CDP launch in China

The first CDP China Report was launched in Beijing International Hotel. With only five replies from 100 companies the presentations and discussions were more interesting than the report. I also remembered how hard Peng Lei had to work to get a 30% response rate on our report about Chinese Companies in the 21st century a few years ago so I was not surprised.

The two key presentations were done by Dongzhi Yu from ICBC and Jennifer Jiang from Merrill Lynch. Both presentations were of very high quality and with focus on the core business of the banks related to a low carbon development and what they are doing. I really hope that we will see more of these kinds of presentations in OECD from people in the finance sector, especially these days.

Then there was a "panel" where I participated together with Allan Zhang, Director, PwC and Richard Shi, Director, China Entrepreneur Club DCE sitting on the chairs on stage. Chairing the session was Feng Jia, Deputy Director, MEP. Our discussions focused mainly on the opportunities mong Chinese companies to become winners in a low carbon economy.

Hopefully the future development of CDP and other instruments that support a low carbon development will focus more on the winners in a low carbon economy and less on today’s big emitters.

UPDATE 29th October: Chinese article with pictures

Baoding and a resource smart development in China

WWF and CAS (Chinese Academy of Sciences) arranged a conference in Beijing with the theme: “Why Ecological Footprint Matters to the Economy and Sustainable development: Practical Solutions to Global Needs”.

I was in a session called “International cooperation on natural resources and energy solutions” together with Yuan Jinghua, head of Baoding Industrial Zone and Liu Daoping, Division Director, State Forest Administration. Professor Cheng Shengkui, Director of institute, IGSNRR, CAS, as chairing the session and Nan Li from WWF ended the session with a very interesting overview of the work WWF done with CAITEC in Africa to see how the Sino-African axis can be a driver for sustainable resource use.

It was encouraging to see the progress in Baoding and I really hope our coming report, that soon will be ready, will be able to make the work there known to a broader audience.

China Mobile: Getting ready for low carbon leadership

To meet with China Mobile is always a pleasure. Their work in the low carbon area is really interesting. They have a balanced approach where they approach both their own emissions and their (mainly positive) impact from use of their products and services. People like Yan Jiang, General Manager, at China Mobile are working hard to deliver concrete results.

Following earlier work, three areas are of particular interest in relation to China Mobile:

1. How China Mobile can keep their own emissions under control, especially emissions from base stations. China Mobile already have a target to reduce CO2 from base stations with almost 7 million tonnes of CO2.

2. Assess the emission reductions due to existing services that China Mobile is providing. Today China Mobile provides a number of low-carbon IT solutions, but no assessment exists on how significant these savings are.

3. Assess the future potential of services from China Mobile. The need for a resource efficient development in China is established by the Chinese government and for a low carbon development it is important to understand the potential for smart low carbon IT solutions.

China Mobile is already well prepared and it is interesting to see how the GRI reporting framework we developed back in 2003 as a supplement for the telecom sector is being used today by China Mobile.

CASS workshop: Low Carbon Development Index work in China

It is encouraging to see how fast things can go when really skillful people want to make things happen. CASS (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) under the leadership of Jiahua Pan, Executive Director, Research Centre for Sustainable Development, have begun developing instrument to measure the progress towards a low carbon economy. This work builds on the joint work that we launched in Copenhagen earlier this year [link (it is Professor Pan talking on the picture)].

We also used the CASS workshop to formally agree to take the next step and have CASS, WWF together with Baoding, Tiruvallur and Project Zero as leading cities to develop the first global low carbon city development index. Dalberg, that also helped during the Copenmind process, is helping to coordinate this work and to ensure high quality.

Professor Pan presented the work so far and a draft outline for a structure that could be used to assess countries and cities. There is a great need for leadership and while few countries have shown leadership so far a lot is happening on the city level. So far no instrument exists that can measure the progress towards a low carbon society, but the work that CASS is embarking on will contribute to the first instrument that also will be able to measure cities progress toward a low carbon economy.

Building on Pan’s framework Zhuang Guiyang presented some initial finding on a country level and ZHU Shouxian presented initial findings on the regional level in China. The work is still under development and the need to further develop indicators for “human welfare” beyond HDI and look into the import/export aspect as well as thinking about the different aspects that should be included (the infrastructure, consumption patterns, industrial contribution, etc).

Zhuang Guiyang also made a very interesting presentation “Measuring the Efforts of Countries towards Low Carbon Economies”. It is a different approach that compare the commitments and strategies of a country in relation to the reductions that are needed to avoid dangerous climate change. This is then compared to the BAU scenario. Still quite a way to go, also for this approach, but already very interesting results and a promising approach that could be used in relation to not only countries, but also cities and companies.

Suresh Vaswani from Wipro on Green/low carbon IT

An interesting article in Business world by Suresh Vaswani, CEO Wipro. This is an interesting development and we need more CEOs from the IT sector with this message.

Some might be interested that Wipro and WWF are collaborating and the first results will be ready in a few months. See earlier blog