Frequently Asked Questions
What is Beyond?
Led by founding businesses Amazon, Disney, Google, Microsoft., Netflix, Salesforce, and Workday, and partners Environmental Defense Fund, United Nations Environment Programme, and World Wildlife Fund (WWF-US), with the We Mean Business Coalition serving as Secretariat, Beyond aims to gather and disseminate information and opportunities for and from peers, practitioners and experts, including sharing best practices, funding opportunities, and research and insights to scale and improve climate solutions.
Beyond offers an opportunity to help connect and support existing initiatives and the surrounding community of practice by providing a central, neutral platform for businesses and experts to meet, learn, discuss, and act together.
Who is involved in the alliance? How was this group founded?
The alliance was founded by a group of companies and NGO/IGOs in 2020 under the initial moniker, BASCS (Business Alliance to Scale Climate Solutions) to create a space to improve and scale business investment in climate solutions to the level necessary to achieve a just and sustainable 1.5°C future.
Beyond is led by founding businesses Amazon, Disney, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Salesforce, and Workday, and partners Environmental Defense Fund, United Nations Environment Programme, and World Wildlife Fund (WWF-US), with the We Mean Business Coalition serving as Secretariat.
What topics and financial vehicles will the Beyond cover?
Beyond is broad, global, and neutral in its approach, inclusive of activities that occur across and beyond value chains and deliver robust and transparent climate mitigation impacts. These investments should represent or eventually result in the avoidance, abatement, or removal of GHG emissions. For the purposes of Beyond:
- Climate solutions Climate solutions can include avoidance, abatement, and removals.
- Climate solutions funding can include carbon credit purchases and non-credit investments, for example in new technologies, philanthropy, impact capital, and other external-facing investments.
What is Beyond‘s vision of climate leadership?
To limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, the world must halve emissions by 2030 and accelerate an inclusive transition to a global net-zero economy by 2050.
Corporate climate funding acts as a critical component and catalyst in scaling climate solutions necessary to achieve a 1.5°C future.
Beyond realizes that leadership starts at home, and all members demonstrate the importance of the mitigation hierarchy via alignment with a science-based target and/or ambitious internal reductions in line with a 1.5°C future.[1] Beyond focuses on investments made both inside and outside of a member’s value chain that are supplementary to ambitious company emission reductions to achieve critical, time-sensitive global climate priorities.
What does it mean that Beyond is a “neutral platform?”
Business investment in climate solutions is evolving rapidly and opinions and approaches to it differ. To grow and improve this community of practice, Beyond seeks to offer a platform to showcase and discuss these differences to facilitate the discovery and proliferation of best practices. Beyond does not promote one climate solution over another, and it is up to members to prioritize climate solutions for themselves, in alignment with Beyond’s Member Principles.
Who Participates in Beyond?
- Funders invest in credits and other climate solutions funding. Funders are most often but not exclusively companies (e.g., can be philanthropies or VC firms).
- Service providers are organizations and individuals seeking to promote their climate solutions and solicit funding.
- Partners are NGOs and IGOs with relevant expertise.
- Major donors are philanthropies that contribute substantially to the costs of implementing BASCS’ workplan.
What is the role of NGO/IGO participants?
Non-profit, NGO, or IGO participants in Beyond contribute to advancing the mission of Beyond by providing expertise, guidance, resources, and insight.
[1] The IPCC includes many pathways that could result in 1.5 futures, so to limit high risk scenarios or high overshoot and scenarios, we recommend these additional criteria to guide pathway selection: 1) science-based 1.5C pathways should be based on no overshoot and low overshoot Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (IAMC) scenarios that do not exceed the transient climate response to emissions (TCRE) budget of 990 GT CO2e prior to achieving net zero; 2) in which peak emissions occur before 2025; and 3) that are more ambitious than the 20th percentile of the scenario envelope.
[2] de Coninck, H., A. Revi, M. Babiker, P. Bertoldi, M. Buckeridge, A. Cartwright, W. Dong, J. Ford, S. Fuss, J.-C. Hourcade, D. Ley, R. Mechler, P. Newman, A. Revokatova, S. Schultz, L. Steg, and T. Sugiyama, 2018: Strengthening and Implementing the Global Response. In: Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, H.-O. Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J.B.R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M.I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor, and T. Waterfield (eds.)], available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SR15_Chapter4_Low_Res.pdf
[3] “Consultation: Nature and Net Zero”, World Economic Forum, January 2021 at p. 6, available at: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Consultation_Nature_and_Net_Zero_2021.pdf