Big Business Says It Will Tackle Climate Change, but Not How or When
In Davos, business leaders were newly vocal about the danger, though they gave few details about how they would reform their practices.
DAVOS, Switzerland — Business titans who for decades brushed off warnings about climate change arrived at the annual World Economic Forum this week ready to show their newfound enthusiasm for the cause.
Having previously played down the need for the reform that scientists had urged, finance leaders and company chiefs conspicuously rallied around a consensus that accelerating global temperatures pose a significant risk to society — and to business.
Missing, though, was a clear answer to the question of what exactly they would do about it and how quickly.
“It’s an increase in rhetoric, absolutely,” said Alison Martin, who leads the Europe, Middle East and Africa divisions of Zurich Insurance. “Will we see a walking of the talking? The jury is out.”
After months of global climate protests that drew millions of young people, a raft of companies said this week in Davos that they would aim to lower their emissions of planet-warming gases to net zero by 2050 or earlier. A coalition of major financial institutions, representing $4.3 trillion in assets, said it would take steps to minimize carbon-heavy investments in its portfolios and lobbied other investors to join it.
A group of 140 of the world’s largest companies pledged to develop a core set of common metrics to track environmental and social responsibility. And companies and government leaders, including President Trump, who has rolled back dozens of environmental and climate policies, said they would aim to plant one trillion new trees around the world, at the behest of Marc Benioff.
“The tree is a bipartisan issue,” said Mr. Benioff, a co-founder and the co-chief executive of Salesforce. “No one is anti-tree.”
The window of time to avert the worst impacts of climate change is rapidly closing, according to numerous scientific reports. And while critics blame big business for decades of inaction, as well as the active suppression of climate science, many major companies now acknowledge the immediate need for change.
“The measurements all show that we are clearly not doing enough yet,” Feike Sijbesma, the chief executive of DSM, a Dutch health company, said at Davos.
The pledges were the latest in a string of climate-related announcements in recent weeks.
BlackRock, the world’s largest institutional investor, said it would place climate change at the center of its investment strategy. Microsoft said it would not only go carbon negative — reducing more greenhouse gases than it adds to the environment — but also somehow remove all the emissions the company has ever produced. Lloyds, the British financial group, pledged to cut by “more than 50 percent” the carbon emissions generated by the projects it finances by 2030.
Larry Fink, BlackRock’s chief executive, showed up to meetings wearing a wool scarf that represented the decades of warming since the industrial age, a Christmas present from a nonprofit organization that works on climate issues.
“I’ve never seen a social issue explode like this,” said Paul Tudor Jones II, the investor and founder of Just Capital, which ranks companies based on sustainability factors. “Every single C.E.O. and board is having to figure out what their carbon footprint is and what they’re going to do about it.”
Behind this flurry of corporate commitments is a growing concern about tangible risks to the bottom line, including the prospect that ratings agencies will factor in climate risk, pressure from younger employees, changing consumer preferences and government regulations like a carbon tax.
Extreme weather events are already causing economic havoc. The California wildfires last year were estimated to have caused $25.4 billion in damage. Pacific Gas & Electric, the largest energy producer in the state, has filed for bankruptcy.
Jesper Brodin, the chief executive of Ikea, said his company was already feeling the impact. Severe flooding in the United States temporarily closed many of its stores. Energy prices in Sweden skyrocketed during a recent heat wave.
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