What is net zero?

Synopsis

Climate change has a new poster boy as companies from British Airways to Facebook, along with pop artists like Billie Eilish and Massive Attack, commit to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to achieve net zero. This initiative involves over 50 countries worldwide, marking a crucial step in managing climate change. However, the concept of net zero is more complex than it appears. To halt global warming, greenhouse gas levels must stop rising, which requires significant reductions in emissions, particularly from challenging sectors like aviation and manufacturing. The 2009 Copenhagen climate conference highlighted the difficulty of cutting emissions quickly enough to meet policy targets. Consequently, the idea of balancing emissions with greenhouse gas removals emerged, leading to the Paris Agreement, where countries pledged to achieve net zero by balancing their emissions and removals by the century's end. Achieving net zero involves not only cutting emissions but also actively removing them from the atmosphere, a process known as negative emissions, which presents its own challenges.