WEF’s Head of Climate & Nature Economy on turning climate risk into a growth strategy

“It’s not only a risk. It’s an opportunity,” Pim Valdre says of the relationship between business and climate. It’s an important part of the coalition she leads, where over a hundred major companies are working to prove that cutting emissions and growing revenue aren’t mutually exclusive.  

She sees the same logic playing out right now in one of the most consequential infrastructure build-outs of the century: data centres. Most of the public debate focuses on energy, she says, but that’s only part of the picture. A single large facility can use as much water in a day as a small city, and the sites require significant land and critical minerals too. Rather than wait for problems to surface, Valdre and her team at the WEF are working with the tech industry, component manufacturers and other players across the supply chain to define what a green, resilient data centre could actually look like, from water reuse models to how developers engage with the communities living around them. “We should not wait,” she says. “We need to come in early and ask these questions.” 

Valdre has spent 15 years moving between diplomacy and economics, from the United Nations and Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to her current role at the WEF’s Centre for Nature and Climate. That path shows in how she frames the problem: most boardrooms know their carbon footprint down to the tonne, she says, but have barely measured their nature footprint at all, things like how much water a business uses, how much land it affects, or how much it depends on things nature provides for free, like clean water or fertile soil. Closing that gap, she argues, isn’t primarily a regulatory problem. It’s a narrative one, business needs a more persuasive story for why acting on nature is worth doing, not just a set of rules requiring it. 

Policy still has to catch up, in her view. Electrification is behind its own targets, and circularity strategies stall against a patchwork of local and national rules. With no global price on carbon on the horizon, Valdre argues business can’t afford to wait for one before it acts. 

What convinces her the opportunity case is winning isn’t one breakthrough. It’s the combination of renewable energy costs falling faster than she expected, battery storage accelerating right behind it, and a generation that grew up watching the climate movement take shape now moving into positions of power. Progress, she says, has never been linear. It stalls, it backslides, and then it accelerates again. 

That’s the case Valdre wants on the table at COP31 this November in Antalya, Turkey: not nature and climate as a cost to be managed, but as the growth strategy the next phase of the transition depends on. 

Listen to the latest episode of Screw It: 

Screw It – Episode 16 – Full Conversation Transcript

Katarina: On this episode of Screw It, we’re covering the responsibility that global organisations have when it comes to planet Earth. It’s a big topic and it’s a lot to cover, so I’m very pleased to be joined by Pim Valdre from the World Economic Forum. 

Katarina: All right. So Pim, thank you so much for joining me here today. You’ve spent the last 15 years working for the United Nations, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Sweden, as well as now World Economic Forum. Did you always know that you wanted to work in diplomacy? 

Pim: I think so. I grew up as a kid in the 1990s, and my heroes were people like Kofi Annan, who was then the Secretary-General of the United Nations. As a Swede, I also looked up to Dag Hammarskjöld, who was the UNSG between 1953 and 1961, and also Alva Myrdal, who was the first female UN ambassador of Sweden. I looked up to these characters because it was a pretty different time that I grew up in. If we look at how the world looks today, globalisation was something quite positive. This interdependence that we were seeing between countries was doing something that was ultimately positive from the point of view of managing conflicts and large global issues, migration, human rights. But of course, also essentially this idea that we could manage dispute through law rather than military force, and that this interdependency would actually help us with resource efficiency, with capital flows, if we lower the borders on trade, it would lead to lower prices for consumers. So it was this world of growing up in something that was a positive interdependence, which I think if we look at today, this is more of an era of weaponised interdependence, where this seems to be more of a serious game and we’re retreating more to national borders, national interests. 

Pim: So I didn’t always know that I wanted to work with diplomacy, but it certainly was something that I looked up to these characters and maybe I even had a bit of a romantic vision about what the United Nations was, what a global citizen was. For me, this whole idea of an international civil servant, which was something also that Dag Hammarskjöld really underscored, this idea that there would be an impartial civil servant really trying to serve the greater good and not his or her national interest, and that person would act with integrity and try to stay away from external influence. 

