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

November 04, 2021

GZERO Staff

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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Highlights from Davos 2022

World leaders gathered this week in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum at a moment of heightened global uncertainty. Three months into the Russian war in Ukraine, the conflict seems no closer to resolution. A global food crisis — made worse by the war — is putting more than a billion people at risk of food insecurity. Meanwhile, cyberattacks and misinformation continue to wreak havoc around the globe. The world faces many dangerous challenges, but the biggest one may be this: “you can’t solve a problem unless you agree on what the problem is,” says GZERO’s Ian Bremmer.

The yet-unseen consequences of Russia's war in Ukraine

World leaders attending the 2022 World Economic Forum in Davos know there's a crisis going on — but Ian Bremmer thinks they are still unaware of the first- and second-order consequences of Russia's war in Ukraine. First, "people are mostly thinking about this as a war inside Ukraine. It's not a war in Ukraine. It's actually a war between Russia and NATO," the president of GZERO Media said Global Stage livestream conversation hosted by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft.

Moisés Naim: With inflation & low trust in democracy, Latin America faces perfect storm for nasty politics

How much power does the World Economic Forum in Davos still have? For Moisés Naim. distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, not much, and this year's leitmotif is confusion, he tells Ian Bremmer in a Global Stage interview. And what about Latin America's future? He sees a"very dangerous convergence of inflation and disappointment with democracy that could result in "a perfect storm to create nasty politics" in the region.

Wolfgang Ischinger: Ukraine made German foreign policy go "out the window"

For Wolfgang Ischinger, former chair of the Munich Security Conference, the state of transatlantic relations is in good shape right now, although whether we'll have the stamina to stay on course is uncertain. In a Global Stage interview with Ian Bremmer, he seems more worried about American war fatigue than the Europeans — although the EU has Viktor Orbán and it's hard for Germany to cut off Russian gas. One lesson Ischinger has learned from the current crisis is that Europe must have America's back on China, especially with Taiwan. And he calls German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's recent foreign policy U-turns as "going out the window."

Exports controls are "worst possible" thing to do in a food crisis, says UN Foundation chief

The war in Ukraine has aggravated a global food crisis that started with the pandemic. Is there anything we can do about it? The UN is trying, but there needs to be a much more ambitious response to what is already a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, UN Foundation President Elizabeth Cousens said during a Global Stage livestream discussion hosted by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Gillian Tett: Ukraine knows how to get what it wants from the West

The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is not known for big outbursts of human emotion. But this year, the Ukrainian delegation got a standing ovation from the usual crowd of global business leaders. Gillian Tett, US editor-at-large and chair of the Financial Times board, met with the Ukrainians and shares her perspective with Ian Bremmer in a Global Stage interview.

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