2021 is called the first year of “carbon neutralization”. In this year, many heroes have competed for the carbon neutralization track, and the Internet industry has become a pioneer force to lead Chinese enterprises to achieve carbon neutralization.
Due to the relatively small carbon emissions of enterprises in energy, manufacturing and other industries, it is easier for Internet technology enterprises to achieve carbon neutralization. In addition, facing the dual pressure from investors and customers in domestic and foreign markets, Chinese Internet technology enterprises have greater impetus to carry out zero carbon transformation. At the same time, Internet technology enterprises have keenly captured the opportunity of “carbon neutralization” track, using digital enabling low-carbon transformation to explore the business opportunities of low-carbon technology.
The 21st Century Business Herald reporter found that since 2021, most of China’s top 10 Internet enterprises (ranked according to the comprehensive strength index of China’s Internet enterprises (2021) released by the China Internet Association) have implemented green and low-carbon related measures to preempt the layout of carbon neutral tracks. Including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and 360, a total of four Internet companies have launched carbon neutralization plans or released action reports.
Yan Luhui, founder of carbon sequestration, a SaaS service provider for carbon management, said in an interview with the 21st Century Business Herald reporter that it can be seen from the measures taken by various leading enterprises that China’s Internet industry is closely following the pace of the world’s leading technology enterprises, actively carrying out its own carbon neutralization practice, combining its own advantages and characteristics, and starting from the reality of the enterprise, Combine their own technological and financial advantages to achieve individual carbon neutralization.
giant differentiated layout carbon neutral track
Internet and high-tech enterprises started carbon neutral relatively early, and such enterprises have a great influence on their ecosystem.
Overseas Internet and high-tech enterprises started relatively early. Internet technology giants such as Google, Microsoft and apple have set clear carbon neutralization targets in the past decade, set the target of 100% use of renewable energy, and take comprehensive and systematic energy-saving and emission reduction measures, which has played an exemplary role for other enterprises.
Some enterprises put forward the goal of carbon neutralization within their own operation scope and began to promote carbon neutralization in the value chain. Analysts believe that the significance of Internet enterprises to achieve carbon neutrality lies not only in their own energy conservation and emission reduction, but also in encouraging Internet enterprises to strengthen technological innovation and R & D, take carbon neutrality as an opportunity to give full play to their own advantages and further force China’s low-carbon technology transformation.
According to the statistics of the 21st Century Business Herald reporter, four Internet companies, including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and 360, have put forward the carbon neutralization goal of their own operation scope and started to promote the carbon neutralization of the value chain, but their starting points are different.
During the “double 11” period in 2021, tmall under Alibaba group set up a green venue for the first time. The rookie’s “box return plan” covered 87000 rookie post stations, with about 4.8 million consumers participating. Tencent’s “low carbon planet” applet, which provides technical and operational support, went online to focus on the public’s green travel and low-carbon life scene, calculate the carbon dioxide emission reduction generated by the public’s use of low-carbon travel, and encourage the public to actively participate in carbon reduction actions. Baidu has established a green data center to reduce the energy consumption of computing power and reduce the carbon emission of computing power.
Alibaba carbon neutralization action report released by Alibaba on December 17, 2021 puts forward three goals: achieve carbon neutralization in its own operations no later than 2030; Halve the carbon emission intensity of upstream and downstream value chains no later than 2030, take the lead in realizing carbon neutralization of cloud computing and become a green cloud; It will take 15 years to drive the ecological carbon reduction of 1.5 billion tons with the power of the platform. At the same time, Alibaba is also the first technology enterprise in China to issue green bonds. In terms of energy use, Alibaba promises to use clean energy for 100% of cloud computing power supply from 2030; By 2030, the power required for global production and operation will be 100% carbon neutral.
According to the 2021 sustainable development bond (first anniversary report) recently released by Alibaba, Alibaba issued 20-year sustainable development bonds in February 2021, with a net income of about US $987 million. At present, the fund has been fully used to support 12 ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) related projects, covering the fields of energy efficiency, green building, covid-19 pneumonia crisis response and so on.
Tencent first proposed a carbon neutralization schedule, announced the launch of the carbon neutralization plan in January 2021, and proposed in December that it would achieve full supply carbon neutralization at the group level by 2030. Unlike Alibaba, Tencent focuses on reducing data center energy consumption and Urban Smart transportation. In April 2021, Tencent established the sustainable social value division and specially set up the “carbon neutralization laboratory”. Since then, the laboratory has also launched the popular science game “carbon island” with the theme of “carbon neutralization”.
In June 2021, baidu group released the “panorama of carbon neutralization” and announced that it would achieve the goal of carbon neutralization at the group’s operation level by 2030. “To achieve the goal of carbon neutralization at the operational level of the group, refer to the first and second types of the scope of the greenhouse gas accounting system, and take the operational control right as the calculation boundary.” The relevant person in charge of Baidu group introduced to the 21st century economic report. Scope type I emissions refer to the direct emissions of the company. Type II emissions are beyond the direct control of the company, such as electricity or heat related emissions purchased from utility companies. Scope three types of emissions include emissions related to “upstream” products purchased by the company and “downstream” emissions related to the consumption of products sold by the company.
Baidu achieves the goal of carbon neutrality mainly through six paths: Data Center, office building, carbon offset, intelligent transportation, intelligent cloud and supply chain. The most interesting thing is that Baidu proposed to help reduce the carbon emission of road traffic in China through the path of “building a whole chain carbon reduction technology” of intelligent transportation.
