Join our Climate Dialogues - Welcome message

Dear partners, stakeholders, citizens,

Today, we kick off our new BusinessEurope campaign "Climate dialogues: HOW to reach climate neutrality?".

This campaign aims at discussing the major "HOW questions" to develop solutions, with politicians, citizens, non-governmental organisations, scientists, the industry, and any interested person. We want to foster our dialogue with you, all key stakeholders in Brussels, European capitals and worldwide, on moving our economies towards climate neutrality. We are engaging with all our national member federations across Europe to make this campaign happen.

European business is fully committed to making Europe the first climate-neutral continent. The implications of this revolution are huge, with far-reaching impacts on society at large that will gradually materialise. It implies a radical transformation of industrial patterns, business models, consumer behaviour and massive investments in next-generation clean technologies across clusters such as hydrogen, gigafactories, electrification, smart grids, bioeconomy or carbon capture utilisation and storage.

No doubts that European business is firmly embarking on this transformative path. At the same time, no one can ignore that numerous challenges prevail, not the least the socio-economic impact of the Covid-19 crisis which will undoubtedly impact the capacity of many businesses to invest, notably in research and innovation activities.

The speed with which we will overcome these challenges and maximise the opportunities will be determined by our capacity to discuss and collectively answer the numerous 'HOW' questions that still today remain unanswered.

Our campaign wants to foster this dialogue on key 'HOW' questions European industry is still confronted with in its journey towards climate neutrality. We will particularly look at the following four main themes that are central to make this transformation a success.

• Energy supply: how to ensure supply of affordable and low-carbon energy? how to best incentivise the expansion of alternative fuels and energy sources? what infrastructures and technologies are still missing in large scale?

• Industry cooperation: how to support companies willing to cooperate in large-scale cross-border industrial projects?

• Investment gap: how to boost and channel needed investments? what are the best incentives? how to ensure that certain industries are not prevented from transitioning by reducing their access to finance?

• Global dimension: how to conduct the European climate ambition in a world that is only slowly stepping up ambition? how to best calibrate EU carbon leakage measures? What actions should the EU undertake on the global scene?

In these challenging times due to the pandemic, our campaign will use all possible channels, webinars, social medias, videos, interviews, opinion articles and press conferences to reach out to policy-makers, scientists, think-tanks, citizens, NGOs, etc. in order to deepen our dialogue around these 'HOW' questions and hopefully make solutions emerge. If you so wish, don’t hesitate to initiate the conversation by contacting us.

Let’s engage!

Alexandre Affre
Deputy Director General
BusinessEurope