In today’s edition:

⚡️ Carbon accounting in the spotlight

🚜 Patagonia helping to save the soil

🌳 A “Game changing” biodiversity fund

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⚡️ Energy (1-minute read)

Carbon accounting comes under scrutiny

What’s happened: According to a research paper from King's Business School in London, the widely used carbon counting tool called the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG) can be manipulated by companies to appear less polluting than they actually are.

Details:

• The GHG system allows for different methods of carbon footprint calculation, and using the most optimistic method can result in a footprint 4.6 to 6.7 times smaller than the most pessimistic method.

• Discrepancies in widely used “emissions factor” data sets (Which give a rough idea of how much carbon is emitted as a result of each unit of output) and the freedom to choose accounting methods contribute to these discrepancies.

• Example: Basing calculations on one of these data sets, maintained by the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Areas, gives a carbon footprint 10% lower on average than using the one by the Environmental Protection Agency in the US.

• We might assume companies would err on the lower side of emissions. Still, others might have reasons to inflate them, e.g. Carbon accounting services and offsets providers who could be tempted to choose higher emitting metrics for their clients to sell them more offsets.

Why it matters: All of this could have an impact on investors. Previous research, including by the National Bureau of Economic Research, has found evidence that companies’ share prices fall when they disclose higher emissions. Based on this logic, the King’s academics predict (albeit using a very limited data set) that if companies globally switched from UK emission factors to the US ones, their share price could plummet by 1.9 per cent on average.

🚜 AgriTech (1-minute read)

Beer and Patagonia are helping save soils

Patagonia Provisions, the food arm of the outdoor clothing company, is making beer using Kernza grain to replace the use of conventional grains, like barley. As a perennial grain, Kernza lives for multiple years (unlike barley which lives for a single year), offering environmental benefits, including a deep root structure which prevents soil erosion, boosts nutrient retention, and sequesters carbon.

Importance: Farmers using perennials like Kernza help fight against soil erosion — a process of topsoil degradation accelerated by intensive agriculture. With an estimated 24 billion tons (equivalent to 48 million fully-loaded cargo ships) of fertile topsoil lost annually, without shifting to practices that boost soil health, global agricultural productivity faces a major threat.

Challenges: Kernzia is smaller than barley and requires a separate milling process, meaning competing with conventional grains on cost is difficult. Growing the market for Kernza beer and boosting the efficiency of the brewing and malting process will be crucial to scaling.

🌳 Nature (1-minute read)

Plans for “game-changing” global biodiversity fund given the green light

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) council has approved the establishment of a fund (the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund) to support the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework implementation. The Kunming-Mantrial Global Biodiversity Framework was agreed upon during the COP15 summit and set ambitious goals for the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of biodiversity and ecosystems by 2030. Drawing on capital from governments, the private sector and charities, the fund (which will launch officially in August) is a big step toward achieving the goals of the biodiversity framework.

Doesn’t stop there: The GEF council also approved direct support for developing countries' efforts to protect biodiversity. A $1.4bn fund for low- and middle-income countries will help reduce the impact of climate change on at-risk species alongside boosting the use of sustainable agriculture, fishery and forestry practices.

💭 Little Bytes

Quote: “We believe in the need to move to a more circular economy to reduce the impact of mobile technology on the environment.” — The GSMA’s chief regulatory officer, John Giusti

Stat: Venture Capital funding for climate tech dips by 40% in the first half of 2023

Watch: Stockholm is building an entire neighbourhood out of wood

🗞 In other news…

• A draft EU law, due to be proposed by the European Commission would set a binding target for every EU country to reduce overall food waste in their shops, restaurants and households by 30% per capita by the end of 2030, compared with 2020 levels.

• In the United Kingdom, the Financial Conduct Authority wrote to a handful of top UK, US and European bank executives yesterday to warn them that slapping a “sustainability-linked” label on loans is not enough to avoid accusations of “greenwashing” and “conflicts of interest”.

• The European Commission proposed in March that EU extraction of 16 "strategic raw materials", including lithium and copper, should rise to 10% of EU annual consumption by 2030, EU recycling to 15%, and EU processing to 40%.

• The University of Cambridge has partnered with the Fashion Pact and Conservation International to launch a two-year initiative, Transforming the Fashion Sector with Nature, which offers the fashion industry insights into establishing tangible nature targets.

• A heat-tolerant coffee strain has been grown in a Sierra Leone pilot project. The coffee variety yields beads at temperatures 7oC warmer than standard Arabica and is seen as a potential answer to protecting the world’s coffee industry from global warming.

• A standard to assess companies’ claims about progress towards internal climate targets and their use of carbon offset credits was launched this week by a global initiative seeking to bring transparency and confidence to an unregulated market.

• A Belgian-Spanish startup, uWare, has received seed funding to revolutionise underwater data gathering using an autonomous underwater drone to provide baseline data which supports monitoring changes in underwater environments.

🎣 Gone Phishing

Three of these stories are true, one we've made up. Guess which:

• Dakota police hunt down dinosaur

• Thief of a microscopic ‘Louis Vitton’ bag caught

• Police in Japan searching for urinal thief

• Mayor in Finland caught spraying graffiti

🌞 Climate meme of the week

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