Scaling Corporate Decarbonization: Funding, Innovation, and Implementation

As part of our participation in Climate Week this year, ENGIE Impact hosted an event to discuss the importance of scaling corporate decarbonization, and how to do it. The session included leaders from Kraft Heinz, Danone, and Nokia — each providing valuable insights into the different ways they approach decarbonization, and the common need for a portfolio-wide approach.

Watch the full session below

Historically, many companies have approached corporate decarbonization by funding and implementing small-scale pilot projects, often at single sites, making incremental progress toward their overall objectives. However, decarbonizing at scale is essential for companies to achieve their targets and for the world to stay on track for the Paris Agreement objectives. Doing so requires a holistic, enterprise-wide approach grounded in credible roadmaps, stakeholder alignment, funding, and effective implementation.

The session highlighted several critical components to scaling corporate decarbonization, including:

• A credible roadmap that goes beyond high-level forecasts to incorporate asset-level planning, prioritized and sequenced decarbonization levers, and CapEx and OpEx forecasts.
• Governance and management alignment from the board level to the site level.
• A funding plan that brings a decarbonization lens to capital expenditures, leverages public sector awards and tax credits, and, as warranted, deploys as-a-service models or partnerships along the value chain to defray high CapEx.
• Strategic engagement of the ecosystem to accelerate customer uptake of lower carbon products and increase demand for low carbon inputs.
• Implementing cutting-edge technologies and methodologies to accelerate decarbonization, from heat pumps or electrification in factories to circular models that use biomass from farm waste to fuel factories, then return the ash to the fields.
• Getting the basics right: proven practices incorporated into the core of day-to-day operations.
• Robust monitoring and reporting mechanisms to track progress and make necessary adjustments.

A crucial takeaway from this session is that CapEx cannot be the reason to delay decarbonization.