Climate positive definition

The components of a meaningful climate positive definition

How has climate positive been defined so far?
The term 'climate positive' is rising up the corporate agenda, with many companies and sustainability experts beginning to focus on a broader view of our impacts on the climate beyond the important first step of decarbonisation.
There isn't yet a globally agreed definition for climate positive - so as a first step we look to the Carbon Disclosure Platform (CDP) - as this is the most used platform for climate disclosures and covers broader climate-related activities such as governance and resilience.
CDP already defines what a credible Climate Transition Plan should include in its 21 indicators in their report Are companies developing credible transition plans?.
Those claiming climate positivity should include all of these indicators in their related disclosures. This is an important reminder of the depth of breadth of the indicators that should be considered when claiming climate positivity.
As well as disclosing on all 21 indicators included by the CDP, a climate positive entity is broadly defined as an entity that:
Has decarbonised and removed more GHG's than it emits, while being nature positive and strengthening climate resilience.
What a climate positive definition must include
As a next step from the broad definition at hand, we know there are some minimum requirements a climate positive definition must include:
Removing GHG's:
  • Reach net zero by or before 2050. This is required before climate positivity can be considered and includes;
  1. Decarbonise by at least 90% (see Science Based Targets Network and others credible schemes)
  2. Include more than 95% of the full value chain for organisations, the full life cycle for products and the whole life carbon for infrastructure projects and building assets
  3. Remove emissions from the atmosphere equivalent to the residual emissions netting off to zero emissions to atmosphere
  • Go further than net zero both by decarbonising further towards zero fossil emissions if not already achieved, removing more than just the residual emissions achieving net negative emissions to atmosphere and include all key GHG's not just CO2
Nature positive:
  • A nature-positive world requires no net loss of nature from 2020, a net positive state of nature by 2030, and full recovery of nature by 2050 (as defined by Science Based Targets Network - SBTN).
Companies need to understand what this means for their sector and we are fast developing sector specific methods for quantifying what nature positivity means. These development processes benefit from the work already completed to define sector specific carbon targets.
The CDP's climate indicators could strengthen their requirements around biodiversity given that we know that climate change and biodiversity are inextricably linked - every kilo of additional biodiversity correlates to possible carbon removed from the atmosphere and perhaps more importantly, unchecked climate change will result in a mass extinction of species.
Strengthening climate resilience:
  • Assuming you have completed your climate-related scenario analysis - identify and increase the climate-related resilience of those communities within the value chain of your products and services.
This includes clients, suppliers and employees. Measures will evolve as maturity of the metrics develop to truly evaluate claims and we appreciate that we are in the early days of developing metrics to truly evaluate such a claim.