Schneider Electric releases key report on climate change as part of COP26 engagement

Schneider Electric, the leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation, which was named the world’s most sustainable corporation by Corporate Knights Global 100 Index in February 2021, is actively supporting global climate change efforts at the upcoming COP26 meeting, with experts on the ground and the release of a flagship report that offers fresh perspectives on our planet’s pathway to decarbonization.

The 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) taking place in Glasgow on 31 October - 12 November is widely considered critical to accelerating global action to tackle the climate emergency.

Many climate experts, campaigners, and corporates including Schneider Electric are urgently calling on governments, businesses and societies do much more – and act much faster – to ramp up the adoption of clean-energy, electrification, energy-efficiency and other climate-positive technologies. 

“We welcome the commitments already made by numerous governments around the world, and hope that COP26 will deliver more concrete actions in support of an accelerated transition to net zero”, says Olivier Blum, Chief Strategy and Sustainability Officer at Schneider Electric. “The private sector is key in this race to a greener and fairer economy. That’s why we continue to lead the charge, as a practitioner and an enabler, to meet the goal of keeping global temperatures from rising more than 1.5ºC, in line with the Paris Agreement.”

Ranked the world’s most sustainable corporation by media and research company Corporate Knights earlier this year, Schneider Electric helps customers reduce their carbon footprints via products and software tools that optimize energy management and industrial processes. The company has a decades-long track-record of spearheading and advocating action on environmental, social and governance issues, and recently announced it is also expanding its sustainability consulting practice.

To coincide with COP26, the Schneider Electric ^TM Sustainability Research Institute is releasing a major new report on how we could achieve net-zero by 2050 and limit global warming to the critical 1.5ºC threshold.

Entitled “Back to 2050” and conducted with energy intelligence company Enerdata, it assesses the long-term impact on energy usage and associated CO2 emissions of changing social expectations and up-and-coming, disruptive technologies such as autonomous driving, decentralized clean-energy generation, smart EV charging stations in buildings and the use of more digital tools in infrastructure construction, among others.

“Our key finding is that changing consumption patterns, driven by an appetite for the progress that new technologies herald, will help bring about a less carbon-intensive economy. In other words, keeping global warming to 1.5ºC may be more feasible than we think, because as the economy modernizes and provides increased benefits to people, it also decarbonizes,” says Vincent Petit, Head of the Schneider Electric TM Sustainability Research Institute and SVP of Global Strategy Prospective and External Affairs at Schneider Electric. “What we need, however, is to accelerate this trend by shifting the policy focus from being purely infrastructure-centric to being more consumer-centric.”

While in Glasgow, Schneider experts will meet customers and business partners to help them better understand the tools that already exist to help decarbonize infrastructure, buildings, data centers, industries, and cities.

They will also participate in panels and roundtables with artists, campaigners, climate scientists, policy makers, influencers, entrepreneurs, and innovators such as Bertrand Piccard, Founder and Chairman of the Solar Impulse Foundation, which is supported by the Schneider Electric Foundation.

The Schneider Electric Foundation, under the aegis of Fondation de France, will also work with Art of Change 21 to highlight the important role that artists play in the ecological transition by mobilizing youth and creating a dialogue between art, technology, innovation and climate.

Note to Editors:

The Schneider Electric ™ Sustainability Research Institute is the internal strategy think tank of Schneider Electric. Its team of analysts conduct scenario modeling to enrich our understanding of current and future sustainability landscapes, highlighting obstacles and opportunities to accelerate global and local transitions to a climate positive future.