations Organization (UN) is concerned about green image laundering – the so-called greenwashing in English—in which you may be incurring with unsound plans and empty and uncontrollable promises. Antonio GuterresSecretary General of the UN, presented this Thursday a team of international experts who will try to combat these practices and who will seek to set minimum criteria to be able to evaluate the climate promises of the so-called non-state actors, among which are, in addition to the companies, local and regional governments, who are also jumping on the boat of net-zero emissions commitments by 2050.

This concept of net zero emissions refers to the fact that a company or a city will only expel greenhouse gases in its activity that can be captured by sinks, such as forests. The trap may lie in what is considered a sink or in double accounting (that the same forest is counted several times to offset emissions) or in unclear technological solutions for capturing gases or in not taking into account the entire life cycle of a product or all business areas…

Guterres committed to creating this group of experts at the Glasgow climate summit last November to propose “clear standards for measuring and analyzing net-zero emissions commitments.” And that is what this team will do, headed by former Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna and made up of 16 other experts, including the Spanish Helena Viñes, director of the CNMV and who was already a member of the team. technician who made the green taxonomy proposal for the European Commission.

Guterres explained this Thursday that, in order to keep warming within the least dangerous limits possible, it is necessary that “urgently” all “companies, investors, cities, states and regions” commit to net zero emissions. But he has insisted that “more credible and robust standards and criteria are needed to measure, analyze and report on the promises” of these entities that are outside national governments, which are the ones that are accountable to the UN and the Agreement of Paris against climate change.

This group of experts will present a proposal within a year at the latest, focused on four fields: establishing standards and definitions for net zero emissions targets; implement credibility criteria to assess the objectives; design processes to verify progress towards commitments and decarbonization plans; and set a roadmap to translate the standards and criteria into international and national regulations.

The mandate given to them by the Secretary-General warns that there is currently no set of standards and criteria for net-zero emissions promises and their implementation. This means that there is a risk of “undermining the commitments and actions” of those who are interested in fulfilling their climate commitments, “which favors greenwashing, announcements that lack concrete decarbonization plans, undue dependence on the use of offsets and the possible unrealistic dependence on absorptions”, the text states. In short, to bet only on these supposed sinks and not on a gross cut in emissions, which should be the main solution.

The person in charge of chairing this working group, former minister McKenna, recalled through a statement that the “recent avalanche of promises of net zero emissions by companies, investors, cities and regions will be vital to keep alive” the objective more ambitious of the Paris Agreement: that the increase in the average temperature of the planet does not exceed 1.5 degrees compared to pre-industrial levels (warming is already at 1.1 degrees). But she has warned that this will only happen “if all the promises have transparent plans, solid actions in the short term and are fully implemented.”

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