Agendi team at GreenBiz 2023; companies making progress on sustainability

It was a pleasure participating to GreenBiz23 in Scottsdale, Arizona for Agendi. Such a refreshing week with the sustainability community, very inspiring listening to, among others, Marisa Dukovich from Morgan Stanley and Anya Nelson from Climate Asset Management.

It’s exciting to see the huge strides made in a year by many corporates. Last year we were talking about if qualitative Scope 3 calculations / SBTs were possible and what incentives companies had to report on it / commit to them. This year most are working on it / towards them, and key topics and takeaways from the conference show a drastic increase in ambition:

• Show tangible action towards established goals, rather than stalling at defining those, because the effects are themselves already very tangible (cf. historic river droughts in Arizona and other ongoing climate disasters)
• How to incorporate nature and biodiversity in those action plans, whatever the business model, in line with COP 15 recommendations back in December in Montreal. Objective is to be nature positive, and flip the script from doing less damage, to actually helping here (e.g. number and diversity of species within your value chain). Initiatives and frameworks like TNFD, 30 by 30 by 30 will play a big role here
• How to leverage yet also support and empower local indigenous communities, as they are the stewards of most natural capital.
• EnvironmentalJustice as a whole should gradually play a more important role in the ESG conversation, as certain populations suffer the lion share of the negative consequences of climate change.
• Need sobriety for all of this to work. We need to recognize that nature is not a commodity, and use less resources in a better way
• ScenarioPlanning will become an even stronger pillar of climate disclosure moving forward, as investors are wary of market changing with increasing pace and unpredictability
• CarbonRemoval has become front and center of many conversation, yet there are still many uncertainties in the growth of CDR projects.Some constants though: More than ever, we will need emphasis on collaboration, as well as require regulation and governments to play their role. This will true across all topics above.See you next year GreenBiz Group, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and many others, excited to see where it will take place, thank you Scottsdale, you were incredible…