Neglected Climate Areas: A High-Level Analysis
When you are a small organisation with limited resources, tackling a climate crisis that is global, complex and urgent, where should you put your focus?
Subak’s impact in addressing climate change comes from our members - those organisations and individuals we support to develop, scale and generate new data and ideas. Our existing cohorts have done amazing things in clean power generation, policy advocacy, citizen and business engagement and energy systems modelling, to name just a few areas.
The application window for our next Accelerator cohort closes on 17th March. We will then have the enjoyable but difficult task of selecting 15 early-stage climate not-for-profits. How will we evaluate and choose between compelling organisations doing hugely valuable work in very different fields?
We have a number of criteria but one key question is: which organisations have the most significant potential for contribution to the global climate effort?
To help guide our decision-making, we have undertaken a high-level analysis to identify neglected climate areas. We’re looking at what specific parts of the economy are doing to decrease emissions - and whether the level of effort is enough relative to the scale of the challenge.
We welcome thoughts and contributions from our colleagues, with the aim of producing a more comprehensive report in collaboration with partners in the coming months. If you would like to get involved with this work, please get in touch!
What we did
We developed a taxonomy of 8 sectors - adapted from the Quadrature Climate Foundation taxonomy - and built a composite score of neglectedness for each sector based on an assessment of two things:
Greenhouse Gas emissions: total current emissions in CO2eq, and the historic 30-year trend (1990-2019).
Funding: total investment by sector from private, public and not-for-profit sources. We are using funding as a proxy for allocation of effort and resources - it’s not perfect, but it reveals a great deal.
We adapted the analytical methodology developed by Founder’s Pledge to give each sector a score out of 24 for emissions, and out of 16 for funding – i.e. a maximum total neglectedness score of 40. The higher the score, the more “neglected” a sector is considered. We explain the methodology in detail here.
What we found
The graphic below sets out the total neglectedness score by sector. It’s immediately apparent that sectors with identical scores can have very different neglectedness characteristics through their shading; blue = emissions and grey = funding. This scoring helps us not only to understand how neglected (or not) a sector might be, but also to characterise the underlying causes. For example, clean electricity receives by far the most climate philanthropy of any sector (£750 million in new commitments through 2020 and 2021). However, emissions from the global power sector remain so high, a trend still increasing, that it still receives the highest score for neglectedness.
Figure 1. Total global neglectedness score for 8 major sectors from the Quadrature Climate Foundation taxonomy. Blue shading indicates the part of the score from emissions and grey shading indicates the part of the score from funding. (Link to Flourish)
Power. Despite high funding levels, power still scores highest for neglectedness, due to its dominant role in global emissions and continued increase. This indicates two possibilities: firstly, that this funding isn’t being used effectively to curb emissions from power-related activities, or secondly that even the current funding level is too low given the scale of emissions. In either case, this reinforces that not enough is being done to abate emissions from predominantly fossil power generation.
Aviation and shipping. High score driven by rapid increase in GHG emissions (over 100% from 1990-2019). This figure does not consider the fall in emissions from aviation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, emissions are still projected to increase past 2030 when the IEA estimates emissions will return to pre-pandemic levels (1). Additionally, although emissions from aviation are far greater per kilogram transported than shipping, shipping compromises a greater share of their cumulative emissions (2). Strikingly, despite receiving roughly five times more for-profit VC funding than any other sector, non-profit and public funding remained at roughly the same level as other neglected sectors (3). While road transport, the other transport subsector, has higher overall emissions there is a declining trend, in part due to a shift towards electric vehicles. Considerable challenges still lie in decarbonising HGVs (4).
Industry. High score driven by rapid increase in GHG emissions (over 100% from 1990-2019). Industry is another key opportunity for investment as a global neglected area. There is a key challenge to help the Global South industrialise in line with SDG goals and shift industry away from using high-carbon fossil fuels as primary energy to low-carbon electricity (5). 75% of global iron and steel production is still produced using coal-fired power, with an average annual increase of less than 1% of electric arc and electrolytic hydrogen furnaces used in production over the past decade (6).
Agriculture and farming. We expected a higher score due to the relative lack of global funding. But this is countered by a relatively minor increase in global emissions. However, our scoring system does not factor in knock-on impacts on deforestation, which are significant. What’s more, our scoring methodology does not factor in how available and robust data sources are, and the UN has documented a lack of basic agricultural data in many countries, including the whole African continent (7). The Subak Data Team, therefore, shows considerable interest in improving data scarcity in this area.
Waste. Emissions are largely unchanged from 1990. However, there is uncertainty about where exactly these emissions come from (8), which may be a reflection of relatively low levels of funding (and hence a high neglectedness score for funding).
Buildings / the built environment. Relatively low and stable emissions contribute to a low neglectedness score. However unlike waste, emissions such as from cement and heating/cooling (separate from those included in the energy category) were more easily identifiable (9).
Land use change and forestry. Achieved the lowest neglectedness score due to its low emissions. However, this is arguably misleading given the unrealised potential for this scheme to be a carbon sink, offsetting lack of progress in other sectors (10).
Implications
While our methodology has some limitations, it nevertheless provides some valuable nuance for thinking about the impact of different approaches.
To slow the pace of climate breakdown and keep 1.5 degrees within reach, abating emissions from power should be the priority. For countries like the UK, fully decarbonising the power sector can be seen as an even greater priority given the more significant challenge of doing so in many parts of the world (happily, the Climate Change Committee has just shown exactly how we can do this by 2035).
However, from a long term perspective, every pound spent today on decarbonising agriculture or industry will have an outsized impact, given the relative absence of funding for those sectors.
This analysis is an early stage window into our emerging thinking. We recognise that many other organisations are doing similar work - such as Project Drawdown - and welcome collaboration in turning this analysis into actionable recommendations. We will continue to develop our research and thinking over the coming weeks and months, including running versions of this exercise for specific regions.
Sources:
https://www.wri.org/research/state-climate-action-2022
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe