In a world reeling from the impact of COVID-19, investing in public transport could create 4.6 million jobs by 2030 and cut transport emissions, mayors in some 100 cities have said.

A “green and just recovery” with investment in buses and trains, particularly electric vehicles, would also reduce car use and air pollution, and protect vulnerable residents, said C40, a network of cities pushing for climate action.

“The road to recovery is paved with investments in our infrastructure,” said C40’s Cities Climate Leadership Group chairman and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, in a statement.

“Public transportation is more than just a way to move people around. It’s a vehicle for opportunity, equity, and a better quality of life.”

Several major public transport systems were decimated by the new coronavirus pandemic as cities ground to a halt, with New York predicting a $6 billion deficit in 2021 and Paris losing nearly $4 billion in revenue in 2020, the C40 report said.

Home to 60% of the world’s population, cities have borne the brunt of the crisis, with nearly 100 million people – mostly women and ethnic minorities – at risk of poverty due to the economic fallout, the report said.

Every $1 invested in public transport could generate $5 in economic returns, while every $1 billion invested could create 50,000 jobs, the C40 report said.

Cities are key to combating climate change because they generate three-quarters of carbon emissions, earlier studies have found, with urgent action needed to meet a 2015 goal to avoid catastrophic warming.

C40 said a green recovery would also support low-income workers who rely on public transport to get to work, especially women and young people – who the United Nations says have been hit hardest by job losses during the pandemic.

“This is the time to invest in strong local public services, including in public transport infrastructure to ensure a just, prosperous and green future for all,” said Rosa Pavanelli, head of Public Services International, a trade union.

“Without strong public transport systems, workers – especially women, migrant, young, precarious and informal workers — face greater barriers to access employment,” said Pavanelli, whose union is backing C40’s investment call.

By Lin Taylor @linnytayls, Editing by Katy Migiro.

Companies big and small are undertaking a green rethink, as awareness grows of the need for businesses that take better care of the planet

Chile’s climate action champion Gonzalo Muñoz has the tough task of teaming businesses with governments to help meet the global warming limits set in the 2015 Paris accord. As an entrepreneur who runs a winery and a recycling firm, he knows the challenge.

Muñoz co-founded circular economy company TriCiclos in 2009 after a decade of managing food businesses, where he noticed “how much garbage I was putting into the market” with unsustainable packaging.

Unable to convince executives to shift to a greener model, he and his partners started producing mobile recycling stations, which can handle 90% of household solid waste and are now deployed in about 10 Latin American countries.

“We identified the problem (of) waste as an error of design,” he said. And to deal with that environmental problem, “we have to correct every single design”, including how a product is disposed of and its materials reused, he added.

Today, a growing cohort of companies – big and small – are undertaking a similar rethink, as awareness grows of the need for goods and services that take better care of the planet.

Many are rushing to sign up to responsibility initiatives such as B Corp, which legally requires its more than 3,500 certified companies to consider how their decisions impact workers, customers, suppliers, community and the environment.

Almost 800 B Corp firms, and 200 other companies, have also pledged to more rapidly cut their planet-heating emissions to net zero by 2030, aiming to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the lowest goal in the Paris Agreement, Muñoz said.

Ahead of this year’s postponed COP26 U.N. climate summit, one key aim is to bring smaller businesses, including startups, together with multinationals under a new “Race to Zero” alliance launched by the U.N. climate secretariat in June, he added.

“This (climate challenge) is something that none of us can solve alone,” Muñoz told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “A fundamental part of this is that we have to solve it together.”

Unilever announced recently that it would allocate 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) for a “Clean Future” program to help it remove fossil fuels from its cleaning products and replace them with renewable and recycled ingredients by 2030.

The household products giant invited those with “an idea for an innovation, solution or opportunity” to contact it about becoming a partner.

Huge corporations are increasingly looking to work with smaller, nimbler companies with cutting-edge technology and ideas that could help fix the damage done by global capitalism, those working to foster such partnerships said.

