Swiss Re joins the First Movers Coalition

The First Movers Coalition, a flagship public-private partnership to clean up the most carbon-intensive industry sectors, from heavy industry to long-distance transport, announces a major expansion to more than 50 corporate members worth about $8.5 trillion and a total of nine leading governments, including the US, covering over 40% of global GDP.

Led by the World Economic Forum and the US Government, the First Movers Coalition targets sectors including aluminium, aviation, chemicals, concrete, shipping, steel, and trucking, which are responsible for 30% of global emissions – a proportion expected to rise to over 50% by mid-century without urgent progress on clean technology innovation.

For these sectors to decarbonise at the speed needed to keep the planet on a 1.5-degree pathway, they require low-carbon technologies that are not yet competitive with current carbon-intensive solutions but must reach commercial scale by 2030 to achieve net-zero emissions globally by 2050. To jump-start the market, the coalition’s members commit to purchasing – out of their total industrial materials and long-distance transport spending – a percentage from suppliers using near-zero or zero-carbon solutions, despite the premium cost. If enough global companies commit a certain percentage of their future purchasing to clean technologies in this decade, this will create a market tipping point that will accelerate their affordability and drive long-term, net-zero transformation across industrial value chains.

The coalition is launching two new sectors: carbon dioxide removal and aluminium, which join the four existing sectoral pledges (aviation, shipping, steel and trucking) launched at COP26.

Carbon dioxide removal

Earlier this week Swiss Re announced that it was a founding buyer in NextGen CDF facility to dramatically scale up carbon removal technologies. Today's announcement that Swiss Re joins the First Movers Coalition also includes confirmation that Swiss Re commits to 50,000 tonnes or $25 million of carbon removal.

All FMC members must deliver on their commitments by 2030 and demonstrate that the carbon can be stored for more than 1,000 years.  Members’ carbon removal purchases will be supported by implementation partners, including Breakthrough Catalyst, Carbon Direct, Frontier and South Pole.

Why Carbon Dioxide Removal?

Carbon dioxide removal is the process of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locking it away. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report emphasises that due to a lack of progress on emissions mitigation to date, limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5⁰C will now be impossible without carbon removal solutions.