Climate transition – emerging risk
Risk description
The lack of a Group strategy to address climate-related transition risks (as defined by TCFD[3]), wider environmental challenges, and future resource scarcity could cause damage to Solvay reputation, business losses, undervaluation and difficulty attracting long-term investors.
Climate transition risks stem from various causes:
- Policies and legal context: regulations and actions to limit CO2 emissions, for example increasing the price of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions,
- Technology: unsuccessful investment in new, lower-emission technologies,
- Markets: lack of adaptation to changing customer behavior,
- Reputation: negative stakeholder attitudes if their climate change concerns are not addressed effectively.
Apart from greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), Solvay activities’ environmental impacts come from:
- Use of raw materials from fossil or non-renewable resources,
- Energy consumption,
- Water use,
- Waste production (solid or liquid, hazardous or safe),
- NOx, SOx, Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) or dust emissions.
Prevention and mitigation actions
- Solvay’s strategy focuses on businesses with higher added value and less environmental exposure,
- Every year, the Sustainable Portfolio Management (SPM) tool assesses the environmental exposure of our sales and our innovation projects portfolio. SPM includes climate-related criteria aligned on 2°C scenarios,
- The Carbon Intensity action plan has a 40% reduction target for 2025 (reference year 2014).
2017 main actions
- Appointment of an Executive Committee Supervisor for climate and the start of work on a comprehensive climate strategy roadmap,
- A new plan and 2020 targets for air emissions (SOx, NOx, VOC), water usage, and hazardous waste.
(3) Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure