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Highlights
- 🌍 Record Emissions: In 2024, global CO2 emissions soared to over 41 billion tons, primarily driven by fossil fuel use across multiple sectors.
- 📉 Scope Emissions Concern: Scope 3 emissions account for 75% of a typical company’s emissions, yet only 15% of companies report them.
- 📊 Data Collection Challenges: Companies face significant hurdles in gathering and analyzing data on their supply chains, impeding their ability to act on emissions.
- 📈 Technological Innovations: Companies like SAP are spearheading efforts to integrate emissions tracking into business practices, aiming for greater accuracy.
- 💡 Strategic Partnerships: Collaboration between businesses and governments is deemed essential for achieving emission reduction targets aligned with the Paris Agreement.
- ⚠️ Risk of Inaction: Ignoring Scope 3 emissions could thwart corporate net-zero commitments, posing a risk to global temperature control targets.
- 🏗️ Emissions as a Business Criteria: Many leading companies are now integrating emissions reduction targets into supplier contracts, hence incentivizing climate-conscious practices.
In 2024, carbon emissions hit a record high, with more than 41 billion tonnes of planet-heating CO2 pumped into the Earth’s atmosphere. From aviation to agriculture, every industry contributed a share of those emissions, mainly through the use of fossil fuels.
If the world is to start reducing emissions and reach net zero in the second half of the century, as promised under the Paris climate agreement in 2015, we need to know exactly where those emissions are coming from. Crunching the data offers up estimates of which sectors release the most greenhouse gases – but this is a far harder task at the corporate level.
There are the major fossil fuel firms, both state-run and private – such as Shell, Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil or Coal India – which we know play an outsized role. But according to the World Bank, 90% of global businesses are small and medium-sized enterprises.
Understanding their environmental impact – and how they contribute to the emissions of larger companies further up the value chain – is complex but essential if climate action goals set by both governments and the private sector are to be met, experts say.
Read the full post at Climate Home News.