Pim: That was very attractive to me as I grew up, and it continued to influence me and put me on that path that opened up the door to the United Nations, and after that, the other areas of work that I’ve worked with throughout my career. 

Katarina: How would you say your view of the world has changed since then? 

Pim: Well, I think we’re at a time today when we’re looking at what many say is an era of unprecedented disruption. For me, we’re disrupted almost at three levels. When we think about how crisis used to hurl over us in the past, it seemed like we had longer time to think about and reflect and act on crises. If we look at how global CEOs and global leaders and leaders of governments could navigate these crises now, these crises tend to happen at such a short interval. And it’s led to this almost extreme short-termism in today’s world. I’ve also heard this term “weaponised interdependence,” meaning all of those ties that we needed together during that era of globalisation have today been turned into a way to coerce, using trade as a barrier rather than a connector. The fragmentation of global value chains, the ways in which we look at the world as a world of scarcity and a world of competition for means and resources and divergence, rather than a place where, if we lower the barriers, actually there’s a win for everyone. Of course, we’ve also seen that in certain regions, that interdependence and the globalised model had an impact on industries, on certain segments of the population, manufacturing industry, of course, and other industries in certain geographies that just could not keep up with that pace. 

Pim: And maybe that’s part of what we are more navigating today. 

Katarina: Yeah. And I was going to say, a foundational feature of what you guys do today is collaboration between governments, global organisations, civil society, academia. What do these conversations look like? 

Pim: I think what is interesting in my job today, so I work for the World Economic Forum, I work in the Centre for Nature and Climate. It’s one out of the ten centres across this organisation, which was created in the 1950s after the Second World War. And the idea was also, how do we create a platform for collaboration? The difference is that we collaborate not only between states. We are the international organisation for public-private collaboration, meaning we want to help governments and other parts of society, primarily business, but also civil society, academia, to come together and solve problems. So I would say what we do differently maybe than other organisations, is that rather than putting the institution at the centre and asking everyone to come to the institution to solve the problem, we put the problem at the centre and we mobilise all the different actors that can have an impact on that problem. 

Pim: And I think it’s almost like a little bit of an app approach. Here we have an issue, we have a problem with large corporations emitting large quantities of CO2 in the atmosphere. Can we come together and mobilise all of those actors around that issue and try to solve that problem in an agile way? 

Katarina: What would you say are some of the most urgent issues that you’re facing in these dialogues today? 

Pim: Well, I think if we look out on the global landscape, I see three major systems that are being disrupted at the moment. We look at the energy system, the way that we source energy, the way that energy travels between borders. And the affordability and reliability of energy has been disrupted today due to the Iran war, but also due to other aspects. And then we look at the second large system that’s being disrupted, our global value chains, they’re being fragmented. There is in many ways a scarcity of supply. There are trade barriers that mean you have to reroute, you have to sometimes produce closer to home or change partnerships. You have to navigate a very volatile regulatory environment. And then the third large system that is being disrupted, which is coming back to our first point on global multilateralism and the rules of the game, international law, international regulation. I think these three large systems that are being disrupted just make it very challenging, if we look at the private sector, for a global CEO with a global company that spans several jurisdictions, several countries. It just makes it very, very difficult to plan, to understand both the risks and inevitably also the opportunities. 

Pim: I should have actually mentioned the fourth system, and that is the build-out of this new AI infrastructure and the demand for resources to power this new phenomenon in our societies and our economies, and the imprint that is having on the natural world. How are we going to manage the demand for natural resources such as water, land, energy, materials, with our one and only planet? 

Katarina: Yeah. And that’s one thing that I’ve heard you talk about before. And I think there was a conversation that you had with Johan Rockström, which is one of the leading scientists when it comes to climate change. So, first of all, how do you guys work with academia to make sure that you can have informed dialogues and decisions? 

Katarina: And also, what are some of the findings that you’ve had? 

