Decarbonization & Industry Day
The third thematic day of COP27 focused on "Decarbonization and Industry". As outlined by Alan Harper CEnv, Honorary Secretary at SocEnv:
"The Industry Sector in COP and IPCC terms consists of those individual activities that produce the basic technical building blocks of economic activity. It is hard to define precisely as it overlaps substantially with Energy, Agriculture, Building and Transport. Industry satisfies the demands of these sectors but has demands of its own, particularly from Energy, Transport and Resources. In mature, affluent economies like UK, Western Europe and North America it contributes surprisingly little to the overall GHG budget but where there is growth and needed increase in prosperity the contribution can be very high. Due to challenges like long-lived capital assets, as the IEA have highlighted: 'Heavy industries both facilitate and complicate the transition to a net-zero emissions energy system'."
What happened on Decarbonization & Industry Day?
US President Joe Biden spoke at COP27, announcing tougher regulations on the oil and gas sector to cut methane emissions. He also doubled the US’s pledge to adaptation finance to $100 million. Read more here. You can watch Joe Biden’s speech back in full here.
The UNEP International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO) launched The Methane Alert and Response System (MARS), a new initiative “to scale up global efforts to detect and act on major emissions sources in a transparent manner and accelerate implementation of the Global Methane Pledge.” Find out more here.
The UK government announced over £65 million investment to help decarbonization by speeding up the development of new green technologies. Read the news release here.
Initiated by the UK COP Presidency in partnership with the Race to Zero and the UN Climate Change High Level Champions, the ‘Breakthrough Agenda’ was launched, seeing “countries representing more than 50% of global GDP setting out sector-specific ‘Priority Actions’ to decarbonise power, transport and steel, scale up low-emission hydrogen production and accelerate the shift to sustainable agriculture by COP28”. Find out more here.
With the consumer industry responsible for approximately one-third of total global emissions, the Net Zero Playbook for Consumer Industries was launched by The Consumer Goods Forum, providing guidance and case studies on how organisations in the consumer industry can achieve positive change on the road to decarbonization. Find out more here.
Further reading on Decarbonization and Industry:
Trackers and toolkits:
Taking action to reduce emissions:
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