For success, almost every decarbonization avenue requires collaboration and coordination between diverse stakeholders.
The extent of collaboration needed could differ from one avenue to another. While decarbonization avenues such solar power plants or wind farms require relatively less collaboration owing to the nature of the technology and business, avenues such as sustainable forest management, wetlands and permafrost management are far more intricate, requiring complex coordinations between solution providers, government, civil society and in some cases even indigenous tribes.
Given the diverse nature of stakeholders, each having quite their own set of priorities, and given the challenging nature of implementation and maintenance, it is critical to ensure effective collaboration between these stakeholders to scale decarbonization for these domains.
Not surprisingly, there are already a number of collaboration frameworks that have emerged for many industries - textiles, steel, cement, oil & gas are some of the prominent examples - though their effectiveness is not yet clear.
While technology and processes can play a vital role in accelerating multi-stakeholder collaboration, they may not be sufficient. Significant changes may be needed in both international and national governance systems, in transparency and reporting of local and regional actions and in the way critical, large-scale decarbonization projects are led and managed.
We can expect a lot of activity in this domain for the 2020-2030 period, with significant action happening especially in hard-to-abate and high emissions industries, green chemistry, fashion, buildings, oil & gas, transport and carbon capture & utilization.
Decarbonization is complex, and even more so for some sectors such as agriculture, food, textiles that have a complex supply chain or sectors such as steel, fertilizers and cement that are hard to abate.
For rapid decarbonization to occur in the above sectors, in addition to technology innovations and cost reductions, multi-stakeholder coordination & collaboration are critical.
Such coordination can accelerate decarbonization owing to a variety of factors, but two important ones that such coordination can bring about are: Complementary skills & assets and sharing resources & risks.
Results from some recent studies show that while different types of stakeholder interactions may influence decarbonization effectiveness differently, sharing of procedural information and coordination mechanisms were considered some of the most effective for quick results. Interestingly, almost all such sharing can take place virtually.
But more complex stakeholder interactions will be needed for some impactful results. For instance, electrification of steel making - an avenue with significant decarbonization potential - will need coordination not just between steel makers, solution providers & researchers, but also coordination with policy makers (for financial incentives), green power developers (for the vast amounts of solar or wind power that will be needed), and also with suppliers of green hydrogen if the steel makers wish to reduce the process emissions from the blast furnace by replacing coke with hydrogen as the reducing agent.
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