Pim: That’s a great question. I think indeed we worked very closely with Johan at the institute and other climate scientists, and I think in today’s day and age, when we think about the climate action landscape, in many ways the scientific consensus around this issue has never been more united. But the policy and the political space has never been more fragmented and diverging. And I think it is important, as we consider our options for the future, to really lean on science and anchor many of our decisions in the scientific findings. So indeed, at the World Economic Forum, since we are multi-stakeholder, that is really core to our essence. We do take that opportunity to bring the best scientists in the world to help inform business strategies, to help them integrate findings into their decision making, into the way that they do investments, the way that they analyse both risks and opportunities. And I think that is just very important. I think Johan once said that crossing 1.5 degrees of global warming, that’s not a nice political slogan, it is a breach of a physical boundary. And of course, we’re pushing up against the boundaries of our planetary system. And I think that’s a concept that has helped many decision makers really try to understand what is going on with our planetary system and how it is impacting our economies as well. 

Katarina: And we’ve actually breached that for the first time. I forget the year, was it 2024? 

Pim: Indeed. And we’re now closing in on three degrees. What does a world like that look like? Well, I think it’s really important to also note already what we are seeing around us with the warming that we are experiencing in places like Europe. We’re currently going through a heatwave. The last heatwave, in 2022, I think took around 60,000 lives. We’re already seeing the impacts of a warmer climate. But of course, it becomes even more alarming when we consider that current policies, if we look at the latest report by the Emissions Gap Report, will lead to between 2.5 and 2.9, close to three degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels at the end of the century. And this really means that the difference between what governments have pledged and the emission reductions that scientists say are really necessary is at this stage a huge gap. And of course, scientists are all the time updating their scenarios for what would actually occur if we face three degrees of warming. But I think some of the consequences that have been found and that have been relatively widely dispersed include, of course, frequent and devastating extreme weather events. We’re going to see prolonged droughts that will mean knock-on effects on big sectors, including agriculture, water resources, sectors that are fundamental for our economies. It may also lead to rapid reduction, or at least over time reduction, of ice caps such as West Antarctica, Greenland. This will successively lead to sea level rise, the mixing of salt and freshwater, increased ocean acidification. This is, I believe, the latest boundary in the planetary system to be breached, the fact that our oceans are absorbing so much of the carbon dioxide that we are continuing to put out in the atmosphere, and this has a detrimental impact on the acidification of our oceans, which is really a lifeline for many economies as well. 

Pim: And of course, for coral reefs, for the health of our marine ecosystems. I think also, looking at the human impacts of this, the potentiality for migration for human populations needing to move as we encounter sea level rise, as critical and core systems of our economies are being disrupted. 

Pim: So it’s really not a compelling picture. And I think in many ways, what we are also trying to do at the World Economic Forum is to show a different future, to show a future where, if we do take some steps right now to try to transition and transform our economy from the current extractive and very carbon-intense mode into a more regenerative economy that also respects nature as our critical infrastructure, what benefits can that lead to: a healthier planet, a planet with less pollution, with better human and ecological health? Can it also lead to more competitive societies, to more thriving economies? That is also something I think is part of our responsibility, to really put forward a future vision of our world and the way that our economy works. 

Katarina: And in order to change behaviours and capital allocation and the way that our system works, that’s really key, changing behaviours. And I think the science is painting a very grim picture of what might actually happen, but it’s also showing that we can turn this around. So what needs to happen in order for things to change? 

Pim: Yeah, I think when we speak about what we call a nature positive economy, it starts by really recognising that nature is the foundation of the global economy. And part of the research that the World Economic Forum put out through our New Nature Economy Reports is that more than half of global GDP, around 58 trillion, is moderately to highly dependent on nature and its ecosystem services. And when we speak about ecosystem services, these are things that nature offers us that we today take completely for granted, clean water, pollination, soil health, biodiversity. These are really critical, this is critical infrastructure to our economy. And I think that today our system is created in a fundamentally different way. And if we look at global capital flows, we see that over 7 trillion every year is invested in nature-negative activities. And that means that for every $1 the world spends, we’re destroying $30 of ecosystem worth instead of really protecting and restoring them. So that’s a huge shift, and also a mindset shift that needs to happen. But it’s not going to happen overnight, and I don’t think it’s only going to happen if we keep on speaking about nature and climate as a trade-off. 

