The chemical industry has been the first private sector embracing the UN framework and the SDGs in order to create a common understanding in the form of a roadmap.

From the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the chemical industry prioritises and focuses on 10 of them.

We start seeing more intra-sector collaborative announcements which are moderated by different enabling and unifying bodies.

The outcome of the Transition Pathway is a three-part roadmap. It is a co-developed set of actions in the form of a three-legged roadmap which co-implementation will make possible a more resilient, sustainable and circular industry able to commit and contribute to the Green Deal ambitions and goals.

In my view, there are four transversal areas that determine how to accelerate the development of the decarbonisation roadmap, which are policy, technical options, funding and synergies. In the case of the Transition Pathway the roadmap is composed of three components, which are action-oriented, technology and regulatory.

It all comes to creating transparency and trust, in order to pave the road for sustainable solutions supply chains. Being able to measure progress in an accreditable way is a must.

Frameworks provide clear expectations and guidance on how to measure, report and verify progress against targets achievement. Explore the progress of a couple of these frameworks, a generic one (SBTi) and solution focused one (CTI) and how the industry propose to measure up.

It becomes a massive opportunity for certifying bodies and digital tool creators to develop a new sustainable world.

The desire of transparency and the need of tracking mechanisms make the certification schemes a must have at every stage of the decarbonization process.

Did you know that back in 2011 the Dutch government already had put together guidelines on how to select a biomass certification scheme? at that time it was merely focused on the production of biofuels and biomass for energy purposes, nowadays we know the array of applications has expanded.

The era of carbon capturing is near, how will the certification scheme for negative emission look like?

The transition to a net zero emissions world is estimated to cost trillions in global spending by governments, business and individuals. My takeaway about the cost of the transition is threefold. Inflow of billions of dollars is plainly needed, a notable increase in the investment percentage is expected and surely the cost of production is going to increase in a significant proportion.

Explore public funding possibilities, focusing on the European programs designed to create innovation, read about the different scaling up schemes, discover how to develop value chains by using law provisions or public-private partnerships and notice how all of them are raising millions of euros to push for the technology driven approach and lower the involved risks.