NESS SEMINAR
Dr Saphira Rekker
@roconscicom
Date: Friday 2nd December
Time: 12 – 1pm
Location: Zoom
The achievement of the Paris Agreement climate goals of well-below 2 degrees of warming requires companies to align their greenhouse gas emission reductions with this goal. To measure whether companies are compliant with the Paris targets we propose several strict conditions that any emissions allocation methodology must meet before it can be classified as Paris-Compliant. Our conditions focus on the need for a common, and early as practicable, base year for all companies and consistency with an underlying Paris-aligned decarbonisation pathway. Additionally, we propose four operationalisation requirements to ensure companies can declare they are on a Paris Compliant Pathway including calculations of their carbon budgets and re-alignment pathways. Applying example Paris-Compliant Pathways and associated metrics to ten high emission electric utility companies and ten cement companies, we find that all but one of these companies are not currently Paris-compliant, with every year of delayed action increasing their required rate of decarbonisation and hence the exposure of billions of investment dollars to transition risk. Applying this proposed method will ensure the Paris carbon budget is met and that progress can be tracked accurately – an imperative for any companies and stakeholders seeking to align their decision-making with the Paris Agreement.
Dr Saphira Rekker is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Finance at The University of Queensland and has a PhD in Finance. Saphira’s research focuses on tools to measure and verify the efficacy of decarbonisation commitments by corporations. As part of the Princeton-led Rapid Switch initiative, she leads UQ’s Corporate Climate MAP program, which evaluates the alignment of companies and investment portfolios with the Paris Agreement. Saphira is a member of the Technical Working Group of the Science Based Targets initiative for the oil and gas sector, and a key contributor to EU climate benchmarking regulation. She has ongoing collaborations with numerous industry partners including Fidelity International, Ernst & Young and Norges Bank Investment Management. Saphira’s research is cross-disciplinary and she has published in high impact journals, Nature Climate Change and Nature Communications, as well as several other highly ranked academic journals.
