The REP Wrap: TNFD, SBTi issue sector drafts + launch of ‘world’s largest decarbonisation effort to date’

Your weekly summary of corporate sustainability news.

The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures is calling for feedback on proposed guidelines for eight sectors: Biotechnology & Pharmaceuticals, Chemicals, Aquaculture, Electrics Utilities & Power Generators, Food & Agriculture, Forestry & Paper, Metals & Mining, and Oil & Gas. The documents, published yesterday, build on sector-agnostic recommendations made by the body in September. The consultation will run until the end of March 2024.

The Science Based Targets initiative wants companies in the buildings value chain to pilot its draft target-setting guidance and tools for the sector. The body ran a consultation on the initial proposals in May and has now launched an updated version based on the feedback. Its looking for developers, owner-occupiers, owner-lessors, property managers, significant tenants and real-estate investors and lenders to test out the proposals using their own datasets.

The CEOs of Danone, Nestle, IKEA, Acciona, Salesforce and Maersk are among more than 300 to have signed a letter calling on the world’s governments to “deliver a 1.5C outcome” at COP28. The statement, signed by 800 senior figures from corporates, finance, civil society, philanthropy, politics and academia, is addressed to the summit’s president, Sultan Al Jaber. It demands a just and orderly phase-out of fossil fuels, the expansion of renewable energy capacity, and a carbon price. It also calls for the reversal of deforestation and land degradation by 2030, with a focus on resilient food systems.

A body has been created to convene key carbon emitters, policymakers, investors and technical experts, to accelerate the climate transition. The Industrial Transition Accelerator was launched at COP28 by various UN figures, and will be run by the Mission Possible Partnership, with $30m in funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies. It will “turbocharge implementation across energy, heavy industry and transport sectors, finance, and public policy in the world’s largest decarbonisation effort to date,” according to a statement.  

Technology firm Clarity AI and environmental reporting platform CDP have paired up to assess 1,700 companies’ alignment with the EU’s climate taxonomy. The results show that just 11% of revenues were aligned with the taxonomy, and 12% of capital expenditure. Speaking during an event hosted by the European Commission on Monday, Laurent Babikian, CDP’s Director of Capital Markets, said: “We can see in terms of findings that companies that have set science-based emissions reduction targets are demonstrating greater alignment in terms of CapEx… A second finding is that the companies with the higher taxonomy alignments overall are the companies that identify their revenue and spending as part of their transition plan.”

The French Government has completed the transposition of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. It makes France the first country to have incorporated the EU rules into its national laws, despite recent warnings from its confederation of small businesses that the requirements would be hard for smaller companies to meet. The deadline for other Member States to have followed suit is currently July 2024.