Climate Neutral Now is an initiative launched by UN Climate Change in 2015 to raise awareness about the need for urgent climate action – which explains the “Now” – and to encourage all stakeholders to contribute to achieve global climate neutrality by following a three-step process: estimate their greenhouse gas emissions, find ways to reduce their emissions, and compensate the rest with credible carbon credits.
By doing this, participants (we call them signatories as they sign a Pledge as the very first step) learn what their impact on climate is; become familiar with the measures they can take to address that impact, and eventually support projects that reduce emissions and bring about sustainable development benefits globally. In addition, they get recognition from participating in a UN initiative.
So, what have we learned these past five years? Here are five of the most profound lessons:
Collaboration is key
We know this may sound obvious, but if you have actively led collaborative initiatives, you’ll know how surprisingly difficult it is to achieve true collaboration. Climate Neutral Now has been able to reach many more organizations and individuals through joint efforts with NGOs, companies and national governments than through any of the direct communication and social media campaigns our UN Climate Change team has implemented. The combined networks and abilities of these different partners have allowed us to have a much bigger impact than we would have had on our own. This is equally true in the global need to take climate action: we are far stronger together.
Clarity is good, but life is rarely clear
We would love to have answers for everything. In particular, we’d love to be able to explain to everyone how they can become totally greenhouse gas emission free, or ‘Net Zero’, now or in the future. But we can’t. This is a road that has never been traveled. We are creating this journey together. This is one of the challenges of climate change. No one has faced this before, so no one really knows how exactly to solve the different challenges. But that is no excuse for a lack of action. There are many things that we can and must do. We also know what the challenges are and we must all work to solve them.
We can see this with the Paris Agreement. The Agreement defines common concrete objectives and sets up the international framework for collaboration among parties, related mainly to planning, reporting and contributing through the actions they take. While there’s a variety of ways signatories can do that, its importance as a common goal centred around climate action cannot be underestimated.
Therefore, we need to be comfortable with uncertainty. This doesn’t mean we become complacent or maintain the status quo, but that we understand full that clarity is rarely possible, and that we need to keep moving forward, led by the current data we have.
Improvement never stops
We feel as if we have been in a non-stop process of planning for Climate Neutral Now since we started planning for the initiative in 2014. Even after its initial launch in 2015, the brainstorming and the conversations with many stakeholders about how to make the initiative more effective, more attractive, more robust, better known, continue to this day.
This has been a thrilling experience, and it is impossible to be bored when approaches are continuously adapted. We have adapted to our evolving understanding of the science of climate change, as well as to the expectations of the various stakeholders. We have also adapted to the growing awareness of the urgency of climate change among the general public.
The beneficiaries/signatories are the main source of knowledge
We often meet organizations and individuals who expect the UN Climate Change team supporting Climate Neutral Now to tell them what exactly to do. But in reality, what we do is provide a framework for the signatory (either an organization or individual) to develop their own understanding of their greenhouse gas emissions, what they can do to reduce those emissions and the options they have to contribute/compensate. But they understand their own activities, their own resources and their own challenges, better than anyone else. In the end then, it is each organization and individual who will discover what they can do and decide how to proceed. We only support them in that discovery process.
Our work will never be over
As our understanding of climate science has advanced, and with it our understanding of the actions that we need to take to stop climate change, we have realized that climate action – the very reason for the existence of Climate Neutral Now – will be ongoing.
That’s because we need to continue developing different technologies and approaches to address our continuous impact on the climate, and take action to reverse part of that impact.
Does that mean that Climate Neutral Now will never end? Definitely not (one of those rare moments in life where there is clarity about the future), but it means that our work (and by ‘our’ we mean ‘everyone’s) will be important for a long time into the future. In short, while much has been done, there still remains much more to do.
