By Karl Ritter
Cross-posted from the New Zealand Herald
Christiana Figueres said her efforts to reach out to executives from companies such as Coca-Cola, Unilever and Virgin Group represented “a deeper recognition of the fact that the private sector can contribute in a decisive way”.
Since the year began the Costa Rican head of the UN climate agency has met corporate leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos and on a cruise to Antarctica organised by Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former United States Vice-President Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project.
“I’m hoping to accelerate what I call the push and pull process,” she said.
Governments act as a pull factor by shaping the policies that promote green technology and help renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power compete with the fossil fuels that scientists say contribute to global warming through the release of greenhouse gases.
“But the companies, particularly these very, very high-powered companies that … have the ear of many of the decision-makers and the opinion leaders of different countries, they can act as a push factor,” Figueres said.
Walmart, Coca-Cola and Unilever were examples of companies that had “looked at their own production and up and down their value chain” for ways to reduce their carbon footprints.
Underscoring the focus on businesses, the UN climate agency last month started an online database showcasing examples of companies making efforts to help vulnerable communities adapt to climate change.
The heightened attention to the role of corporations in addressing climate change comes amid a realisation that the two-decade-old UN climate talks are unlikely to achieve the goal of keeping temperatures from rising more than 2C above pre-industrial levels.
Scientists predict that further warming could lead to severe damage from extreme weather, droughts, floods and rising seas.
Last year, governments agreed to draw up a new climate pact by 2015 that would come into force five years later. But major hurdles remain, including the difficulty in getting the United States to sign up to legally binding emissions cuts.
The US does not want to commit itself to a binding deal unless it also imposes strict emissions targets on China and India, while they insist their targets should be more lenient because, historically, the West has a bigger share of the blame for man-made warming.
Figueres said it was up to the US electorate to decide in the presidential election this year “how they would like to see their national leadership treat this issue”.
However, there are no signs from the presidential campaigns that the US stance is going to soften.
Republican candidates have expressed doubt over, or flat-out rejected, the notion that human activities contribute to warming.
And Democratic President Barack Obama, facing Republican criticism for locking up the nation’s energy resources, has embraced increased oil and gas production on the campaign trail.
“What is always astonishing to me is how the US citizen is willing to diminish the possibility that the US has to be a leader in the technologies of the future,” Figueres said.
“And it also has implications for the world. Because this world would profit from the technical and intellectual capacity that is in the US.”
- AP
