Even Small Companies Can Save Lives by Reducing Emissions

Abstract

Global warming is often framed in broad planetary numbers such as the 1.5C and 2C warming thresholds, creating the false impression that individual corporations efforts to reduce emissions are meaningless in the absence of collective action. This perspective causes companies to reduce ambition towards voluntarily cutting emissions, as they believe their pollution has negligible impacts on its own. Reframing the issue to focus on the life-saving potential of independent corporate actions empowers companies to act and holds them accountable for inaction. Here, we show the results from an innovative climate-health modeling technique which calculates the avoided deaths from sustainability efforts for 3,084 companies spanning a range of sizes and sectors. From the reported emissions and planned emissions reductions, we create scenarios for 2020-2049 with and without companies pledged emissions cuts and calculate the resulting warming from 2020-2100 using a climate emulator. We then use temperatures from these scenarios to calculate the deaths resulting from warming by using mortality damage functions. We find that more than 92% of these companies stand to save at least one life by following through with emissions reduction plans. Additionally, if all 3,084 companies follow through with their emissions reduction plans, over 4.4 million temperature-related deaths can be avoided.