E151/1 Podcast Special - Target 1.5C: Financial Services & Sustainability

Quick word from our sponsor, 51tocarbonzero.com. If you're a CFO or board member staring down CSRD or Scope 3 and thinking, where do we even start? We at Sustainability Solved would point you to 51tocarbonzero.com. They turn complex, fragmented emissions data into something simple and give boards clear, audit-ready visibility on exactly where the reduction opportunities are. It's not another reporting tool that adds work. It's built so the data holds up when your auditor asks the hard questions. If that's a conversation worth having, get in touch with 51tocarbonzero.com, or just drop me a message and I'll point you in the right direction. Right, back to the episode.

Welcome to Target 1.5, a miniseries of podcasts designed to help You play your part in limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees. Our world is facing a climate crisis. The IPCC has warned us that this is code red for humanity. Without taking action now, the stability of our food, our water, our leisure, and most of all, our safety is at risk. But this warning isn't final because there still is time. Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees may help us avoid the worst aspects of this climate catastrophe. But in practical terms, what can businesses do to help make this happen? In this series, we'll be meeting business leaders from 3 key industries: financial services, law, and food and beverage. We'll be finding out how they've changed the way they do business to become more sustainable. And they'll be sharing exclusive insights, advice, and guidance to support you on your journey. I'm your host, Will Richardson, and with me is our in-house climate strategist, Emma Littlewood. Emma, first of all, let's just get a handle on all this terminology. What is this 1.5-degree target, and why is it so important?

Yes, hi, Will. That's a really good question. So Back in 2015, there was a meeting of all the sort of top countries in the world got together, and it was called the Paris Accord that they came up with. There's an organization called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, known as the IPCC, and they had come up with a report that showed that the way that we were going in terms of the amount of global heating— I mean, people tend to call it global heating rather than global warming now— Was going to lead to sort of catastrophic climate change. And the Paris Accord was the first sort of real groundbreaking moment when the countries, the OECD countries and other countries came together and agreed that they would work together to try and limit anthropogenic climate change by reducing their carbon emissions on a certain pathway which the IPCC had drawn up. Now, at that time, the pathway was more or less sort of 2 or well below 2, ideally 1.5. But then in 2018, the IPCC produced another report which showed that actually the scientists are warning that temperature rises above 1.5 degrees would lead to more heat waves, extreme rainstorms, floods, tornadoes, and actually really quite devastating sea level rises. So they said, look, this 1.5 degrees, we need to try and reach that rather than the 2 degrees or well below 2 degrees. And actually, even 1.5 degrees is going to be pretty devastating for some areas of the planet.

We'll hear the phrase net zero carbon quite a lot. What does this actually mean?

Well, in terms of the corporate world, there hasn't actually been criteria as to what net zero is. The IPCC again defines what carbon net zero or emissions net zero, which includes all the other greenhouse gases as well as carbon, and they define it in a certain way, but that is looking at the global picture. Real net zero, as in one that's going to help us to limit human-made heating is actually all of us doing it together, the whole globe. You can't just sort of push the carbon around. And so what's happening now is that there are lots of companies who are setting targets for net zero and saying they are already net zero. And that's great and it's really commendable, but it's— they're all different net zeros. So we're just about to find out what real net zero is in terms of science-based net zero, because on October 28th, 2021, the Science-Based Targets Initiative will be publishing their science-based criteria for net zero at the corporate level.

And what do you— do you have a feeling of what you think it's going to be?

Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. Yeah, I've got more than the feeling because I've been involved in the consultation and read the draft documents, etc. And what it's going to be is— we'll come on to this a bit more later when we talk about science-based targets, won't we? But what it's going to mean is that when you are net zero, you have reached your long-term science-based reduction target, which will mean a maximum of 10% of your baseline emissions, which is the year that you set the target as your baseline. Only a maximum of 10% of those can be addressed by any kind of removals of carbon from the atmosphere. So reduction is going to need to be 90% of your strategy.

And could you briefly summarize what offsetting is?

Yeah, sure. So the offset— so there are 2 offset markets. There's the national one, which is carbon credits, and countries can trade carbon credits with each other so that one country can emit more than its allowance. It's called a cap-and-trade scheme. Now, in the voluntary sector, you can get something called verified carbon offsets, and there are various different schemes. Carbon offsets have been around for a long time, and they are designed to compensate for that bit of your carbon footprint that you haven't been able to reduce.

Okay, and in a nutshell, what are science-based targets?

In a nutshell, science-based targets are designed to align companies with the 1.5 cap on heating above pre-industrial levels, and it will show you what your reduction trajectory needs to look like and how you need to reduce in your carbon portfolio.

