Liaison Of the Co-Chair, World Bank Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition
What is the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition?
The Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition (CPLC) is a global advocacy initiative launched at COP21 in 2015 to advance carbon pricing and build high-level support across businesses, civil society and most importantly: (sub)national governments. This platform brought together over 320 partners committed to promoting carbon pricing as a cost-effective policy tool for economic development and climate action.
World Bank Liaison
From 2015-2018, I served as Co-Chair Liaison of Royal DSM’s CEO, Feike Sijbesma through my role as DSM’s Global Climate Lead. A true corporate climate leader and innovator, he generously invested his time and energy in the CPLC as one of its inaugural Co-Chairs, alongside Ségolène Royal and Catherine McKenna (Environment Ministers of France and Canada respectively).
Feike Sijbesma also co-chaired the High Level Commission on Carbon Pricing and Competitiveness, and served a broader role as World Bank Climate Leader (in the first years, alongside Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General and Christiana Figueres, former UNFCC Executive Secretary).
In my role as Liaison, I:
drove the mobilization of hundreds of CEOs and their businesses - to join the coalition, to use their voice in their (and our collective) advocacy, and to apply an internal carbon price;
initiated, co-created and/or reviewed the creation of materials that enabled companies to do the above. For example, a Yale-hosted webinar series on internal carbon pricing (including by DSM) and the C-Suite Guide to Internal Carbon Pricing;
prepared the Co-Chair ahead of the CPLC’s High Level Assembly meetings, alongside the teams of the other Co-Chairs and the World Bank Secretariat;
co-created impactful thought leadership - examples include CEO op-eds and speeches for the Guardian, Financial Times, Project Syndicate, NY Climate Week, World Economic Forum and unique one-off gatherings such as President Macron’s One Planet Summit.
High Level Assembly of the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition, 2016. Left and right from Co-Chairs Feike Sijbesma and Ségolène Royal are former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, World Bank President Jim Kim and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde.
Results
You can read more about the initiative, its impact around the world and how it has moved from high-level advocacy to on-the-ground delivery here. Results are also in the CPLC’s 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 report.
New narratives
A “carbon tax” is not a term that resonates with people in every geography. How, then, to best communicate about carbon pricing policies in such a way, that it is appealing to the public? We explored this question through this CPLC Guide to Communicating Carbon Pricing.
Fun fact: to better connect with grassroots communities involved in this topic and infuse a bit of humor and creativity into our technical and political work, I rewrote the lyrics of the song “Price Tag” by Jessie J. Yes, including the rap part! To my surprise, it was performed live many times, including to sing Governor Newsom (California) onto the stage at a large conference. Read that story here.
“Paulette has been at the center of the movement of businesses stepping up on climate change to strongly influence political ambition. She brings endless energy, determination and creativity to everything that she does, as well as a shrewd understanding of the business issues at the heart of this disruptive issue which makes her both compelling and infectious. Few people have done more to shift the narrative from climate change being a problem for politicians to solve to it being the source of endless opportunity for innovative businesses.”
“Paulette has been instrumental in the success of a variety of corporate climate change initiatives, including the World Bank CPLC. It has been a delight to have her as a partner over the past few years. She is creative, determined and a leader in her field. She has worked tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure the necessary political space for prominent initiatives and campaigns was created - she can often spot an opportunity before others do.”