The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) just released Towards Planet Positive Chemicals – a roadmap for the chemical industry to drive net-zero, nature-positive outcomes, and ensure a just transition for workers and communities.
⚠️Chemicals power almost every sector—healthcare, energy, mobility, communication, textiles—you name it. Yet, their impact on climate change, nature loss, and human health is often overlooked.
🏭 Business-as-usual is no longer an option. Companies that fail to secure sustainable chemicals risk losing their social license, facing litigation, and disrupting supply chains.
✅ The roadmap calls for a just transition, putting people at the heart of the transformation which includes promoting fair wages and safe working conditions, preventing harm and empowering employees, and upskilling & re-skilling workers for a circular economy future.
For further information:
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) published Towards Planet Positive Chemicals - A chemical transformation roadmap enabled by a circular economy (October 2024), which lays out a shared vision based on accelerating net-zero trajectories, reversing nature loss and ensuring a just transition for workers and communities, enabled by a circular economy and sustainable chemistry.
Key points from the report:
- The case for change: Chemicals play a pivotal role in almost every sector in the global economy, such as healthcare, energy, mobility, communication and textiles. However, their contribution to climate change, environmental degradation and adverse human rights impacts are significant. For instance, the chemicals sector represented 6.3% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2019. Chemical production, use and disposal have led to water, air and soil contamination and pollution. In addition, 92% of pollution-related deaths occur in low-and middle-income countries. The roadmap recognises these challenges, calling for an urgent transformation in how chemicals are produced, used, disposed of and recycled. The risks to companies in the chemical value chain if they fail to transform are: 1) losing their social license to operate; 2) potential litigation; 3) failing to access and secure long-term finance; 4) increased cost due to delayed action or slow technology development; and 5) creating supply chain disruptions due to failure to secure the availability of and access to sustainable chemicals.
- Three objectives of the Roadmap: To meet its vision of driving a just, people-centred transition to net-zero and nature-positive chemicals by 2050, the Roadmap outlines three objectives. These are 1) net-zero chemicals, which means committing and delivering net-zero scope 1, 2 and 3 industry greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 in a way that prioritises emissions reductions and limits the use of offsets; 2) nature-positive chemicals, which means committing to halting and reversing the impact of chemicals on nature loss by 2030 and achieving full recovery by 2050; and 3) a just transition for chemicals. This means co-creating transformative solutions with value chain partners that put people at the centre in all stages of the chemical product life cycle, including preventing harm, empowering employees and fostering the adoption of fair working conditions. Additionally, three transformational enablers are needed to achieve these objectives. These are empowering a circular economy, activating sustainable chemistry as a solution and combatting pollution.
- A just transition for chemicals: The chemical industry negatively affects people in several ways, including harm to human health, unsafe working conditions, and paying wages that fall below a living wage. The Roadmap states that the chemical industry has a duty to protect those working in the industry as well as those indirectly impacted through. What are companies to do? At a cross-sector level, businesses: can 1) define and implement a just transition programme for chemicals; 2) embed key elements of a just transition in companies' portfolio transformation and sustainability assessment tools; 3) assess living wage practices and create a collective action agenda to drive improvement throughout the entire value chain; and 4) identify and disseminate best practices in leading the organizational change required to implement a transition to net-zero and nature-positive chemicals. At both cross-sector and chemical industry levels, businesses can co-create an upskilling and re-skilling program to support all value chain actors and their employees as the industry and value chains adopt circular economy principles.
