WBCSD release Guidance on Avoided Emissions: Helping business drive innovations and scale solutions towards Net Zero

This report is a seminal step toward an expanded climate innovation agenda where companies are not only seen as sources of emissions, but also as solution providers. Solutions that deliver on societal needs in ways that allow the world to provide flourishing lives for everyone on the planet while delivering on a 1.5°C-compatible pathway. Today most policy makers, media, NGOs, academia and even companies themselves view companies only as sources of emissions. Climate leadership is often seen as a race to reduce emissions from companies and their value chains to zero. That companies try to reduce their emissions is absolutely critical, but in a world with rapid technological development, many unsustainable trends and accelerated innovation, is even more important to ask how companies can deliver solutions that improve human lives in a sustainable way. Avoided emissions help companies expand their climate agendas to where climate action also includes the capacity to sell products that deliver on human needs and a just transition while avoiding emissions in society, with market shares and profits as key drivers.

Avoided emissions assessments deliver several benefits, including:

• The possibility to link the need for avoided emissions in society to the rapidly growing sales of low-carbon solutions
• Support for companies that aspire to be purpose driven by providing a measurable indicator of net positive impacts on society
• Cultural change in support of a dynamic solution approach when staff receive verified data confirming they are contributing to a just transition by delivering sustainable solutions to human needs
• The unique opportunity to recruit top talent by showcasing a company as one where success means having more positive impacts on society
• Engaging with investors and other stakeholders as a solution provider with data about positive impacts on society and data that can be used to indicate intangible assets that so far have not been acknowledged.

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