CBI @10am: Countdown to COP26 - what can we expect?

Speakers:

• Rain Newton-Smith, Chief Economist, CBI
• Peter Betts, former Director of International Climate Change and Energy at BEIS and former EU Lead Negotiator on climate
• Maria Smith, Director, Buro Happold
• Sarisha Mann, Sustainability Communications, BNP Paribas
• Liz Moseley, Editor and Partner, Tortoise Media (Chair)

In this session:

Rain Newton-Smith:

• Continues to be a busy autumn with labour market shortages, and energy crisis and price rises. In one-way, vacancies are a positive story, rather than dealing with high unemployment, but we’re now seeing vacancies at record high which is causing acute challenges in food and drinks sectors and manufacturing.
• Good to see government announce new advisory group last as we had been calling for – a COBR style taskforce - so we can really grip these crises and get on top of the issues to support the economic recovery.
• Later this month will be the Chancellor’s Budget and Comprehensive Spending Review. Looking at focusing on what we need in terms of investment to kickstart the economic recovery, including fundamental reform on business rates which remains one of our key asks.
• CBI @ COP26 in Glasgow: what we want to see is an ambitious commitment from individual countries to reducing their carbon emissions and clear credible plans on how they will achieve this. We’re also looking at what businesses are doing to make their own commitment – will showcase our Goal 13 Impact Platform – and calling for more policy detail from government and ensuring we have a legacy beyond this summit.

Peter Betts:

• COP is two things: world’s biggest multilateral negotiation and the world’s biggest trade fair. Tens of thousands of people coming together to talk about climate.
• Very complex issues being discussed, agreed by consensus, goes slowly and everything happens at the end. There’s not much left to negotiate, focus is now on delivering, but much of the real action is what happens in the run-up to COP by coalitions and companies.
• UN has said we need 30bn tons of additional abatement by 2030 for 1.5 degrees of warming and need 15bn abatement to be on track for 2 degrees.  Not sure yet what China will do, but even if they do something dramatic, we might still be quite far off the target.

Maria Smith:

• Buro Happold are an international built environment consultancy practice – individual projects to master-plans and cities and focus on making the built environment more sustainable either for new builds or retrospectively.
• Built environment accounts for 38% of greenhouse gas emissions and use lots of energy via electricity / gas etc and there are lots of emissions created in the process of creating building materials e.g., bricks.  Focus has been on operational emissions of buildings, but we need to shift focus to the materials we use and the processes we use to build and retrofitting existing buildings.
• At Buro Happold Make sure all new buildings they design are net-zero carbon in operation by 2030 and reducing carbon intensity of all projects by half by 2030 as well as ensuring their own offices and operations are net-zero, too.
• Reduce, reuse, recycle can be applied to the built environment: optimising use of existing buildings and reducing demand for buildings, then refurbishing existing stock e.g., insulation, double glazing etc and updating machinery and equipment, and for recycle, when we do need to build or extend, we can use recycles / reclaimed materials and bio-based materials such as timber.

Sarisher Mann:

• Finance can play a big role in transitioning the real economy to net-zero. We’re seeing interesting transitions taking place across companies with new economic targets linked explicitly to sustainability and net-zero.
• Integration of decarbonisation targets and sustainability-linked finance is a huge area of development. For example, this could look like incentivising companies to retrofitting, food waste targets integrated into loan agreements, energy efficiency of operations included in new bond frameworks. Essentially banks and organisations are trying to embed a concrete environmental narrative into financial targets.
• BNP Paribas are working with lots of different experts to look like what transition pathways in different companies might look like and what can be achievable.