Pim: If it’s only going to be considered a risk, well, it is a risk. If we look at the physical impact of climate change, it certainly is a risk. But there are also opportunities. And I think that’s also something we’ve been working on at the World Economic Forum, to really show the return on investment, the economic opportunity of shifting towards a more low-carbon and what we call the nature positive economy. 

Katarina: Yeah. And is that concept that you’re talking about, is that nature financing? 

Pim: Yes, I would say certainly nature finance, financing is part of that. I can take an example of what we did at the World Economic Forum to really make this more specific, because I think we speak to a lot of corporate boards, and for many of them in boardrooms, they’ve understood climate. They’ve understood carbon. There are also metrics and ways to measure carbon in the atmosphere. There are science-based targets you can set. There are ways to disclose your emissions. It’s relatively easy to understand the problem and the impact that your business is having on global warming. But if we look at nature, not all businesses understand their nature footprint. And when I say nature footprint, I mean both in the way that they are dependent on nature, so meaning, if you are a large textile industry, you are certainly dependent on water for your operations, massive amounts of water, access to water, the price of water. But you also have a dependency, and of course also an impact. 

Pim: So how much of your operations will impact negatively on nature, and what we did, to break this down and make it more concrete, we went to the sector level. We did something we call our sector transitions to nature positive. We essentially put out these sector transitions across some of the more nature-intense sectors, mining and metals, cement, chemicals, offshore wind. And we worked with key industry representatives from these sectors to develop guidance, first, to understand their impacts and the dependencies that these industries have on nature, and also priority actions that business can take to avoid and reduce the negative impacts, mitigate nature-related risk, build resilience, and also look at unlocking opportunities across their value chains. 

Pim: So this means, investing in circularity, improving water stewardship, supporting nature conservation, restoration, there are many things that these sectors can do and integrate if they are aware of the challenges. 

Katarina: What’s the responsibility of these big global organisations versus policymakers, governments? 

Pim: I think that’s a critical question. Certainly what we hear these days when we speak to global CEOs is the policy uncertainty, the policy divergence that we’re seeing right now around climate. The fact that we seem to be in a two-speed world, almost, in greater parts of China, of course, being the dominant manufacturer of many of the renewable energy technologies, where the cost curves have fallen dramatically in the latest decades, including wind, including solar, and now also batteries and storage. The policies and the frameworks there have been stable and long-term, whereas in other regions, in other jurisdictions, there’s a lot of policy uncertainty, there are shifts, there are changes in government, there are shifting parties. It makes it very challenging for businesses to allocate resources, to drive investments, when they don’t know what the regulatory risks are around the corner. But I really feel that when I started working on climate around the time of the Paris Accord in 2015, a lot of the focus was on governments, it was primarily on governments, it was all about the nationally determined contributions, the way that countries set their targets to reduce their emissions. But in many ways, we shouldn’t forget that emissions don’t stay within national borders. So there was a huge mobilisation effort after the Paris Agreement to actually go towards sectors of the real economy and really mobilise the business sectors, and start also to develop the metrics and the standards that are necessary. 

Pim: And of course, we’re certainly not there yet, but there has been progress. And I think sometimes there’s so much pessimism out there right now, it feels like a fairly grim world when we look at where the trajectories are. But we also have to recall that there has been progress. I think the way that the private sector understands the challenge, if we look at, there’s close to 10,000 corporates that have now set science-based targets, there is movement, there’s much more understanding. But of course, this has to be the interplay between policy and the way that the private sector integrates this into their decision making, into their strategies, into their capital allocation. 

Pim: That interplay has to accelerate essentially. 

Katarina: Yeah. Can we spend some time just shining a light on that progress? Because I think that’s important to also see. So what are some of the examples or developments that you’re seeing that make you feel hopeful? 

