University of Oxford researchers call for different approach for corporate climate targets
Till now, the main strategy the governments and companies followed was that they set their emissions targets to net zero and expect that when everyone sets this target, it can be achieved by 2050.
Study in UK: While scientists agree that to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, by mid-century the world needs to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. However, to achieve this, the researchers at the University of Oxford and a Swedish organization with the name Exponential Roadmap Initiative have called for a different approach to make changes on a more systemic level.
They called for a corporate climate reporting system. Kaya Axelsson, a research fellow at Oxford University’s Smith School of Enterprise said, “We have been leaving a huge amount of impact on the table by failing to encourage or invite companies to be rewarded and compared for their significant efforts beyond their value chain."
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The researchers first proposed that the company's new practices or products should consider avoiding emissions rather than only improving the efficiency of the supply chains and existing products. The second proposal is political power which says, “A company taking significant steps to change a political system constraining climate progress across its sector should arguably be treated preferentially to a company with the same inventory emissions who has chosen not to engage in political processes," as reported by Grist.
The third proposal is that companies must practice purchasing power.
“Projects which serve to protect nature or enable clean development still play a role, if imperfect, in global mitigation and adaptation efforts. When a company uses its purchasing power in this way it goes above and beyond another company that has not done so," the paper says.
Doreen Stabinsky, a professor of global environmental politics at the College of the Atlantic in Maine also commented on the research and said that though she is not part of this research it addresses the flaws in the existing system.
She said, “I agree that there’s a problem with a myopic focus on inventory emissions, and I agree that you need to have innovative strategies that operate at a system level. But I’m critical of thinking that it’s up to individual companies to innovate those system-level strategies.”
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