Genecis Bioindustries, a Canada-based clean-teach startup that converts food waste into biodegradable plastics, for instance, aims to help big brands turn to eco-friendly packaging for everything from food to textiles, according to its website.

Its twin aim is to cut plastic pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from landfills.

Genecis’s growth and partnerships lead Robert Celik said the company was already working with French food services multinational Sodexo to take waste from its clients’ cafeterias and transform it into biopolymers to use in new products.

It also has a collaboration with Danish pharmaceuticals manufacturer Novo Nordisk to re-purpose medical waste.

Such deals are important because “they provide us with the resources we really need to implement the solution at scale”, said Celik.

For big firms, the advantages of such hook-ups lie in being able to tap into disruptive technology and business models without assuming all the risk — and then scaling up fast if something works, he and others said.

“If big companies want to make a difference they really should be engaging startups,” Celik said.

“It actually might make it easier for them to achieve very ambitious targets” — whether on climate change or other sustainable development goals, he added.

Genecis hopes to launch commercial bioplastic products in two to three years, Celik said. But working with larger corporations could speed up that process, and is helping it make products that meet real needs in the market, he added.

Meeting market demand is just as important for success as bring driven by a green, ethical mission, said Frans Nauta, founder of ClimateLaunchpad, an annual competition that selects and trains startups tackling climate change around the world.

“Even if your personal motivation might be to help the problem of the polar bear – it is not your customer,” Nauta said. “You can’t talk too much about your obsession for the climate. You should be obsessed with your customer.”

Celik said Genecis aims to make convenient, sustainable replacements for conventional plastics rather than simply target the small percentage of consumers with a green conscience.

“That is a huge game changer,” he said.

Genecis last year won a competition for startups working towards a net-zero emissions future run by global technology conference Web Summit.

Summit organisers put together a new group of green startups that were showcased and introduced to big investors at its virtual gathering in December last year, under a tie-up with the U.N.-backed “Race to Zero” campaign.

Peter Gilmer, Web Summit’s chief impact officer, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that the profit potential for clean tech startups had “notably increased” in the past decade as more businesses began to sew sustainability “into their DNA”.

But many startups still need to reduce their costs before their low or zero-carbon products can compete on price, he said.

“It’s not that hard an issue to solve… once you get to a certain scale,” said Gilmer, adding that Web Summit aims to help the small firms it curates reach that point more quickly.

Start-ups featured at the summit included Australia-based Soil Carbon Co., which applies a microbial fungi to crops to increase natural carbon deposits in soil.

Another sign-up, Sweden-based Volta Greentech, has developed a red-seaweed cattle feed supplement that can cut an animal’s emissions of methane — a potent greenhouse gas — by up to 80%.

Climate Launchpad’s Nauta said climate action would require changes across a wide range of businesses, involving myriad solutions — from electric transport in cities to biodegradable packaging for food delivery and green aviation fuel.

“Climate change is a thousand problems, so… you need tens of thousands of people trying to fix it in all these different areas,” he said.

By Megan Rowling @meganrowling; editing by Laurie Goering.

Costa Rica’s goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 will net $41 billion in economic benefits over the next three decades and set an example of the “right road to follow” for other nations, its president and environment minister has said.

The fiscal payoff of decarbonising the Central American nation, cited in a new report by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), is “an extraordinary figure,” President Carlos Alvarado said in an online webinar with the media.

Costa Rica is a pioneer in global efforts to reduce planet-heating emissions, and its net-zero goal is part of a long-term national development plan, according to the IADB.

Under its 2019 decarbonisation plan, the small nation of five million people aims to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, meaning it would produce no more carbon emissions than it can offset.

According to the IADB, pushing toward decarbonisation involves Costa Rica preserving and expanding its tropical rainforests and promoting sustainable farming and eco-tourism.

It also entails making buildings energy efficient, recycling waste water, switching to electric cars and public transport and employing renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

“It also leads to benefits in health, minimizing the effects of air pollution which is one of the main causes of hospitalizations in the country for children and the elderly,” Alvarado said.