In June of the same year, 360 digital released the 2021 carbon neutralization plan, which promised to gradually realize the carbon neutralization of operational emissions from this year and reach the peak in 2030; Achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions from its own business and its customer activities by 2060. 360 digital will adopt a four-step strategy. The first step is to carry out carbon inventory. Take 2020 as the base year, and effectively identify emission reduction measures and formulate neutralization path on the basis of finding out the annual carbon emissions. The second step is to strengthen internal green governance. The third step is to increase the preference for green financial business and explore forest property mortgage loans. The fourth step is to improve carbon inclusion and design “green finance” products.
JD proposes to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 compared with 2019. At the same time, by 2030, JD will also work with partners to build the world’s largest roof photovoltaic power generation capacity ecosystem. At the end of 2020, Jingdong Logistics took the lead in putting forward the environmental goal of “achieving an absolute emission reduction of 50% from range 1 to range 3 by 2030”. Industry insiders believe that JD’s advantages lie in that, first of all, it has the typical attribute of self operated e-commerce platform and has stronger control over its own supply chain, and JD logistics is the first logistics enterprise in China to join the scientific carbon target Initiative (SBTI).
Yan Luhui said that carbon neutralization will bring great changes to China’s economy and society, and the integration of the information world and the real world will become an important trend of development. Internet enterprises will more actively embrace traditional industries through digital technology, analyze and optimize emission reduction practices, and improve energy and resource utilization efficiency. While realizing their own carbon neutralization, enterprises should also take into account social benefits, and promote the realization of carbon neutralization of the whole society through the output and empowerment of technology, resources and ideas.
carbon offset is still the preferred path for carbon neutralization
The so-called carbon neutralization refers to the direct and indirect emission of carbon dioxide from human activities in a certain area within a certain period of time, which offsets with the carbon dioxide absorbed through the purchase of quotas and afforestation, so as to achieve “net zero emission” of carbon dioxide.
Enterprises’ cognition of carbon neutralization action is still groping. At present, carbon offset is one of the preferred paths for Internet enterprises.
According to the 2021 carbon neutralization action report, Alibaba’s core goal is to achieve its own green transformation in the process of carbon neutralization, which will be achieved through four emission reduction paths: electrification and intelligence, efficiency improvement and emission reduction, energy transformation, carbon offset and carbon elimination.
Baidu announced six ways to achieve the carbon neutralization goal, of which the third is carbon offset: for the operation fields that are difficult to achieve zero carbon emission, carbon offset is carried out by taking relevant emission reduction measures.
Recently, some environmental organizations claimed that multinational companies, including Amazon and Google, made false and misleading statements on carbon neutrality rather than taking immediate and meaningful measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. One of the things that has been questioned is that these companies rely heavily on offsetting rather than cutting carbon emissions.
Some research reports pointed out that the carbon neutralization targets of some enterprises rely on indirect emission reduction paths such as carbon offset and carbon removal. The carbon sink resources of the whole society are limited, and the carbon removal path is complex. There are no mature technology application cases. Internet technology enterprises have a relatively small emission reduction burden, so they should first consider direct emission reduction and avoid relying on carbon offset and removal.
In Yan Luhui’s view, enterprises need to be aware that the essence of reducing carbon emissions is also reducing operating costs. The general consensus of the international community is to resist the simple and crude way of spending money to achieve carbon neutrality, and encourage and guide enterprises to reduce emissions as much as possible. If companies rely heavily on spending money to make up for carbon neutrality rather than cutting carbon emissions, it may damage the corporate brand.
According to the above research report, some leading enterprises (such as Tencent) only put forward vague plans, lack the roadmap and specific implementation plan of carbon neutralization action, and the slogan is greater than action. Most Internet technology enterprises’ carbon neutralization target commitments are not complete and often lack scope III. for Internet technology enterprises covering e-commerce, logistics and other business types, scope III emission is often the largest emission source and the key link for enterprises to deal with emission reduction. For enterprises that already have three emission reduction targets and commitments in scope, enterprises tend to avoid the important and choose the business departments and types with smaller carbon emissions for emission reduction, while ignoring the business types with larger carbon emissions related to energy, transportation and manufacturing. Some enterprises lack the goal of 100% renewable energy. Internet technology enterprises, especially those covering digital infrastructure construction (Data Center) business, have a huge increase in energy consumption. The transformation to 100% renewable energy is the key path to achieve its carbon neutrality goal, which is indispensable.
What are the main paths for the mainstream carbon neutralization of Internet enterprises? For the carbon neutralization path of enterprises, creos methodology is proposed for carbon footprint, that is, computing, reducing, engaging, offsetting and spreading.
Yan Luhui explained that to achieve carbon neutrality, enterprises must first calculate their carbon emissions in all dimensions. After finding the core carbon reduction links and space, and combined with the business form of the industry, seek technical solutions with obvious emission reduction effect or great potential to reduce emissions as much as possible. For unavoidable carbon emissions, offset through carbon reduction projects or carbon sink projects. In addition to their own emission reduction, enterprises can also drive ecological partners to participate in emission reduction actions. For some enterprises, their drive to reduce carbon emissions even exceeds their own carbon emissions. Finally, since carbon neutralization has become a definite trend, enterprises should start with the end and act as soon as possible, so as to win the best communication opportunity and brand influence.
