The Sustainability Imperative
As organizations struggle to define a strategy that balances purpose and profit, opportunities are increasingly emerging to take the lead in sustainability initiatives. Front-line advances in areas such as net-zero emissions, AI-powered solutions for the underserved, precision agriculture, digital healthcare, and more are delivering business benefits, while simultaneously contributing to the realization of the UN’s 17 SDGs. We provide the expert thinking, debate, and guidance to help your organization reposition and transform in the era of sustainability.
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Martin Dix and Oliver Golly examine how CCUS technologies can bridge the gap between current policies and decarbonization targets. Dix and Golly say CCUS offers a range of business opportunities: capture (designing and building CO2 capture infrastructure as well as operating and maintaining these facilities), transport (via pipeline, truck, or ship), storage, usage (providing CO2 to customers instead of storing it), and CCUS as a service (managing the upstream, midstream, and downstream lifecycle). They detail the key players in the CCUS value chain and describe which players are well positioned to succeed at which market segment. According to Dix and Golly, “CCUS can act as a bridge to the developing hydrogen economy, reducing short-term emissions while infrastructure and capacity mature and providing a long-term solution in areas where hydrogen will not deliver effective emissions reduction.”
Enrique Castro-Leon advocates for using carbon offsets (COs). He acknowledges the challenges (including several accounting issues) and reminds us that the CO market is immature, making it difficult to compare offerings. Castro-Leon says IT can be leveraged to maintain real-time inventories of carbon assets and could be used to create a system designed to meet specific GHG-mitigation goals. He describes the Scalable Carbon Offset Open Platform (SCOOP) specification currently under development at OptimiLabs, which creates a digital twin that’s essentially a computer model of the physical carbon store asset. This allows CO suppliers to easily place their offsets in the carbon market of choice and demand-side entities to discharge their carbon liabilities by either paying a premium buying offsets or paying a broker to carry out a discharge on their behalf. This type of system, says Castro-Leon, establishes a formal linkage between carbon stores, carbon sources of emissions, and trading mechanisms toward global net zero goals.
Ani Melkonyan-Gottschalk and Maximilian Palmié recommend focusing decarbonization efforts on urban areas. Urban infrastructures cover only about 2% of Earth’s surface, but they consume roughly 75% of the world’s resources and 70% of global primary energy while emitting 50%-60% of the world’s GHG. Melkonyan-Gottschalk and Palmié describe the role of urban transportation systems in the decarbonization process and outline a comprehensive strategy designed to increase their overall sustainability. This includes integrating mitigation and adaptation tactics into a unified strategy, prioritizing strategies that go beyond technological improvements, optimizing the performance of multimodal logistics chains by prioritizing energy-efficient modes, and investing in the public-private cooperation necessary for decarbonization to enter a deep societal transformation process.
To achieve a circular economy, companies must first develop a comprehensive view of emissions data across their extended supply chain. Developing such a baseline at the supplier and category level is essential to identifying the greatest opportunities and developing an effective action plan.
Modern large language models (LLMs) require huge amounts of computing power to churn through huge amounts of data. In this Advisor, we analyze the carbon footprint of these LLMs and its impact on the environment.
Ghulam Sorwar describes how bonds and loans, government financing, capital markets, and fintech can impart a solution for an effective circular economy. He acknowledges the need to consider complexities and says planning is a paramount objective in these activities; he then proposes coordinated local initiatives as an important way forward.
Henning Wilts and Virginia Pillmann recommend plastic credits as a financing mechanism for investment in circular plastic systems. The need for collaboration between government (policy), industry, and society (consumers) is clear when it comes to promoting plastic credits. The article takes us to a developing region of the world via case studies about three Indian cities. Wilts and Pillmann discuss the conditions that can support plastic credit programs without undermining incentives for waste prevention and extended producer responsibility in India and present lessons for a variety of other contexts.
Ani Melkonyan-Gottschalk, Denis Daus, Lara Johannsdottir, and Daniel Goldmann introduce a framework in which physical infrastructure design, regional development strategies, and supply chain governance take place across society, industry, science, and policy. Best practices from around the world are showcased, highlighting places where society, industry, science, and policy have come together in multistakeholder partnerships to facilitate circular transformations. The authors draw attention to the role of finance and investment in the success of these initiatives.