As 2024 draws to a close, only five years remain to halve emissions and prevent catastrophic global warming. World-leading climate scientist Johan Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Co-chair of the Exponential Roadmap Initiative, did the maths at a COP29 session hosted by Exponential Roadmap Initiative and We Don’t Have Time:
That’s a 7.5% reduction per year to have any chance of staying within the 1.5°C temperature limit. For the next year, in 2025, task number one is to remove 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the global economy.
An exponential transformation is needed, he stressed.
Business and policy are the two key levers that need to come together for this transformation, Rockström agreed with Exponential Roadmap Initiative CEO and Co-founder, Johan Falk, and Catherine McKenna, former Chair of the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Expert Group for net-zero commitments of non-state actors, HLEG. Catherine McKenna:
The question is how we get the exponential change that we need right now. [The answer is that] we need governments to regulate and step up and provide, you know, the policy that is necessary to set the stage for moving forward. And then we need companies to be leading the way. What we need to see from companies next year are ambitious transition plans to 2030. They need to step up and say what they’re doing. Then we will have an ambition loop.
Johan Falk:
We require that all members of the Exponential Roadmap Initiative disclose high integrity transition plans. Practically, that means transforming energy and materials and phasing out fossil fuels to halve emissions across the value chain by 2030 towards net zero by 2050. But it also means scaling up climate solutions and contributing to climate action in society.
Many companies are reasonably well on track regarding the first step. But we do need to accelerate green demand to enable the scaling of solutions. So we really need strong national climate action plans, or NDCs, that are backed by national transition plans and roadmaps for every sector so that business and policy come together to accelerate the transformation.
Business could send a hugely important signal, said Catherine McKenna, by demonstrating that it was possible to “grow and make money while reducing emissions.” Decoupling emissions from growth was what countries were after, she said, and business proof points could prompt governments to implement the needed policies.
Rockström highlighted that countries had much to learn from each other.
We’re in a transition phase in which we’re replacing the system that we’ve had for 150 years to power the economy with another. Of course, this is messy. But in this messiness, everyone is looking for good examples.
Rockström cited the European Union’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) following the lead taken by the US state of California as an example for how successful policies could spread from one place in the world to another. The carbon taxing in the Nordic countries was another example, he said.
This suggests that even small or emerging economies – be they Switzerland or Finland or Colombia or Vietnam, can have a disproportionately large influence today, because everything is shaking.
I think we’ve been focusing too much on the size of emitters [when looking for where the change should come from]. I think we should look more towards where there’s outsized cleverness, and innovation and novelty. And that would include clever, innovative and novel policies.
Johan Falk agreed it was absolutely possible to identify and scale winning policies. He called for not overcomplicating things and looking for what he called the “vital few” winning policies. He gave Norway as an example for successful policies to drive up the share of electric vehicles, as 90% of all new vehicles there are electric.
It’s about relative pricing and providing particular incentives. And these type of strategies could be copied by other countries.
But, said Johan Rockström, the only way to get the winning strategies to scale was getting citizens behind them.
[The policies have to deliver] something that citizens feel is better than the previous way of transporting yourself, or of consuming, or of building.
Catherine McKenna agreed, citing the example of introducing carbon pricing in Canada when she was environment minister there.
Phasing out coal in Canada was very hard. We had to go to communities and listen to people who were angry. And we needed to hear what they needed. They wanted investments in infrastructure, they wanted early retirement, they wanted retraining, they wanted opportunities for those communities. That’s normal. That’s exactly what normal people want.
The crucial step for reaching positive tipping points ahead of COP30, McKenna and Rockström stressed, was to “make the mitigation agenda the winning agenda for the Global South and for the weakest economies in the world”. Rockström:
At the moment there is such a hard front between [industrialized and developing countries] where those who rightly see themselves as victims of climate change are therefore trapped in a state of inertia, when we need to get all economies on board this innovation pathway.
But, said McKenna, countries in the Global North had a part to play in unleashing innovation and action in the Global South.
As a global community, we can’t go and tell countries like Indonesia or Vietnam or South Africa that they’ve got to get off coal. We cannot only be worried about getting from coal to renewables, globally, without worrying about the transition for workers [in these countries].”
That in turn required money, McKenna added:
We need to get the trillions going. So of course, we need governments stepping up and grant money can help leverage private capital, as can money international financial institutions like the World Bank as well as regional development banks.
Johan Rockström:
We need to de-risk investment. Finance must be about de-risking innovations towards the new economy of tomorrow.
With business action, policy and finance all falling into place, there would be a critical mass of actors to achieve the exponential transformation said Falk:
I foresee that we can achieve a positive tipping point ahead of COP30. And that should be our objective.
Watch the whole session:
