GENDER EQUALITY

Young women 'must work 40 years longer than men' to plug £100k pension gap

Young women would have to work nearly 40 years longer than men to build up the same retirement pot, according to a report highlighting the pensions gender gap by pensions company Scottish Widows. The average woman in her 20s can expect to have £100,000 less in her pension pot than a man of the same age as a result of earning less, working part-time, and taking time out of paid employment to care for family members. A female saver would typically save £2,200 annually for the first 15 years of her career, compared with £3,300 for a young man. The average woman in her 20s today would have to work 37 years longer than a man of the same age to reach retirement parity. (The Guardian)

SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

Britain's Morrisons targets supply from net zero carbon farms by 2030

British supermarket Morrisons has pledged to be the first supermarket group completely supplied by net zero carbon British farms by 2030, five years ahead of its peers. Over the next nine years, it will work directly with its 3,000 farmers and growers to produce affordable net zero carbon meat, poultry, fruit and vegetables, with the first produce reaching net zero carbon status in 2022. The farms Morrisons uses will look to reduce carbon emissions through rearing different animal breeds, using low food-mile feedstuffs, renewable energy and low emission housing, as well as cutting down water and fertiliser use. They will also offset carbon emissions by planting grassland, clover and trees, restoring peatland and seeding hedgerows. Morrisons claims that British agriculture currently accounts for 10% of all UK greenhouse gas emissions. (Reuters)

RENEWABLE ENERGY 

Microsoft and Chevron partner on bioenergy and carbon capture project

Oil and gas major Chevron is collaborating with oilfield services company Schlumberger's New Energy arm and technology giant Microsoft to develop a major bioenergy plant with carbon capture and storage. The companies will begin front-end engineering and design processes immediately, and the plant could come online this decade, capturing some 300,000 tonnes of CO2e every year. The plans involve converting 200,000 tonnes of biomass made from locally sourced agricultural waste, like almond trees, into renewable synthetic gas every year, which will be used to generate electricity. The partners will aim to capture more than 99% of the CO2 emissions from the process and “permanently” sequester them underground in natural geologic formations. (Edie)

STRATEGY

Henkel targets climate positivity and Nokia unveils 1.5C science-based targets

Chemicals and consumer goods company Henkel, the parent company of brands including Schwarzkopf and Persil, has pledged to become climate-positive by 2040, using science-based targets to achieve its aim. The company has sped up its ambition of sourcing 100% renewable electricity globally from 2040 to 2030, and has committed to reduce emissions from operations and the supply chain, including a reduction in the climate footprint of all production sites, by 75% by 2030. In related news, telecommunications company Nokia has had new, more ambitious climate targets approved by the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), aligned with 1.5◦C. The firm is aiming to halve absolute emissions across the business by 2030, against a 2019 baseline, including supply chain emissions as well as Nokia’s operations. (Edie)

DIGITAL ETHICS

Google won’t use new ways of tracking users as it phases out browser cookies for ads

Technology giant Google has clarified its plans for targeted advertising, promising not to use other ways to track users around the internet after it ends support for cookies in its web browser ‘Chrome’ by early 2022. The company will only use “privacy-preserving technologies” that rely on methods like anonymization or aggregation of data, after it announced plans in January 2020 to end support for third-party cookies in Chrome by 2022, which fuel much of the digital advertising ecosystem,. The search engine will begin testing a proposal with advertisers in Google Ads next quarter, called “Federated Learning of Cohorts,” that would put people into groups based on similar browsing behaviours, meaning that only “cohort IDs” and not individual user IDs would be used to target them. (CNBC)