This week's updates at a glance:

In the news... Biden prioritizes climate crisis by naming John Kerry special envoy Mark Carney oversees blueprint for scaling up carbon market as offset demand soars Saudis and Europeans reach compromise on climate as G20 projects unity Asia Inches Ahead of North America on Climate-Risk Reporting Arctic Oil Fight Comes to Insurers as Trump Plans Lease Sale Opinion on... How the real estate industry is protecting cities from climate change Demand for cooling is blind spot for climate and sustainable development Tune in... EIOPA: Sustainable Finance Roundtable CBI - Black Lives Matter: delivering meaningful change What we're reading... The next pandemic: where is it coming from and how do we stop it? What record-setting oceanographer Sylvia Earle can teach us about resilience (pictured)

 President-elect Joe Biden has appointed John Kerry as his special presidential envoy for climate, underscoring his commitment to tackling the global crisis and offering a symbolic rebuke to President Donald Trump's lack of leadership on the issue. The creation of the role has been seen as an encouraging sign by climate groups.
 
Kerry has long worked on climate issues. As secretary of state in the Obama administration, he played a key role in negotiating the Paris agreement, which was adopted by nearly 200 nations in 2015. In 2019, Kerry co-founded a bipartisan initiative of world leaders and celebrities to combat the climate crisis and he was a co-chair of the Biden-Sanders unity task force focused on producing policy recommendations on climate.

Biden has proposed an ambitious plan to spend $2 trillion over four years on clean energy projects and to end carbon emissions from power plants by 2035. The President-elect's legislative agenda on climate will largely depend on whether Democrats gain control of the US Senate, however, which will be decided in two runoff elections in Georgia on January 5. But regardless of which party controls the Senate, Biden has pledged on day one to sign a series of climate executive orders, including rejoining the Paris Accord, which will not require congressional approval.

Read the article here. 

With the surge in carbon neutrality pledges by companies across the world, demand for carbon credit is also surging - doubling since 2017. Carbon credits can be purchased by companies to offset emissions they cannot cut, allowing them to claim to be carbon neutral. Carbon credits are traded on a "voluntary carbon market". But Mark Carney, the UN special envoy for climate action and finance says it is "opaque, cumbersome and fragmented".
 
Carney convened a taskforce in September which is driving efforts to improve credibility of the market so that companies such big oil producers do not get a free pass. “It’s incredibly important that the ‘net’ in net zero […] is verifiable, transparent and is preserving that precious and very limited carbon budget,” Carney said. The carbon market will need to grow 15-fold by 2030 to be consistent with a Paris Aligned target of 1.5°C warming. But, it also has to be a functioning and professional market for that to happen.

 

Read the article here.

After years of pressure from investors, Asian companies are pulling ahead of their North American counterparts when it comes to climate risk reporting. And there are signs the region is approaching an inflection point as major economies including China, Japan and South Korea commit to achieving net-zero emissions in the coming decades.

There’s been a huge increase in awareness and action from investors in Asia on climate-risk reporting over the last five years or so, according to Rebecca Mikula-Wright, executive director of the Asia Investor Group on Climate Change. Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund has been a strong advocate for ESG investing, and a surge in money flowing into ESG-themed exchange-traded funds has also given companies greater incentive to boost their credentials, she said.

Asian companies were ahead of their North American counterparts on nine of the 11 climate-reporting metrics covered in the Taskforce on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (“TCFD”)’s last status report released in October, though they lagged their European counterparts in all the measures. Asia did well in part because the region has embraced TCFD as a standard.


Read the article here.

In the face of more frequent wildfires, hurricanes and flooding, the real estate industry is under more pressure to build more resilient and efficient buildings. There has been a focus on efficiency in recent years, but only few have provided guidance on resilience. Lucy McCracken, an associate in JLL’s global sustainability team, says “building codes and standards can be an effective way of minimizing the effects of extreme weather on buildings and communities.”
 
