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WBCSD at Ecosperity Week 2025: Asia’s Race to 2030 

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14 May, 2025

This post was originally published on WBCSD

Ecosperity is an amazing event, which is really beginning to grow globally as the leading sustainability event, in this part of the world.

– Peter Bakker, 6th May 2025 (Channel News Asia Interview)

Asia’s Race towards 2030: All Systems Go was the theme at Ecosperity Week 2025 in Singapore.  The four-day event brought together government representatives, financiers, and industry for a stocktake on where Asia stands in terms of meeting its 2030 decarbonization goals and to identify strategic areas of systems-level change the region requires.  

WBCSD had a clear agenda: to align finance and high-quality data to build resilience and accelerate decarbonization in a nature-positive way. We convened our member community alongside policymakers and financial institutions focusing on action, implementation and business value. 

Left to right – Peter Bakker, WBCSD, Christopher Gebald, Climeworks, Yuko Tsutsui, Executive Officer, NYK Line, Dr Daniel Klier, CEO Southpole, Jessica Cheam, Eco Business

On 5 May at the inaugural Carbon Removal Leaders’ Summit, convened by WBCSD alongside partners Climeworks, Climate Impact X, Tsao Pao Chee and South Pole, companies explored what it will take to scale up removals in support of climate action.  

There was a strong consensus in the room: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes it clear that there is no net-zero world without carbon removals. That means we need a functioning carbon market to reduce emissions and encourage innovation with scalable market-driven climate solutions. We need both reductions and removals. We need both technological and nature-based solutions, each plays a different role and both are essential.  

Singapore becomes world’s first PACT-aligned emission factors registry  

On 6 May, WBCSD and the Singapore Business Federation (SBF) launched a new partnership that makes Singapore the world’s first emission factors registry (Singapore Emissions Factors Registry: SEFR) to adopt PACT Methodology Version 3 (V3). This milestone empowers tens of thousands of Singapore businesses to calculate accurate, granular and comparable Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs), dramatically boosting transparency and standardization in the way emissions data is reported and exchanged across organizations.  

By aligning SEFR with PACT v3, we’ve set a new global benchmark, unlocking reliable carbon data to meet growing regulatory demands, drive green procurement, unlock sustainable investments, and accelerate Scope 3 decarbonization strategies. 

From left to right: Peter Bakker, CEO, World Business Council for Sustainable Development; Lee Chuan Seng, Chairman, National Environment Agency & Founding President, Singapore Green Building Council; Kok Ping Soon, CEO, Singapore Business Federation

Following the announcement, we hosted a workshop with KPMG and SBF focused on addressing Scope 3 emissions through supplier engagement, a critical lever for staying competitive and resilient in today’s market. There was strong demand for SME involvement and tailored decarbonization support, with broad participation from financial institutions, tech players, auditors, and third-party verifiers, all focused on turning decarbonization into a business opportunity.  

Leveraging the Corporate Performance & Accountability System (CPAS) 

We took part in events with  GFANZ (Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero)  and the Industrial Transition Platform Network  (ITPN), ran a workshop on transition planning and integrated approaches to mitigation and adaptation, and a CPAS Roundtable on physical risk along value chains with finance executives from the real economy, investment leaders from asset managers, owners and banks and the Monetary Authority of Singapore.  

We found innovative and sophisticated examples of integration of finance and sustainability, such as an environmental Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) and Value at Risk (VaR).  We found pragmatism – with sustainability action needing to be tied to economic growth and business performance. And we found collaboration – clear signals from policymakers, financial institutions, and corporations to both learn from and contribute to global best practice. 

Climate-proofing businesses and communities  

We ran workshops with members focused on managing climate-related risks and integrating transformative innovation and resilience into performance management. These highlighted the use of AI data-driven modeling platforms to build resilience and cut emissions, and integrated frameworks that marry decarbonization targets with climate resilience, underpinned by clear milestones and stronger public-private collaboration. 

Nature-positive finance with the Singapore Sustainable Finance Association

Businesses shared real-world examples, from TNFD-aligned sustainability-linked loans to large-scale conservation efforts and circular economy investments. Financial institutions showed strong interest, provided that credible data and clear outcomes were in place. 

Inclusive energy transition with ERM

Our members came together on actions to enable a just energy transition through people-centric transition planning that includes workforce skilling and community resilience. Five priorities emerged: reskilling, green job creation, just-transition programs, inclusive participation, and policy coordination.  

Overall more than 250 people engaged in our sessions throughout the week, from over 100 ambitious companies. 

