Liaison of the Chair, World Economic Forum Alliance of CEO Climate leaders
What is the Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders?
The Alliance is the largest CEO-led community dedicated to reaching net-zero emissions on a 1.5°C-aligned pathway.
In April 2015, with about six months to go before the Paris climate summit, a mass mobilization of CEOs from large companies voicing their support for a strong outcome of COP21 was much-needed. Feike Sijbesma, at the time, CEO of Royal DSM, courageously took the lead in making this happen. I served as his liaison through my role as DSM’s Global Climate Lead. Teaming up with the company’s senior Communications Director (Herman Betten), who was responsible for the overall WEF-DSM relationship, I worked closely with our CEO and the World Economic Forum to set it up and grow it in the following years.
Rapid growth
What started with a first letter we published in the Financial Times - signed by 42 CEOs in April 2015 - quickly grew to 79 joining the Alliance’s statement by November 2015. A selection of us specifically voiced our support for the Taskforce on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) in 2017. In 2018, we published another Open Letter, with 50 CEOs confirming their support for effective, meaningful carbon pricing policies.
In my role as Liaison of the Chair, I:
drove the mobilization of hundreds of CEOs and their businesses - to join the alliance, to use their voice in their (and our collective) advocacy, and to lead by example with their own businesses;
supported its strategy development, which included the creation of dedicated groups focusing on, for example, the Taskforce on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition, and climate-smart agriculture (CSA100);
CEO Feike Sijbesma, Chair of the Alliance, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, 2018.
co-created impactful thought leadership - examples include CEO op-eds and speeches for The Huffington Post, the World Economic Forum annual meetings in Davos, at New York Climate Week, and more.
More information
The CEO Climate Leaders Alliance website can be found here.
Expressing her gratitude to those who had been working to mobilize the political momentum ahead of the COP21 Paris Agreement, Christiana Figueres (Executive Secretary, UNFCCC) kindly wrote each of us all a lovely, personalized letter, which in my case included the text below.
“I am acutely aware that we were only able to reach this decisive turning point in Paris at COP21 because of the tireless hard work and unwavering commitment of so many individuals, who helped us all to move in the same direction. It is for this reason that I would like to convey to you my heartfelt gratitude for the pivotal role you played in making this happen. The unanimous adoption of a new, universal agreement by 196 nations was a critical milestone in the fight to address climate change – one of the most consequential challenges mankind has ever faced. Throughout 2015, we said repeatedly that ‘we must, we can and we will’ act on climate change and it now gives me such joy to say, definitively, we did.”
“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.”