Net Zero
June 9, 2023
Climate change affects all of us. We all must take responsibility to reduce our carbon footprint, in our personal lives and in our businesses. Especially vulnerable is the agriculture sector and the hundreds of millions of family farmers who put food on our global table and who in turn rely on farming, fishing and forestry for their livelihoods. Since 2008, Lotus Foods has been working with farmers who practice System of Rice Intensification (SRI) methods, what we call More Crop Per Drop®, one of the 100 solutions identified by Project Drawdown to reverse global warming. We are proud to join other B Corps companies and commit to accelerating reductions in our company's emissions to be net zero by 2030.
"It is international scientific consensus that, in order to prevent the worst climate damages, global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net zero around 2050. Global warming is proportional to cumulative CO2 emissions, which means that the planet will keep heating for as long as global emissions remain more than zero. This implies that climate damages, caused by global heating, will continue escalating for as long as emissions continue."
Net zero refers to a state in which the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere are balanced by removal out of the atmosphere.
The term net zero is important because – for CO2 at least – this is the state at which global warming stops. The Paris Agreement underlines the need for net zero. It requires states to ‘achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century’.
To ‘go net zero’ is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and/or to ensure that any ongoing emissions are balanced by removals.
The ‘net’ in net zero is important because it will be very difficult to reduce all emissions to zero on the timescale needed. As well as deep and widespread cuts in emissions, we will likely need to scale up removals. In order for net zero to be effective, it must be permanent. Permanence means that removed greenhouse gas does not return into the atmosphere over time, for example through the destruction of forests or improper carbon storage.