Brilliant. In our first case study, we're putting the spotlight on the financial services sector. Its role in climate change is being watched very carefully, particularly because of investment in fossil fuels and pensions. Grant Thornton was the first accountancy firm in the world to set science-based targets, and they've been hugely successful in their ambition to reduce their carbon footprint. Karen Higgins is their Head of Sustainability.

We really wanted to reduce our emissions because we pride ourselves on being a responsible business. And we started on this journey because we knew that we, along with many other businesses, or all businesses, have a huge role to play in protecting our planet, not just looking at our own impact as a business, but also thinking about the power that we have in using our voice to tell the story to our stakeholders. So, you know, we're not a huge emitter of greenhouse gases. However, that doesn't mean that we can turn a blind eye. You know, we can't be complacent. And it's really important that we all play our part in the UK in reaching our net zero target by 2050, although obviously we would like to do that a lot sooner. We've used our science-based targets to really commit to reducing our environmental impact. So rather than a finger-in-the-air way of of selecting targets, we've been able to use these in a really meaningful way and set a baseline year of 2018 and then have targets moving forward from that. So the targets we've set now have really allowed us to focus on the areas where we can really make a real difference and have allowed us to think about the way we operate and the way that we behave as a professional services firm. We've been measuring our environmental performance for a number of years. even pre-setting science-based targets. And therefore you perhaps think you're not going to be surprised. So we beat our annual target in 2019. And obviously because of the pandemic, we absolutely smashed our target in 2022. So our first milestone on our net zero journey was to reduce our emissions by 21% by 2023. And we absolutely did this. We had a 64% reduction from our baseline. However, I still was really surprised when looking at the Scope 3 results last year to see that business travel made up 31% of emissions, which was just behind working from home emissions at 32%. So at a time, or during a year, when travel was a lot less, I was still quite surprised to see that figure. But it was probably due to when the restrictions eased a little bit over the summer and before we went into our last lockdown in September, October time, it was probably the amount of travel that was done in that time. And then the other point was when we first set our targets and looked at Scope 3 relative to Scope 1 and 2, although we had measured some Scope 3 activities in the past, such as business travel, really digging down into what else could be included and what else we can measure was really surprising. And one of the actions we took was to look through our purchase ledger to see which large areas of spend we had and where we needed to look more closely. So it was a real eye-opener, I think, to see what was included in Scope 3.

Karen mentioned Scope 1, 2, and 3 there, Emma. Can you help define Scope 1 and 2 and 3 for us?

Yeah, sure, of course. When you emit some greenhouse gases, if you're doing it immediately, like you have bought some petrol, you might be lucky to get some, but you've bought some petrol and put it in your car and you're burning it, then that's qualified as Scope 1 because you're directly emitting those greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and you've purchased the fuel and you've burnt it. And then what they do is they define Scope 2 as indirect emissions from the purchased use of electricity, heat, or steam. And so when you use electricity, you aren't actually emitting those gases straight into the atmosphere. There's an indirect amount of carbon that is embedded within the use of the electricity to do with coal or gas or oil or any other fossil fuels or any other biomass that's gone in there. And then Scope 3 is basically everything else. It's all the stuff that you buy, all the stuff, the waste you throw away, everything that's up and down your value chains. It could be when you get on a flight, it could be when you buy a piece of paper, there's embodied carbon in those products.

Brilliant, thank you. And why should a financial services organization look at implementing science-based targets?

Yeah, it was really interesting listening to Karen there talking about Scope 3. When you're looking at your Scope 3 and you're a finance company, where you've got investments and/or you've got assets under management, you've got an enormous potential to lots of leverage in your Scope 3 because you can direct where the money goes and where the money goes, the carbon follows. So if you're putting— you can choose what money goes where. So you could put all your money into things that are green or you could put all your money into things that are fossil fuels. Obviously, it's not as simple as that because funds have to make money and they have to have returns on the investment. But there's a special science-based targets framework and guidelines and toolkit for the finance sector. And it's— I've used it with a, with a bank, and it's very good. Um, and, and it does sort of peel back the layers, um, that are in front of your eyes that make you feel like you can't see into your Scope 3. And it just sort of brings it to life for you. And it reminds you that your Scope 3 is someone else's Scope 1 and 2.

Yeah. And I think that's really— it's— that's a really important thing to remember. And this is why we've put together this audio guide, Target 1.5. We want to inspire you to change the way you do business to tackle climate change by showcasing the success of established organisations that have already implemented sustainability practices. For Grant Thornton, it hasn't all been plain sailing.