Pim: So I think in our work at the Forum, we lead one of the largest co-led global climate coalitions in the world, called the Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders. That’s 130 companies across 12 industries. It has $4 trillion in combined revenue. And this global alliance is an interesting snapshot of the state of play of what the most ambitious corporates are doing. It also gives us an idea of the emissions trajectory, how well global companies are succeeding with cutting their global emissions, if we look at climate specifically. And I think one interesting finding that we’ve discovered with this alliance, because we actually tracked their progress, all the companies that join this alliance have to set science-based targets across all scopes. So when we speak about scope one, your own operations, scope two, the way that you source your energy, scope three, this is the tail end of your operations, your supply chains, your travel, images that are hard to control. So all of them have set science-based targets across these scopes. They also disclose their emissions through the Carbon Disclosure Project, CDP. And that has enabled us to put a bit of a baseline. So we know that this global coalition emits as much as five gigatons of CO2 every year. That’s massive. If it was a country, it would be the third largest emitter. 

Pim: And we’ve also been able to measure and see that since the baseline in 2019, since we started measuring, they’ve actually reduced their emissions by around 10% while being able to increase their revenue growth by around 15%. And this gives us an interesting data point, because it shows that reducing your emissions, there’s no contradiction between doing that and still being competitive and showing a strong performance. 

Pim: And projects like these and coalitions like these give us an important opportunity to also engage with policymakers and to encourage policymakers to continue to put in place long-term, predictable policy frameworks that are going to help speed this transition up. 

Katarina: And are you seeing, because I think what we’re hearing from a lot of global organisations is the fact that the policy is lagging behind, so what are you seeing from that side of things, what conversations are happening? 

Pim: So we’re actually at a triple COP year this year, which is interesting, all three conventions are convening, biodiversity, desertification and climate. For climate, one of the big targets for this year is to increase electrification, to go from around 20% of global sources coming from electricity to 35%, to meet the new green economy. But there’s not enough, I think, unlocking policy that’s going to help us roll out the infrastructure that we need, the permitting we need, all of the market infrastructure for the private sector to drive investments into electrification, to take one example. That is something that is definitely lagging behind, and something where policies just need to be faster. I’m not saying it’s the easiest thing, but certainly that has to be solved if we are able to power, to move into an electrified economy and move away from the brown sources of energy. I think that’s one clear area where policies are lagging behind. In other areas, circularity, it’s very hard today for a large global company to succeed with an aggressive circularity strategy. It requires working with, national down to local regulators, mayors, on ways to circulate complex materials and so on. So that’s another area where there hasn’t been enough uptake and enough ambition. And then the third, but that’s a general one that people keep coming back to, is the lack of a global price on carbon. 

Pim: I think honestly, that would be an incredibly important piece of regulatory support for the transition. But I also am of the opinion that it’s going to be very challenging for us to be able to agree on a global price. And we cannot simply sit around and wait for that. There has to be much more action. And again, there has to be long-term and stable policies for investments to flow. I think it’s as easy as that. 

Katarina: Yeah. How important is lobbying from organisations in that conversation? 

Pim: I think that’s important. Of course, large industry associations will always lobby for different things. They might not always lobby for the interest of the greater good, the interest of taking care of public goods like our ecosystems, our nature. Sometimes, of course, there’s lobbying against these things, against actions that would actually put us on the path to a greener and more low-carbon future. So I think lobbying is a two-edged sword. And also, I think research shows that global companies sometimes can be very proactive in their own low-carbon policies, but then they can be counter-active in large industry associations. So that’s an important distinction to make. 

Katarina: Yeah. And I think, like you say, it’s never as simple as just. And I think a good example of that is the access to clean water. We keep hearing about it, and what does the future look like, and what impact does, on the other hand, the development of data centres have? 

