Takeaways from COP26

Lars Lindén, CEO at the environmental company Ragn-Sells

Cooperation across value chain key to circular transformation

As many lamented modest progress at the COP26 UN climate conference, Ragn-Sells returned home from Glasgow with renewed hope from a series of cutting-edge sessions on circular economy, featuring businesses and decisionmakers. The tough negotiations and weakened final deal at COP made it clearer than ever that to reduce emissions and slow climate change, the world must replace virgin materials with recycled ones.

“Close to half the world’s carbon dioxide emissions stem from economies consistently extracting new raw materials for everything they produce. This is also true for 90 percent of the loss of biodiversity and 90 percent of the threat to access to clean water. If we are serious about tackling these issues, we must use the raw materials we have already extracted instead. That’s achieved by focusing on circularity, cooperation, and innovation”, said Lars Lindén, CEO at environmental company Ragn-Sells.

After tough negotiations at COP26, the final document was weakened compared to previous drafts. Still, this was the first time a COP final declaration mentioned carbon fuels and emission subsidies at all. Additionally, the EU, the USA and several partner organisations presented a commitment to cut emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane by 30 percent by 2030, thereby limiting global warming by at least 0.2 degrees by 2050, according to calculations. More than 100 countries, representing 70 percent of the world economy, have joined the pledge. This is welcome, but the pace needs to increase further to the next climate summit in November 2022.

Read the article on www.ragnsells.com