Firms see light on emissions

National's proposed 11 per cent greenhouse gas reduction target earned us the headline 'New Zealand deploys creative accounting to allow emissions to rise' on Climate Action Tracker's home page.

As carbon dioxide (CO2) continues to build up in our atmosphere and the costs of extreme weather events add up, attitudes towards climate change have altered profoundly among businesses of all kinds.

It is no longer only the insurance industry and a few enlightened companies that recognise the threat that "business as usual" poses and acknowledge the need to decarbonise.

As Paul Polman, chief executive of Unilever, an Anglo-Dutch consumer products maker, put it: "The cost of not doing things is starting to be higher than the cost of doing them."

So his company buys all its palm oil (of which it is one of the world's biggest users) through an audited sustainability scheme. By 2020 it plans to buy it only from certified and traceable sources.

All sorts of firms are changing their inputs and processes and designing products that spare the environment while helping suppliers do the same.

L'Oreal, a French cosmetics maker, reduced its CO2 emissions by 50 per cent between 2005 and 2014 despite increasing its output by 22 per cent. IKEA, a Swedish retailer, will have invested 1.5 billion (about $2.5 billion) in wind and solar power by the end of 2015 and the firm and its charitable foundation have pledged a further 1 billion to developing renewable energy, and to helping people in places affected by climate change.

On June 1 this year, six big European oil and gas firms asked the United Nations for a globally co-ordinated price on carbon dioxide emissions, to restrain the impact on the climate of burning fossil fuels.

This was quite a bombshell from companies who have, until very recently put considerable effort into creating doubt about that impact.

Thank goodness. Oil is far too useful to burn.

The impetus for all this change is not altruism. These guys are being pragmatic - a combination of consumer and shareholder demand and the New Climate Economy Report, released last year, made it crystal clear that those who do not adapt and decarbonise will fail.

It feels as though the tide is turning.

At the moment Europe appears to be leading the way in adaptation, but China, having reduced much of its environment to something very close to ruin, has woken up to the necessity of change.

How are we doing in the adapt-or-die stakes? Not nearly as well as we could.

Our Sustainable Business Council members collectively make up almost a third of the private sector GDP, but our government is letting us down. The National Government has had a climate change policy of doing as little as it can get away with and an energy policy with coal and oil at its heart.

National's proposed 11 per cent greenhouse gas reduction target earned us the headline "New Zealand deploys creative accounting to allow emissions to rise" on Climate Action Tracker's home page.

This will make us look like a bunch of backward nihilists before the rest of the world at the Paris IPCC meeting in December, and seriously devalue New Zealand's brand.

-Much of the information in this column came from an Economist article headed Walking The Walk, published on June 6, 2015.

-Lorna Sutherland has lived in many different places and always tried to pay attention to the changes in the natural environment around her.