But even though sustainability has become a mainstream issue for governments, real estate investors still have limited mandatory measures to assess their investments. Resilience is, however, rising up the agenda, because investors increasingly want to guard against future risk and losses. More resilient buildings often require less ongoing expenditure and can be better equipped to return to normal operations following disruption.
 
Read the opinion piece here.

According to the International Energy Agency’s “Future of Cooling” report, there were 1.6bn air conditioning units in use around the world in 2018. The power needed to keep air conditioners and electric fans running accounts for 20% of global electricity use and is projected to triple by 2050.

Paradoxically, the demand for cooling does not appear in any of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the 17 goals (SDGs), or their 169 targets.
 
In a new “perspective” paper, a team of researchers from the University of Oxford explore the links between cooling and the United Nations SDG’s, and put forward an analytical framework for considering sustainable cooling.
 
The framework categorises 4 stages of cooling - resources, production and assemblages, cooling activities, end-of-life - and 5 levers of change - social interaction, technology innovation, business models, governance and infrastructure design, and creates a set of 20 “intervention points” where there is an opportunity to initiate change from the intersects. These intervention points include both “active” measures – relying on an external device to transfer heat – and “passive” measures – using the design of a building to manage heat gain and help dissipate heat.

Read the report summary in CarbonBrief here (free) and full paper here (paywall).

EIOPA: Sustainable Finance Roundtable
16 December, 09:00 to 17:00

This roundtable discusses recent and upcoming deliverables of EIOPA on integrating environmental, social and governance (“ESG”) risk assessment in the regulatory and supervisory framework for insurance and pensions. It will gather supervisors, consumer representatives, representatives of the financial industry and of civil society, to discuss how the insurance and pensions sector can contribute to a sustainable society.
 
Topics that will be on the agenda include EIOPA’s ongoing consultation on the scenario analysis in ORSA, their work on disclosure, impact underwriting, protection gap for natural catastrophes and sensitivity analysis for transition risk.
 
Registrations are open until 8 December 2020.
Find out more and register here.

 

CBI - Black Lives Matter: delivering meaningful change
On Demand

As part of a bi-weekly broadcast, this episode covers the impact of the killing of George Floyd and what the role of business in bringing down barriers in relation to race. The panel evaluates why businesses aren’t currently hiring ethnic minority talent at senior levels and they discuss transformative, meaningful actions businesses can take and what they should be thinking about going forward.

Available on demand here.

 

In this article, virus-hunters in jungle hot spots and labs give their views on the challenges and cause for optimism in identifying new viruses and preventing another major international pandemic. It explores factors that make disease emergence more likely or change the pattern of disease, such as deforestation and the illegal trade in wild animals, anthropogenic climate change and extreme weather events such as drought and flooding.

Researchers such as Dennis Carroll, the head of the Global Virome Project (a research group with a mission to catalogue all the viruses that could pose a threat to human health), discuss the challenges they face and the silver linings. As the world fights on against Covid-19, a huge amount of investment and research has been triggered. Scientists are collaborating more across fields - critical for an area such as zoonotic disease. Advances in genetic sequencing could arm us better when the next virus arrives. And there is a fresh acknowledgement that human health is deeply connected to the health of our planet.


Read the report here.

Marine biologist Sylvia Earle is a scient icon recognized by the Library of Congress as a “Living Legend”, named the first of Time magazine’s “Heroes for the Planet”, and frequently introduced as Her Deepness.
 
Sylvia obtained a PhD in phycology (study of algae) in 1966, went on to become one of the first to work as an “aquanaut” in 1970, conducting research 50 feet underwater off the U.S. Virgin Islands as part of the federally funded Tektite II project, and the first woman to serve as chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She has designed submarines, authored numerous books, and created Mission Blue, an organization that promotes science communication and helps expand protected areas in the ocean.
 
Near her 85th birthday, Nat Geo sat with Silvia to reflect on on her more than 50 years of career, her time in quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how to move the dial further with ocean conservation.

Read the report here.

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