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Companies moving from climate pledges to judging performance, says Microsoft’s Lucas Joppa

November 04, 2021

As governments haggle climate deals to curb emissions way into the future at COP26, Microsoft chief environmental officer Lucas Joppa says the private sector is moving beyond lofty pledges to talk about performance. Instead of what your commitments are, he explains, corporations are asking each other how they're scoring on what they promised to do. "How are you measuring carbon? How are you accounting for carbon? What are the systems that need to be put in place to actually make this whole Net Zero thing work?"

Joppa spoke during a live Global Stage event, Climate Crisis: Is net zero really possible? Watch the full event here.

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Finland “investing in security and stability” with NATO push

Kai Sauer, Finland’s Undersecretary of State for Foreign Security Policy, told GZERO Media that as Finland awaits NATO membership his nation is already contributing to the alliance. “We are a security provider. We are investing in stability and security in our region,” Sauer said. “We are bringing a lot of capabilities to the alliance. So, it's in everybody's interest, also in Turkey's interest, that Finland and Sweden will become members.”

Why is Russia on the UN Security Council?

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has launched a discussion about how the UN Security Council works, and how it is dysfunctional - especially when Russia, a permanent member of the Security Council, is the invading country, said Melissa Fleming, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications. In an interview with GZERO Media on the sidelines of the 77^th General Assembly, Fleming reflected on the return to in-person diplomacy after years of disruption caused by pandemic. "There is this real feeling that the UN is the only place for global cooperation,” she said. “We cannot solve the world's intractable problems of climate change, of war, of refugees without multilateralism, and multilateralism is the UN. It is nations working together to solve problems.”

Who can solve the world's "emergency of global proportions"?

Thousands of the world's most influential people are in New York this week to attend the 77th UN General Assembly at a time of multiple related crises. UN Secretary-General António Guterres wants to focus on rescuing the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs — the UN's blueprint for making the world a better place. Progress on the SDGs got derailed by the pandemic, to the point that they likely won't be achieved by the 2030 deadline. To get a sense of the scale of the problems and explore possible solutions, we brought in several experts to weigh in for a Global Stage livestream conversation "Rescuing a World in Crisis," hosted by GZERO Media in partnership with Microsoft.

Putin would rather die than admit defeat in Ukraine, says former Croatian president

Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović knows a thing or two about Vladimir Putin, who she met multiple times when she was Croatia's president. So, how does she see the future of Russia's war in Ukraine? It's not looking good. In a Global Stage livestream conversation, Grabar-Kitarović says that Putin is unlikely to back down from a "special military operation" driven by what the Russian leader sees as Western humiliation during the Cold War.

Digital Equity

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