Several logistics businesses have committed to being ‘net zero’ by 2050 or earlier, joining over 2100 other companies worldwide that have made a similar pledge. ‘Net zero’ sounds reassuring but what exactly does it mean? Basically, it means that efforts will be made to minimise CO2 but some will continue to be emitted. An equivalent amount of CO2 will then be removed from the atmosphere to compensate for the remaining emissions.
This net zero concept applies as much at a planetary level as to a business. Within the next 8-10 years we are likely to exhaust the ‘carbon budget’ for limiting the increase in average global temperature since pre-industrial times to 1.5oC. According to climate modelling, exceeding this temperature limit will carry dire environmental consequences. So we will soon have to recover large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere to get our carbon budget back into credit.
The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change reckons that by 2050 up to 8 billion tonnes of CO2 a year may have to be captured from the atmosphere. To put this figure into perspective, it is 23 times as much CO2 as the UK emitted in 2019. Sequestering billions of tonnes of CO2 already in the atmosphere will be an enormous logistical undertaking.
Currently, the preferred way of doing this would involve planting billions of trees, harvesting and burning this biomass to generate power, capturing the CO2 and burying it underground – a process known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Although the feasibility of organising and funding such a scheme at the required scale is highly questionable, it plays a key role in the modelling of net zero scenarios.
‘Negative emissions’ – the term now used for sucking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere – will no doubt generate lucrative new commercial opportunities for logistics businesses. But how important will it be for the delivery of their individual net zero targets? That depends on how good they are at actually cutting their emissions. A logistics manager in a company with a net zero target for 2050 told me that they knew how to shrink their carbon footprint by 40%. He reckoned that a combination of new technology and negative emissions over the next 30 years ‘would close the gap’.
Companies have long experience of carbon offsetting, paying others to cut emissions on their behalf. There may have to be an exponential growth in carbon offsetting for negative emissions to close the logistics net zero emission gap – and logistics is just one activity to be decarbonised. If CO2 emissions are not driven down to a low enough level, no amount of tree planting, BECCS or other sequestering schemes will be able to get us back within a 1.5oC carbon budget.
For this reason some climate scientists now believe that ‘the idea of net zero has licensed a recklessly cavalier “burn now, pay later” approach’ to climate change. Hopefully it won’t weaken the commitment to genuine decarbonisation within the logistics sector.
Column in Logistics Manager, June 2021