There were challenges along the way, as there always are with, with things like this. Not so much— I mean, setting the science-based targets was fairly straightforward because we work with some fantastic consultants. The challenges are more sort of ongoing, such as the collection of data from our suppliers. Some are easier than others. Another obvious challenge was around measurement during the pandemic and the changes to the way that we've been working and our working patterns, particularly now when some of our people are working from offices, but the majority are still working from home. Overcoming those challenges really presents us with a number of opportunities. And when we talk about collecting data from our suppliers, it has made us think more deeply in terms of how we work with those suppliers. And if there's an opportunity to work more closely with them and think about how together through our supply chain are we going to become a much more responsible business. And then around measurement and working from home, what we're planning later this year is to conduct a working from home survey where we can collect data from all our people around some of the questions that we need to ask around working from home, such as how they're working, their energy supplies from home, etc., etc. And I think that will allow us to understand how people work, but also how we can measure impact as we're working in a more hybrid way. Probably the most helpful discovery on our sustainability at Grant Thornton is the understanding that although supply chain emissions may feel distant and difficult to impact, that when you look at your procurement policies and look at what you really need to operate, there are things you can do. And collaborating with suppliers to bring them on the journey with you makes a huge difference. And that's what we— I mentioned earlier, that's what we want to do a lot more. And once we start measuring what we're doing and what we're doing together, the understanding of the business increases and brings different aspects of the business together on this kind of collaborative approach to avert climate change. I think it goes back to nobody can do this on our own. We're all in this together. And it's not a competitive environment. We all need to make those changes in order to achieve our target.

That leads us nicely on to our next topic, collaboration, which we have touched upon prior to this. In June, we spoke to James Close, the Head of Climate Change at NatWest, and collaboration is a huge priority for him.

We're really proud of the work that we've been doing with Octopus to give our customers access to electric vehicle recharging networks at a lower cost and also use it to install vehicle charging where that's appropriate. And we're also collaborating with Microsoft to give customers access to carbon footprinting data because that's going to be really important for them to make better choices in terms of how they, you know, change their operations to get access to low-carbon energy, how they engage with their supply chain to make sure they're building a supply chain that has sustainable businesses within it. And how they can link that to the way in which their products get used by their customers. So, you know, that measurement side is also really important of the partnership that we're building with customers. And we're using, you know, we know we can't do it all ourselves, which is why we've enlisted the help of some of these leading organizations. And, you know, we've had some other great conversations. So lots more really exciting things in the pipeline, I think.

Emma, how does collaboration work in this space?

It's a very creative space in a way, because what you're doing is you're stepping back and you're coming up with ideas. So, although it's incredibly challenging and seems formidable, it can actually be quite fun. So, for example, you might be a bank and you might have a load of commercial customers. So, you've got lots of companies who bank with you. And you might say, okay, well, they're in our value chain. How can we help them? And you might provide a carbon footprinting platform, a free tool for them. And you might give them access to reduced or free consultancy advice about how to reduce their own emissions, their own Scope 1 and 2 perhaps, or perhaps even their Scope 3 as well. Then you can do things like, for example, you can partner with energy companies. And you can do things like have reduced fees for installing electric vehicle charging points at companies' offices or premises. And this is something that Octopus Energy actually provides, as an example. So, that's a kind of partnership. And other ways that you can do this are, for example, You can say to your funds, if you're a finance company, okay, we're going on this science-based target journey. One of the options at the moment that's available as a Scope 3 type of target is the percentage of your portfolio who are also signed up to science-based targets. So you partner with them and you say, will you come on this journey with us? If you come on this journey with us, we will be on that journey together. And we will collaborate and look at best practice and how to reduce. So there are lots of examples where, you know, people are working together and collaborating. And I think that that is far more impactful than trying to be the first company to reach net zero.

Looking to the future, what's in the pipeline for Grant Thornton? Here's Karen Higgins.

We're really proud of what we've done, but also we can do a lot more. We've got plans in place to focus on certain areas, such as the measuring and reporting on our water usage, which is something we, we haven't done before. We want to work more closely with our landlord-managed offices to capture more accurate information, as well as continuing with some of our employee engagement programmes. to sort of create awareness, encourage behavior change, not just at work, but also when people are at home. And because we're going to be going into this more hybrid approach, I think that's more important than ever. Also, we don't use offsets, nor do we make claims on the back of them. And we also ensure all of our renewable, 100% renewable energy is bona fide. So I think working, you know, Peter advises, we work with a great team and they're on that journey with us. every step of the way to make sure that we, we don't make those mistakes. And we don't waste time being ineffective.

So there's plenty still to be done. I asked James Close what he thought about the financial sector's response to the climate emergency.