Looking ahead 

Ecosperity Week in Singapore underscored the powerful potential of collaboration, showing how finance, government, and business can come together to drive real-world decarbonization, build resilience, and deliver nature-positive outcomes at scale.  

The post WBCSD at Ecosperity Week 2025: Asia’s Race to 2030  first appeared on WBCSD.

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Cybersecurity is about more aspects of ESG than just governance

Cybersecurity is about more aspects of ESG than just governance

Security operations teams must increasingly do their bit to help their employers achieve environmental targets, which may require some system and strategic changes.

For several years now, annual sustainability reports by listed Australian companies have provided a window into cybersecurity strategies employed at these companies. But in spite of the report name, there is often no link between security and sustainability in the information presented.

As these reports cover environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices, addressing cyber risks comes under the governance piece. Yet, the security team — through its choices of hardware, software and services — has a contribution to make on the sustainability front as well.

It is commonly acknowledged that IT infrastructure and data centres are large energy users. Teams in these spaces have worked to become more efficient: rightsizing infrastructure provisioning to fit workloads, utilising more renewable energy sources, hosting equipment in data centres that are rated to be efficient with power and water consumption and the like.

That same level of investment and effort is yet to be brought to bear on the work of the security team and their technology stack. One reason for this is likely to be the intense pressure that security teams are under to protect ever-increasing attack surfaces and ward off a constantly evolving spectrum of cyber threats.

But this is likely to change.

Security teams need to be prepared to contribute to more than the governance aspect of ESG — they need to contribute to the environmental goals of the organisation as well.

This is starting to be seen in several initiatives. These include the adoption and implementation of more energy-efficient security systems, together with a greater emphasis on proactive and preventative security.

Energy-efficient systems

As with other types of information technology, it continues to be the case that the efficiency of security systems is improving over time with each iteration or update.

A key performance indicator is the energy consumption per gigabit of data throughput for a piece of equipment. Next-generation security gateways are a security-specific example of hardware that continues to get more efficient with each new generation of the technology.

As a case in point, a recent Check Point ESG report showed that a current-generation security gateway uses 73% less power consumption per throughput (Gbps) compared to the previous model. This reduction comes alongside a 112% improvement in threat prevention capabilities, meaning the newer version is more efficient than its predecessor in multiple contexts, not just in energy usage concerns. And, to be clear, this kind of improvement is seen consistently between versions of systems.

This illustrates that next-generation security technologies can simultaneously enhance protection and energy efficiency. By aligning to this cadence of technology upgrades, organisations can consistently reduce their environmental footprint while maintaining effective security controls.

Proactive detection and remediation

Another beneficial strategy when seeking to run security operations more efficiently is to focus more on preventative and proactive forms of security.

The logic here is that reactively dealing with security incidents is an intensive exercise. It is taxing on the individuals that have to perform this work, but also in financial terms. We know that the financial implications of a breach continue to increase over time. One aspect of financial implication is the energy-intensive processes such as restoring backups, along with rebooting, restoring and/or rebuilding entire systems.

Clearly, energy efficiency is not the primary goal of incident response. But from a broader ESG perspective, there is interest in organisations having strong cyber risk and security controls together with layered protections in place to mitigate against the risk of an attack, and/or to detect and isolate any infected infrastructure early on, such that any financial, productivity and bottom-line costs can be avoided. As energy is a considerable financial input to IT costs, it makes sense not to add to these costs due to a cyber incident taking place.

Preventative measures are also required because some existing and emerging types of attacks can run up big energy bills if they go undetected. Cryptomining malware, for example, remains a persistent threat despite its peak in 2018 when it affected 40% of analysed organisations. Even recently, malware such as XMRig has been detected targeting gaming engines. The collective energy consumption of cryptomining is estimated at a staggering 125 terawatt-hours annually — highlighting the need to quickly detect this kind of malicious payload before it can be used to run up a big bill.

Data poisoning in AI systems represents another emerging concern. These attacks compromise machine learning models, often requiring complete retraining to remediate — an extremely energy-intensive process. As organisations increasingly rely on AI-powered tools for decision-making, protecting these systems also means avoiding redundant and costly training cycles that consume substantial computational resources.

The combined benefit

Cybersecurity is more than a governance play — it also has a growing role in helping meet the environmental aspects of an organisation’s ESG strategy. By considering the energy implications of security operations, maintaining infrastructure that is both secure and sustainable, and prioritising a proactive security approach, organisations can protect both their business interests and environmental resources.

Les Williamson, Regional Director Australia and New Zealand, Check Point Software Technologies

Top image credit: iStock.com/Vertigo3d

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