“This is the right road to follow,” the president said.

Carbon emission cuts, which other countries are aiming for as well, are key to holding increases in global temperature to well under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

“We see decarbonisation not just about achieving the Paris goals – it’s a model for development,” said Andrea Meza, Costa Rica’s environment minister.

Meza welcomed a decision made on Monday by U.S. President-elect Joe Biden to appoint former Secretary of State John Kerry as special climate envoy, saying it would help the world to “advance in that road towards net-zero emissions.”

Across the region, Latin America and the Caribbean could save $621 billion by 2050 by decarbonising their energy and transport sectors and create 7.7 million new permanent jobs, according to United Nations estimates.

Cutting global warming emissions and tackling climate change is more urgent than ever following back-to-back Hurricanes Eta and Iota that battered parts of Central America, Mexico and Colombia this month, Meza said.

“What we are living through in Central America is clear evidence of what will continue to happen if we don’t change our consumption and production patterns,” Meza said.

A U.N. climate science panel has said global emissions need to be slashed by 45% by 2030 and to net-zero by mid-century to have a 50% chance of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.

“We are thinking of the future, of our children and our grandchildren,” said Alvarado.

By Anastasia Moloney; Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst.

After enduring the hottest decade on record, India aims to keep its homes and workplaces cool without raising energy consumption with one simple change: raising the temperature settings on air conditioners.

The government has mandated a default temperature of 24 degrees Celsius (75 degrees Fahrenheit) instead of the standard 20-21C (68-70F) for units made or sold from the start of this year and wants commercial buildings to keep air conditioning at that level.

The measure could cut national energy consumption by 24% for households and 20% for businesses, according to Gabrielle Dreyfus, co-author of a report published on Friday that called for a switch to more energy-efficient cooling systems.

The United Nations report said that while cooling devices like air conditioners and refrigerators are crucial to human health and the global economy, emissions from the fossil fuels used to power them could worsen climate change.

“Doubling the energy efficiency of the cooling equipment… can save something like 1,600 medium-sized power plants from being built by 2030,” Durwood Zaelke, co-chair of the report’s steering committee, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“That’s a tremendous amount of conventional and climate pollution you can avoid,” said Zaelke, who heads the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, a U.S. think tank.

This should be a focus in post-pandemic recovery plans, said the report, which follows recent heatwaves in the United States and Siberia.

As climate change brings ever-hotter days, worldwide demand for cooling appliances is growing – by up to 10 devices every second on top of an estimated 3.6 billion that are currently in use, the report said.

It also said phasing out climate-warming refrigerant gases known as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) could help the world avoid up to 0.4C of global warming by 2100.

The difference is substantial in the context of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change that aims to limit warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial times to prevent crises such as food and water shortages, rising seas and worsening weather events.

‘ZOMBIE’ APPLIANCES

Better building design could also help by reducing consumption or the need for cooling as well as create jobs, the report said.

For example, a clean white roof that reflects 80% of sunlight would stay about 30 degrees C cooler than a grey roof that reflects only 20% of sunlight and well-designed cities could save 25% of the energy used for heating and cooling.

Another way is to develop national plans to address rising cooling needs but without the corresponding rise in emissions, like India, China and Rwanda have done, Zaelke said.

Others like Ghana have banned “zombie” appliances – cheap, outdated fridges and air conditioners discarded mostly from homes in Europe and then illegally resold that release HFCs.

Globally, more than one billion people lack access to cooling, which puts their health and safety at risk, and a further 2.2 billion are only able to afford cheaper, less energy-efficient cooling, a separate report published on Thursday said.

Mobilising finance for the sector is crucial because while upfront costs might be high, energy efficient technologies often pay for themselves in savings within just a couple of years, said Dreyfus.

“These technologies exist. We just need to put in place the policies and mechanisms to make them more accessible to people.”

Reporting By Thin Lei Win @thinink, Editing by Helen Popper and Claire Cozens.