Pim: Now this is a topic that we are currently exploring. I think a lot of the debate around this massive rollout of the new data infrastructure, that’s one of the most consequential infrastructure build-outs of this century. A lot of the focus right now for data centres is access to energy. All sorts of energy seem to be on the table. Of course, renewable energy is preferable, but I think it’s easy to forget the massive amounts of other nature-related inputs. As you rightly mentioned, water resources, large data centres can use as much as small cities, on a daily basis. These are vast amounts of natural resources. Let’s also not forget land, it sometimes requires massive access to land. It also requires access to critical minerals, materials, and so forth. And we at the Forum are working on trying to understand what a green and resilient data centre can look like, and trying to work across the ecosystem, not only with the tech industry and the manufacturers of the components that go into data centres, but other players along that ecosystem, and trying to really understand what are some of the archetypes of what a green and resilient data centre could look like. How could models for water management, water reuse work? What are the issues around access to land? What is best practice when it comes to understanding the social licence to operate in certain communities? How do you engage with communities at an early stage to understand the needs of their communities? How do you avoid disturbing energy prices for the cities and communities around you? And I think this is the moment. 

Pim: We should not wait. We need to come in early, as this infrastructure is being rolled out, we need to come in early and ask these questions and bring the stakeholders along, to help put forward a vision and archetypes and models that can be scaled. 

Katarina: Very interesting, in terms of, because I think the job that you do, it’s easy to get stuck on all the scary aspects out there. So what’s something that keeps you up at night? 

Pim: What is something that keeps me up at night? Well, I must say that I feel that the way the world is dealing with climate change now, it’s a bit like the frog in the boiling water. We are already in that, the water is slowly heating up, and it seems to me that we are just not able to really grasp the size of this global challenge. And that does keep me up at night, that we just don’t really seem to comprehend it. And then the other aspect of it is also that, at the end of the day, it’s about how we prioritise as a global community. There’s a relatively small degree of global GDP that would need to go into decarbonising our societies, but still we choose, through subsidies, through other economic instruments, to simply prioritise other industries and other parts of the economy. And I think at the end of the day, it’s that responsibility, coming back to the short term and the long term, the fact that we seem to be in an era of extreme short-termism, we can only think weeks, months, maybe a year ahead, but we’re simply not capable of thinking maybe 20, 30 years ahead. And I seem to recall that the founder of IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad, used to think about a hundred years in terms of legacy, in terms of the perspective that should inform decisions. And I think we need to bring it back and try to bring decision makers out of this extreme short-termism bubble that we seem to be in at the moment. 

Katarina: Do you think part of the problem is the fact that communication is so fragmented out there, and that people, if you hear all of these really scary statistics and research, it’s almost like you feel hopeless? 

Pim: I absolutely agree. And I think, on the flip side, what can counter that sense of hopelessness and despair is actually data. Having an evidence-based approach to the narrative and to our arguments. And if we look at the size of the green market, we did a study of this last year, through our Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders, it sized the global green market. When I talk about the green market, I mean services, low-carbon technologies, climate adaptation technologies, so not only goods and services that will help us lower our carbon footprint, but also help us adapt to a warmer world. And we sized that market at approximately $5 trillion as part of the global economy. And the green economy was the second fastest growing segment of that global economy, only outpaced by AI and technology. So that gives me a bit of hope. But it is also important to convey data like that, to counter misinformation that this is a cost, it’s not a growth opportunity or a revenue-generating opportunity. And I think that’s a bit the problem also, if we were a bit self-critical looking at the climate movement, we were asking CEOs to be politicians. 

Pim: But CEOs and companies are not going to be politicians, they’re going to be builders. They’re going to build, they’re going to innovate, they’re going to make things smarter, more efficient, and there will be growth from that. But they’re not going to go back in time and unbuild something that works. And I think the other thing that makes me hopeful is the rate of change. When we look at the technology side for renewable energy, how those cost curves have fallen so dramatically, it’s really outpaced any prediction that anyone could have had, on the solar front, on renewable energy. And now also we’re seeing a lot of progress when it comes to battery-powered storage, for instance. 