What's been really quite extraordinary is Mark Carney and the role that he's played, both to set the narrative around what finance needs to do. And he initiated that when he was at the Bank of England, of course, through TCFD. He's been a very vociferous advocate of carbon pricing, but also as the UN Ambassador for Climate Finance and the advisor to the UK presidency on climate finance. He's mobilized this coalition for net zero, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. And I think there's over $23 trillion worth of asset owners who have committed to net zero. Asset managers are also bought into it. We hear a lot about BlackRock and what Larry Fink's doing. And then of course, many of the banks have also signed up to it as well. And we were delighted to be one of the first signatories to that initiative. So I think there is a lot of momentum building. I think we have to be realistic about the scale of the challenge as well. And we also have to think about how we can best deploy our balance sheet to support the transition. And of course, that requires some difficult choices to be made. And we've made some of those in the context of our lending to coal and oil and gas, and others are going to have to follow. And we're all going to have to figure out the way to do this in a way that supports our customers, but facilitates the transition and measures the impact of what we're doing. And some of the conversations that I had with some of the leading thinkers in the pension industry at the World Bank were really interesting because what's the point of giving somebody a pension 30 years from now if they can't spend it because we are living through a climate emergency and 2 degrees of warming? So it is in the interests of the pension investor, both as an individual and as the fund manager, to make really good decisions around that. Then the fund manager can do it on behalf of the individual. And we as individuals can also request that we're doing as much as possible to make sure our retirement isn't encumbered by having to address climate change and that we can live in a stable world of a temperature rise of no more than 1.5 degrees. So that asset and liability matching is right at the very heart of the role that finance can play.

We're told pensions are a huge part of the problem. How do you think, Emma, they play a role?

So pensions are investments. Investments are made into funds. Funds are all wrapped up and then you get funds of funds and funds and funds of funds. But somewhere at the bottom of all of that, there's a company doing something. And I think it's real— I, I— it's a very challenging thing to look into your pension fund and try and understand it and try and understand what all these instruments are and, and what the companies are at the bottom of it. Um, it's very simplistic to just say, right, we'll just disinvest from fossil fuels, blah blah blah. But having said that, it would be really nice if, you know, banks like Barclays did do that because and direct the funds into renewables, which would be a very powerful statement and a very powerful thing to do. But I do think that because there's so much money in pension funds, because most people, not all people, but most people do have some sort of private pension fund of some kind, then that is a really easy way of saying to people, Look at your pension fund. This is something you can do about your Scope 3. You might not be able to afford an electric vehicle right now this minute, but you can look into your pension fund and you can decide where that money is going to be invested. Do you want it invested in companies that are not following the 1.5 trajectory, or do you want to direct your money towards the best possible carbon reduction companies you can?

So if you're in the financial services industry and you're looking for a pathway to sustainability, here are 3 things that Karen at Grant Thornton would recommend implementing.

My probably top 3 things that the financial sector could do to reduce their impact would be— the first thing would be to set targets and to set targets in a robust way. So sign up to the Science Based Targets initiative to demonstrate, really demonstrate your commitment to net zero. The second thing is leading from the top. Sustainability has got to be a priority for the whole firm and has really got to be built into the strategy. And every decision that's made has got to take that into account. And the success of any business will be on whether we can adapt to the effects of climate change and dramatically cut our greenhouse gas emissions. And finally, probably, let's learn from the pandemic. Let's not go back to business as usual pre-March 2020. What have we learned from the way that we've been working? What can we continue to do or not do? So whether this be less traveling, less printing, working virtually, etc. So let's really continue to embed the changes that we want to see in order to make the difference. I think that the last 18 months have allowed us to see the difference that changing the way we work has made and What it's also done is actually make us think, well, even doing what we're doing now and working the way that we're working, are we still— we need to do even more to allow us to reach net zero by 2050. And the news that we're hearing out there at the moment is that even doing that, we're not going to hit it, and therefore we need to do much more. So we can't rest on our laurels by thinking, well, actually we've made a difference over the last 18 months. We need to do a lot more. So I'm hoping that the time that we've just experienced has brought with it some time for reflection and some time to think about how we can do things differently.

Emma, how do we briefly summarize what we've just been chatting about?

I think in the financial services sector, set science-based targets, which requires you to calculate your carbon emissions, use PCAF, which is an acronym, and I can't remember what it stands for, but it's basically the GHG protocol for financial companies to calculate your carbon footprint, set your science-based targets using the financial services special pathway, and look at your investments and ask your funds to come on the journey with you.

Brilliant, thank you. So that just about wraps up our focus on financial services. If you'd like to know more or make a comment, join our post-podcast discussion at sustainabilitysolve.org. In our next episode, we meet Alex Rhodes from Mishcon de Rea and put the spotlight on law and the legal sector.

42% of all green claims in European companies' marketing materials were either exaggerated, false, or deceptive. So there is a large There's a large problem here in, in the greenwashing space.

For that and much more, make sure you join us for the next episode of Target 1.5.