To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, global temperature rise must be limited to no more than 1.5°C, requiring global carbon emissions to decline to net-zero by the middle of the century. Accordingly, the European Union (EU) has set a new target to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Most of the low-carbon investment needed to achieve this goal must come from the private sector, so the extent to which European companies’ low-carbon investment plans are compatible with this objective is a critical question.
Doubling Down – Europe’s Low-Carbon Investment Opportunity, jointly published by CDP and Guy Carpenter affiliate Oliver Wyman, aims to answer that question by examining European companies’ 2019 disclosures to CDP. For a set of 882 companies comprising over 70 percent of European market capitalization and with emissions equivalent to almost three quarters of the EU’s total, the report analyses patterns in low-carbon investment by sector, the economics of emissions reduction initiatives and the critical question of whether corporate investment patterns are consistent with the net-zero goal.