Pim: That’s really changed the solar energy market as well. So there is progress, it’s incremental. I think when we think about transitions, we tend to be very linear in our thinking, we’re thinking it has to be a straight trajectory. But when we look at other moments of social and economic change and transformation in human history, it’s never been linear, it’s been abstracted, we hit into obstacles, then we adjust, and then maybe it’s a lateral trajectory for a while, and then we accelerate. And I think we need to accept we’re in this for the long run. Hopefully it won’t take as long as the trajectory we’re on right now, but we’re in it for the long run. 

Pim: And I think that’s where we need to find the data to back this up, so that we can counter misinformation that nature and climate is a cost, that it’s only a risk. No, it’s an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for revenue generation, for doing things smarter, for innovating, for being more efficient with resources. It is really a growth strategy. And I think also, coming back to what we spoke about at the beginning, the disruption of these systems, in many ways today, because the fossil economy is quite volatile, those companies that shifted some time ago to a more renewable energy strategy have actually reduced volatility in their operations and in their value chains. So in many ways we can also look at sustainability as risk reduction, as a way to reduce your risk, but also to future-proof your business, and as a pathway to business resilience, which is something we’re starting to see shift. 

Katarina: And I think it’s a good one, and I think there’s a lot of progress that needs to be replicated. And that’s also what we’re trying to do at the Forum, really show those solutions that work and scale them for others to pick up and run faster. So there needs to be a transition, science is telling us that we can turn this around. How do we make sure that it’s also a just transition? 

Pim: Yeah, and I think here is where we may have strayed a bit in the past years of this transition. First of all, really understanding the pitfalls, I think with the narrative where we ended up, where the green economy ended up in the camp of “this is counter to certain sectors” or “this is going to set our economy back, set industries back.” I think it’s about communicating the opportunity of a low-carbon economy for growth, for jobs, for a healthier opportunity for everyone, for less pollution, for less impact on human health. Of course, if we look at it from a national perspective, that is one question. And then we look at a global level, there’s a long way to go before the impacts of climate change, which is of course hitting least developed countries much harder. 

Pim: And countries that are more exposed to the impacts of climate. I think a lot of focus at the global level with the COPs has focused on that. We haven’t solved the issue of how do you actually channel finance. And I think the way that we channel finance, there’s also a disconnect there. Coming back to what we spoke about, bringing policy and business together, I don’t think they speak the same language when it comes to defining this. I don’t think businesses necessarily think that investing in a big global fund is going to be a good way to tackle a just transition. If we speak about vehicles such as from Baku to Belém, I think the way that global businesses think about this is: how can we, through our operations, through our business models, help tackle climate change, but also grow and use this as an innovation strategy? So it also comes down to showing the business case for nature, showing the business case for low carbon, and by that, mobilising private investments. That’s one thing. I think the other thing is, if we look at capital markets, the whole era of building that capital market infrastructure, what is really needed there is transparency, and the whole wave of what we call disclosures, how companies disclose their risks and exposure to climate and nature. That actually helps inform investors on the capital markets. 

Pim: It helps really with investment decisions, whether this is going to be a good investment short to medium to long term. And it can also, from that perspective, help reallocate capital at the global market level. But we cannot get away from the fact that this is not going to solve the issue for poorer countries, for those populations that really need that help. And that’s where, again, the multilateral system remains fundamental, and where governments and companies need to step up their responsibilities. That is sorely needed, and hopefully we’ll see some progress there at this year’s COP in Turkey in November. 

Katarina: Yeah, I was going to say, what are you hoping to see specifically at this year’s COP? 

Pim: So I think this year’s COP, it’s more than ten years since the adoption of the Paris Agreement. And I think in many ways, the Paris Agreement itself has been operationalised. Actually, there’s not a lot to negotiate, if you look at the actual interstate negotiations. Yes, there will be a few things on the agenda, I think it includes the global goal on adaptation, there’s also that framework for a just and equitable transition. But in many ways it’s been operationalised. What I think we need is actually to continue to unlock the real economy transformation. And I think what we’ve seen at the last COPs is actually a gradual shift towards, yes, it’s important what’s going on with the national negotiations, but there’s also the so-called action agenda, which is the public-private part of what’s going on at COP, where businesses and other parts of the global economy come together to showcase what works, where the bottlenecks are. 

