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By Lauren Giella
Senior Reporter
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At the height of this year's Climate Week NYC, climate leaders gathered at Newsweek's office at One World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan to discuss how various industries can work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Newsweek, an official media sponsor of Climate Week NYC, hosted the Pillars of the Green Transition conference Wednesday, September 25. Representatives from energy, transportation, biopharma, agriculture and industry sectors spoke about ways to achieve net zero emission goals and reduce waste.
The event opened with remarks from Newsweek's Executive Vice President Amit Shah.
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"The green transition offers a path forward where economic growth, social equity and environmental sustainability can go hand-in-hand for our better planet," he said to the audience. "I'm confident that the insights shared in this event will inspire action, spark new collaborations and accelerate the momentum needed to meet our ambitious climate goals."
To kick off the discussions, Newsweek's Environmental and Sustainability Editor Jeff Young hosted brief one-on-one conversations with executives from Cytiva and Bayer.
Cytiva, a Diamond sponsor of the conference, is a major supplier of biomanufacturing solutions globally.
Emmanuel Abate, the company's president of genomic medicine and head of sustainability, said that while the company's own plants don't produce a massive footprint, Cytiva's complex, diverse and vast supply chain and the reliance on single-use plastics is a major challenge for the industry.
Greenhouse gas emissions are categorized into three scopes: Scope 1 and 2 cover a company's direct operations, activities and purchases and Scope 3 emission refer to all other activities up and down the supply chain.
Abate said 60 percent of Cytiva's total emissions come from suppliers and the materials. One way the company is working to reduce those Scope 3 emissions is by reconsidering the supply chain by moving transport from air to land or water and rethinking where inventories are held.
"There is a whole story here to be addressed that is not something that you solve just like that in a matter of months," Abate said. "You need to work with your supplier, with your customers, and transform the business model."
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Sustainable product design is another solution the company is working on. Abate said single-use plastics are essential to delivering medical equipment, like the COVID-19 vaccine, and also have a smaller overall footprint than other packaging materials.
Cytiva is working in coordination with the FDA to navigate federal regulations, as well as with university partners to find ways to degrade end-of-life plastics and to encourage customers to participate in better recycling options.
Collaboration and commitment are the keys to driving change in emissions reduction, Abate said. That engagement, he added, is "contagious" and helps breed more meaningful change and attracts new talent.
"At the end of the day, it's about shared commitment and shared interest," Abate said. "It's really about doing something together that is outside of the normal course of business. And frankly, I think it creates a level of intimacy between partners that have not seen prior to leading sustainability."
The next discussion was with Max Dougherty, the vice president of business development at Bayer Ecosystems Services. He told Young that the expectations of food and agriculture are evolving amid the climate crisis.
"We're faced with tackling two of the greatest challenges facing society of our times: food security and climate change," he said. "And so the question is, how can we continue to feed a growing planet of 10 billion people by 2050 while at the same time, recognizing that how we feed ourselves, agri-food in general, can account for up to a quarter to a third of global greenhouse gas emissions?"
His solution: regenerative farming.
This includes cover crop and no-till farming practices for improving productivity and resilience and sequestering carbon from the air into the soil for various crops. Regenerative practices, Dougherty said, have proven to help farmers survive and thrive amid the growing climate crisis.
"We keep the farmer at the center of everything we do, and then we make sure to meet them with a collection of agronomic support and services [and] ways in which we can reduce barriers to adoption of regenerative farming practices," Dougherty said. "At Bayer, we facilitate an entire ecosystem of products and services providers that offer regenerative solutions to growers to make it easier for them to adopt."
After the two fireside chats, Dougherty joined four other business leaders on a panel to discuss how each company is working to lower emissions along the supply chain. The other panelists included Scott Raubenstine, vice president of agricultural services for Perdue Agribusiness; Davide Bollati, chairman of Davines Group; Gilles Tisserand, vice president of climate and biodiversity at Tetra Pak; and Etosha Cave, co-founder and chief science officer of the carbon transformation startup Twelve.
During the panel, Dougherty said agriculture companies need to identify the strengths of each organization along the value chain to facilitate effective collaboration and make a positive impact on the environment.
"When it comes to a challenge as big as climate and food security, we have to be thinking holistically," he said.
Update 10/24/2024, 10:53 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to reflect that Emmanuel Abate is Cytiva's president of genomic medicine and head of sustainability.
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