Capgemini : World Climate Summit 2019

The clock is ticking against the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) target to achieve a 45 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 - and net zero emissions by the middle of this century. That first milestone is now only 11 years away and the World Climate Summit in Santiago de Chile has 2030 firmly in its sights.

The scale of the transformation required to tackle climate change across every business sector is significant. At Capgemini, we believe that delivering the needed reductions in carbon emissions must go well beyond incremental efficiency gains and will involve radical business transformation. Achieving this will demand new thinking, new strategies, innovative new business models and the adoption of new technologies, interlinked platforms and partner ecosystems. This is feasible, but there is no time to waste.

Within Capgemini, having reached our 2020 carbon reduction target two years early, we are now focused on delivering our 2030 Science Based Target as soon as possible. We've also set an ambitious target to change the mindset of the business by helping our clients save 10 million tonnes of carbon by 2030.

Our Capgemini invent business has already embraced the client challenge and is helping organizations design, build and deliver their low carbon strategies. Through these engagements, we are enabling clients to achieve radical transformation by re-inventing almost every aspect of their business, going beyond a traditional user-centric approach to embed an additional planet-centric focus. Technology can also be a key enabler to driving carbon reduction, so technology decisions should be made through a sustainability lens. Leveraging big data and artificial intelligence (AI) is already helping us to deliver significant carbon benefits to our clients.

Increasingly, it is becoming apparent that ambitious carbon reduction targets cannot be achieved in isolation. It requires multiple partners: An ecosystem approach to collaboration allows effective delivery against the whole value network. Consequently, business models are starting to evolve. In the energy sector, for example, our clients are moving away from simply providing energy to leverage new technologies, through which they actively manage demand, as well as supply. They are even redefining their businesses and becoming energy management platform companies.

These ecosystems will be vital in the pursuit of greener, carbon-zero businesses. They will touch on every aspect of a consumer's life, requiring businesses to re-imagine a more sustainable and joined up response to customer demands. Where currently separate companies and even industries operate in silos, an ecosystem model represents a shared responsibility to delivering on both business and climate change objectives. To this end, we are urging our clients to look beyond their own operations, to collaborate with all stakeholders (customers, investors, partners, start-ups, academia and government) to accelerate our collective journey towards achieving a net-zero economy.

No organization will thrive in the decades beyond 2030 without having sustainability embedded in their core. We need to start designing and building ecosystems with interlinked technology platforms that share information today, not tomorrow.

We look forward to seeing you at World Climate Summit - The Investment COP in Santiago!

This blog was co-authored with Capgemini invent Florent andrillon and Jean baptiste Perrin