Pim: And I think in many ways these COPs are becoming much more of an implementation pathway and roadmap and platform, and that’s encouraging to a certain extent. I think this year’s COP is also going to continue to focus on the electrification targets, going from 20 to 35%, that’s by 2035. 

Katarina: Yes. By 2035. 

Pim: Exactly. So current rates of electrified energy sources stand at 20%. And we would want to move from that to 35% by 2035. So that’s one big thing I think is going to be discussed a lot at this year’s COP. But I also think nature is going to come in a big way. And that integration between climate and nature is also something where we’ve lagged, we’ve had separate multilateral agreements for so long. I don’t have the exact stats in front of me. That said, even if we’re on track for three degrees of warming, and we don’t know the full impact yet, we do know it’s urgent to prepare. 

Pim: And even if we phase out fossil fuels in the next 25 years, we will still miss 1.5 degrees. And the Earth is reaching the limits of its self-regulating capacity. So we need to think long term, and think about the transition that needs to happen for future generations. 

Katarina: What are you hoping that they will think of when they think back to this time? 

Pim: I think what future generations might reflect on when they see this time, if we zoom out the time perspective a bit, is they might have seen: we had a groundbreaking moment around the Paris Agreement, we had massive mobilisation, that was the Race to Zero, we had Greta Thunberg, we had the younger generation, and there seems to have been a breakthrough in the collective thinking around this issue and a recognition. 

Pim: And then there was a massive backlash. The politicians did not agree anymore, and there was a political divergence, a policy divergence. But some regions continued and ran faster than others. So what I’m hoping is that if we today can look back at that use case, the regions that chose to go faster, to invest in renewable energy, in greening, to look at carbon pricing for their markets, to tackle some of the subsidies to the fossil economy, that use case led to a stronger economy, an economy much more in harmony with nature. Hopefully the next generation will have seen that there was staying power in some part of the globe, and that vision, that use case, was powerful enough to show that this is the pathway ahead. 

Pim: This is the pathway to a more prosperous society, to a healthier, more competitive and compelling society. That is what I hope. Of course, I think we are at a critical juncture, as you rightly pointed out, we are now reaching almost all of the nine planetary boundaries, and we are not directing global capital flows, we’re not making the political decisions that are in lockstep with the challenges that we’re seeing, and we’re also not getting it right in understanding that climate and nature is not only a risk, it’s actually an opportunity. And I think that’s also a challenge of this next phase of the transition, to continue to understand the risks, but also continue to grow the narrative around the opportunity. 

Pim: And I think unless we only stick on the risk side, it’s going to be hard to unlock that innovation and transformation in some of the bigger industries of our economy that need to transform, in order for us to have any chance of reaching the 2030 and 2050 decarbonisation targets, the targets of the global biodiversity framework. So let’s not forget the enormous opportunities that are also out there, alongside the risks. 

Katarina: Yeah. And on those opportunities, if you were to leave us with one thing that you cling on to that gives you hope, what would it be? 

Pim: I think circularity, for one. I think in today’s day and age, when we think about resource scarcity, we don’t know where our input is going to come from, this could be an era of real innovation in circularity. That’s one opportunity. I also think the formidable, fast and aggressive cost curves we’ve seen on the renewable energy side, the innovation we’re seeing in battery storage, is also going to be a game changer. And I do hold hope for those Greta Thunberg youth that are now growing up to be older, they’re probably going to be politicians at some point. I do think the pendulum is going to come back. It might not swing back as fast as we need it to, but I think it’s going to swing back. And we’ll try to do as much as we can to help move that in the right direction. 

Katarina: Yeah. Thank you so much. It’s been great talking to you. 

Pim: Thank you so much. It’s been wonderful as well.