Markets & Investing
Climate Restoration: New Investments and Research Indicate Multi-Trillion Dollar Market
23 Jan 2020
Thunderbird School of Global Management released a new report projecting that the world can realize at least $1trillion – $3trillion dollars in market opportunities and $3trillion – $5trillion dollars in broader economic, social and environmental benefits per year by 2030.
Thunderbird’s Director-General and Dean, Dr. Sanjeev Khagram authored the new report and shared it at a cross-sectoral gathering hosted by Thunderbird with the Foundation for Climate Restoration in Davos during the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting.
“Together, we must rapidly deploy natural and technological solutions to remove gigatons of carbon dioxide from our air, restore ocean ecosystems, and preserve Arctic ice, while dramatically reducing emissions and adapting to climate change impacts,” said Dr. Khagram. “Climate restoration is the critical third pillar of climate action alongside climate mitigation and adaptation.”
The market is currently expanding and some of major tech enterprises and investors are jumping into it. For example, Microsoft announced it will be carbon negative by 2030, and launched a $1 billion fund for carbon reduction, capture, and removal technologies over the next four years, committing to remove all carbon it has emitted since 1975.
Likewise, Goldman Sachs has pledged to spend $750 billion on sustainable finance projects over the next decade while as of December last year, a record 631 investors managing over US$37 trillion signed the Global Investor Statement to Governments on Climate Change, which called for an acceleration of private sector investment into the low carbon transition and improving climate-related financial reporting.
To catalyze and connect the mounting initiatives and reach the scale necessary for climate restoration efforts to realize their full potential, Thunderbird and The Foundation for Climate Restoration launched a new Global Climate Restoration Task Force at a high-level event at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, along with founding partners from the private sector, government, and civil society.
“Climate change and the devastating impacts of rising global temperatures are impossible to ignore. But I know we can not only achieve climate transformation, we can also do so in a way to advance inclusive and sustainable prosperity worldwide,” Khagram said. “That is the challenge of this new decade of action.”
Climate Restoration is the global endeavor to return the Earth’s climate systems to the safe and healthy state in which humans evolved and thrived. This requires returning atmospheric CO2 to proven safe levels of less than 300 parts per million (PPM) and restoring sufficient Arctic ice to prevent permafrost melt and the resulting disastrous methane emissions.
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