by Antoine Rostand, President and Co-founder of Kayrros
The climate crisis is getting worse. Rising global temperatures, extreme weather events, and biodiversity loss remind us of the need for urgent action. Yet despite growing evidence of the need to decarbonise, political and public momentum has faltered.
Across the world, people increasingly perceive their governments to be burdening them unjustly with additional costs they have come to see as unnecessary. Some see climate policy as belonging to a cluster of policies with which they disagree, rather than a bipartisan issue. And politics is reflecting these changes in sentiment. The new US president has promised to withdraw the US from the Paris agreement and ‘drill, baby, drill’.
Against this backdrop, effective corporate climate action has become even more important than it was before. In fact, a recent study showed that even before these cultural and political shifts, a ‘net-zero hero’ narrative – an emphasis on what individual consumers, through careful choices, could do to fight climate change – minimised the role that companies had to play.
But a lack of available, high-quality data is preventing many companies from getting an accurate picture of their emissions, which stops them from establishing precise emissions baselines, setting attainable targets, and making consistent progress towards hitting them. 44 percent of senior executives, according to a recent Siemens study, say they are missing critical information on emissions and energy use. Only 54 percent say they are mature or advanced in how they use data, though nearly two-thirds (65 percent) see ‘significant or massive’ potential to advance productivity through digitalisation – with sustainability vastly increasing as a by-product.
That data exists. Indeed, as my colleague and co-founder, Antoine Halff, who is also our Chief Analyst at Kayrros, recently explained at Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, integrating, managing and standardising data is where the challenge lies. Availability is not the problem. Earth Observation data – in other words, data taken from satellites and processed using artificial intelligence – can, for example, measure carbon emissions across supply chains, precisely identify methane leaks for immediate repair, and pinpoint exactly what products are produced illegally on deforested land.
It can help organisations identify weaknesses and strengths and emissions hotspots, track progress and implement effective strategies. In Europe in particular, this is essential for compliance with climate legislation, including the EU’s Deforestation Regulation and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
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Non-compliance now carries grave legal and financial penalties. But there is a tantalising carrot dangling in front of corporations here, too: they can demonstrate good behavior and reductions in their climate footprint, and reap the resulting rewards by way of price premiums for their goods or services, or by gaining preferential access to capital.
There are challenges. Businesses face disincentives to being transparent. Should they report their data accurately and find their emissions are way behind where they should be, they face fines and bad press. It’s tempting for them to pursue a strategy of ‘greenhushing’ – neither lying nor telling the truth, but saying as little as possible and taking refuge behind plausible deniability. Moreover, data solutions have to be tailored to the business in question. The effective integration of data depends to a great extent on the size of the organisation and other factors.
But public and investor pressure, in Europe in particular, is pushing companies to embrace Big Data, remote-sensing and satellite insights to make more progress towards net zero. If the climate crisis falls down the political agenda globally, then it won’t for long. The extraordinary and tragic fires that tore through Los Angeles this month were only the latest reminder that whether or not we choose to take climate change seriously, it isn’t going away but rather, getting worse.
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The money that businesses save by setting aside their climate plans will be dwarfed by the cost of failing to make progress towards net zero when there’s still time. Moreover, there are cost savings and other benefits, such as preferential access to capital, to be exploited – renewable energy will be far cheaper in the long run than its fossil-fuelled counterpart, and gaining an accurate understanding of the goings-on of a company and its supply chain creates opportunities for increases in productivity, as well as sustainability.
There’s a golden opportunity for businesses – and the planet – waiting to be taken. While it waits, the climate crisis intensifies, with delay bringing us all ever-closer to irreversible harm. With Earth Observation data, we can bridge the gap between ambition and action, turning corporate commitments into measurable progress. Businesses can establish accurate baselines. They can set realistic targets. And they can make progress towards them in a sustainable way. It’s within the grasp of any company, of any size, to do this. They just need to choose to do it.
What’s certain is that if climate action, among the public or in the business world, is proving unpopular, then we need to get smarter about how we approach it. Being smart means using the most sophisticated means at our disposal to gather quantitative, empirical, undeniable data – and acting in the light of it.
