Sustainability and climate emergency: compliances versus conviction and transparency

WBCSD is a global, CEO-led organization of over 200 leading businesses working together to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world. During the CM meeting in Tokyo this year from 24th to 28th of October 2022 relevant reflections have been made about the critical issues related to sustainabilty. Peter Bakker, WBSCD CEO, stressed out that our world is facing three pressing global challenges: the climate emergency, the loss of nature and the growing inequality. Each of them, on its own, can endanger the safe operating space for humanity and the planet, as well as the license to operate for business. Thus, urgent action for transformation is needed. An urgent and wholesale transformation of everything we have grown up with: energy needs to decarbonize; materials need to go circular; food needs to be produced sustainably and equitably and provide healthy diets.

At Blue Room Innovation we work on new solutions related to the waste traceability and circularity. We are however worried about the facts that our global material footprint has more than tripled since 1979, growing by 67% from 2000 to 2017. At the same time material productivity started to decline around 2000, and has stagnated in recent years. Meanwhile, waste has also significantly increased. Electronic waste is growing fastest, having increased by 8% to 43 million tons from 2014 to 2016 alone, reaching 52 million tonnes by 2021.

Achieving net zero by 2050 requires a full transformation of our economy. The UN estimates that current natural resource extraction and processing practices account for up to 50% of total greenhouse gas emissions.

The 2030 race is close to its end and the objective to limit global warming to around 1.5C (2.7°F) can be reached only with conviction and transparency. The times of compliance are over as clearly stated in the IPCC report[2].

Circular strategies can substantially help reduce worldwide emissions by fostering the use of secondary or sustainably grown bio-based materials, reducing food loss and waste and extending useful lives of products and materials.

Where some see waste, we see value, opportunity and a business case to use resources for as long as they can last. The pressure to shift from linear to more circular ways of doing business increases steadily, thus we need high-tech, transparent and collaborative solutions in order to face the challenge properly and create new business models.

This is exactly where we tackle the issue with out innovative blockchain based solutions since we enable collaborative networks within and across industries, driving new partnerships and opportunities for innovation.

Thanks to this our clients leverage new levels of data quantity, quality and sharing, as well as blockchain technology, in order to monitor and manage supply chain risks and ensure responsible, sustainable sourcing.

Bringing suppliers and customers along on the innovation journey will also help ensure that technologies can be resilient, sustainable or even regenerative along the entire value chain.

As stated by Bob Kaplan:“Blockchain technology, starting with the first stage of production, can be used to accumulate and transfer E-liabilities from stage to stage, reducing accounting and auditing costs across the entire system. Blockchains are especially useful in recording Scope 1 emissions at each stage so that subsequent E-liability transfers must always reconcile with the total Scope 1 number in a value chain. The E-liability system is unlikely to introduce burdensome record-keeping, because it can run on a company’s existing financial-reporting and cost-accounting infrastructure, simply using a different unit of measurement: the quantity of GHG emissions rather than the amount of cash and cash equivalents.”[3]

In order to make the move to full conviction and transparency, its about time to adopt blockchain technology.