Targets
13.1) Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries
IBM
IBM and AECOM worked together with the United Nations’ Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) to develop a scorecard to measure cities’ resilience to natural disasters. The scorecard will help cities improve preparedness to disasters by reviewing policy and planning, engineering, informational, organizational, financial, social and environmental aspects of disaster resilience in 80 assessment categories. Inspired by UN’s Ten Essentials for Making Cities Resilient, this tool enables cities to prioritize needs, track and measure the progress cities make, and identify major areas of weakness – before a natural disaster identifies these for them. Additionally, in the public domain, it will strengthen the understanding of what it takes to protect lives and will help facilitate a more rapid economic recovery. The resiliency scorecard can be downloaded at UNISDR site.
13.2) Integrate climate change adaptation and mitigation into national policies, strategies and planning
dow
Dow’s new sustainability targets include the following commitment towards a more ambitious approach on climate change:
- Protect the climate: “By 2030, Dow will reduce its net annual carbon emissions by 5 million metric tons versus its 2020 baseline (15% reduction). By 2050, Dow intends to be carbon neutral (Scopes 1+2+3 plus product benefits).”
Dow has a long tradition of seeking solutions for the energy and climate change challenges together with key participants collaboratively. These are some examples of the most relevant ones:
- MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change
- World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s REscale team
- Business Environmental Leadership Council from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions
- The Gulf Coast Carbon Collaborative
- Low Carbon Emitting Technologies organized by the World Economic Forum
As both, a major user of energy and a producer of technologies that are essential to a lower-carbon economy, Dow is committed to working with its suppliers, customers and value chain partners to ensure that the company's ecosystem is carbon neutral by 2050.
Dow is committed to ensuring that its products are as sustainable as possible. In fact, Dow’s products lower customers’ emissions more than the carbon emissions that are used to produce them. In order to achieve this, Dow uses renewable energy to manufacture its products. In 2018, Dow launched Packaging and Performance Plastics, which is a renewable energy-made polyethylene in the U.S. that contributes 13.8% fewer greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per pound of product than the industry average polyethylene. This approach helps reduce Scope 3 emissions for customers, which are all indirect emissions that occur in the value chain of a company.
In addition, Dow and Reynolds Consumer Products initiated the Hefty® EnergyBag® program in 2014 to divert otherwise hard-to-recycle plastic from landfills to be converted into energy, fuels, or other feedstocks. The program is successfully operating in three U.S. regions (Omaha, Boise and Cobb County) and has reached 125,000 households, collected more than 536,000 bags and diverted 357 metric tons of waste from reaching landfills.
Dow’s projects, Plaquemine Operations Off-gas Regeneration of Purification Beds and St. Charles Site Hydrogen (H2) Optimization, reduced the enterprise’s carbon footprint by 145,000 tons of CO2, the equivalent of approximately 28,000 passenger vehicles driven for a year.
Moreover, Dow ensures its products’ sustainability by producing bio-based renewable feedstocks for its packaging applications. Dow has partnered with UPM BioFuels and is integrating wood-based UPM BioVerno renewable naphtha – a key raw material used to develop plastics – into its slate of raw materials, creating an alternative source for plastics production. Packaging made from this feedstock is fully recyclable. This production process significantly reduces CO2 emissions. The company’s entire supply chain is also International Sustainability & Carbon Certification (ISCC) certified, which means all steps meet criteria and reduce negative environmental impacts.
For more information on Dow’s efforts regarding renewable energy, click here.
Novozymes
Climate change mitigation is well integrated into Novozymes’ business strategy. The company has targets for CO2 savings, both from its own operations and from customers’ application of its products. In 2019, customers saved an estimated 87 million tons of CO2 emissions by applying Novozymes’ products. The savings achieved are equivalent to taking approximately 36 million off the road. Since 2009, Novozymes has decoupled absolute CO2 emissions from business growth and has also committed to reducing dependence on conventional sources of energy by investing in renewable power.
Among other actions, Novozymes is part of Below 50, which aims to increase the number of companies using transportation fuels that reduce carbon dioxide emissions by at least 50% relative to conventional fossil fuels whilst making both good business and environmental sense.
BECHTEL
In order to reduce the company’s CO2 emissions, Bechtel studied its supply chain and found that the use of steel and concrete in rail projects was one of the main drivers of the company’s CO2 emissions. For this reason, during Network Rail’s Reading Station Expansion Project, Bechtel worked on implementing important design changes - all focused on reducing the amount of concrete and steel used during execution. As a result, approximately 15,000 tons of CO2 equivalent (tCO2eq) and around US$15 million in cost were saved.
Additionally, improvements in construction planning and execution technology are contributing to lowering emissions. For example, 4-D simulations are assisting engineers in optimizing the use of energy-intensive machinery, such as cranes and trucks, thereby minimizing emissions. For construction equipment, electric and hybrid-fuel work vehicles are gaining popularity as heavy equipment manufacturers develop and sell efficient machines across the industry. These next-generation dozers, excavators and loaders boast impressive fuel efficiency, such as improving fuel economy by 25 percent to 40 percent (in gallons per hour), extending operators time-on-tools, and improving emissions performance.
PPL Corporation
PPL Corporation has set a goal to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. In addition, we are targeting a 70% reduction from 2010 levels by 2035 and an 80% reduction by 2040.
PPL has already cut their carbon emissions by nearly 60% since 2010 by phasing out coal-fired generation in Kentucky and investing over $30 billion in the past decade in research and development. This investment will strengthen grid resilience in the face of future storms, reduce power plant emissions, and prepare networks to better integrate more distributed energy resources.
chevron
Chevron is working to address the impacts of a changing climate by delivering affordable, reliable, ever-cleaner energy; reducing their climate action own emissions; and investing in lower-carbon energy breakthroughs.
To learn more about how they are addressing climate change, go to chevron.com/sustainability/environment/climate-change
13.3) Improve education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction and early warning
Procter & Gamble
Getting consumers to wash their clothes in low temperatures and use high-efficiency machine cycles represents a significant opportunity to reduce energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions. In 2010, P&G set a goal to turn 70% of all machine wash loads into high-efficiency cycles by 2020. P&G was able to reach this goal one year ahead of schedule.
P&G has also sought to influence the entire laundry ecosystem by continuing to partner with washing machine manufacturers on three key areas: 1) placing information about the benefits of cold-water washing on new washing machines reaching millions of consumers, 2) encouraging the use of quick cycles where time saving is a great consumer motivator to switch to this cycle and 3) designing detergents that perform at their best in the new high-efficiency machines. More than six million informational packets about the benefits of quick and cold-water washing cycles have been distributed globally to new machine purchasers.
Means of Implementation
13.A) Implement the commitment undertaken by developed-country parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to a goal of mobilizing jointly $100 billion annually by 2020 from all sources to address the needs of developing countries in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation and fully operationalize the Green Climate Fund through its capitalization as soon as possible
13.B) Promote mechanisms for raising capacity for e ffective climate change-related planning and management in least developed countries, including focusing on women, youth and local and marginalized communities