One month on from COP26, you could be forgiven for wondering, was the conference a success? Messaging in the mainstream media has been incredibly mixed, with views ranging from the deeply pragmatic to the wildly sensational. Searching for the question, ‘was COP26 a success?’ will give you some idea of the spread of opinions on the two-week summit.

COP stands for Conference of the Parties, and the summit was attended by the countries that signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – a treaty that came into force in 1994. The event this year was held in Glasgow and saw thousands of people descend on the city, from national governments, climate activists, scientists, policy makers and businesses.

Now one month on, we asked four of our Siemens COP26 attendees to give their thoughts on the sessions they took part in, but also why each of us, as Siemens employees, should feel a renewed sense of impetus on the back of it. This is potentially an epoch defining time for Siemens, one where digitalisation and decarbonisation can become intrinsically joined at the hip, and one where our technology can help customers navigate the next 30 years to reach net zero. To quote the climate activist Katharine Wilkinson, ‘it is a magnificent thing to be alive in a moment that matters so much’.

Here’s what our senior leaders had to say…

Justin Kelly – Head of Business Development and Corporate Communications

It was a privilege to attend some of COP26 in Glasgow as on observer and spend time in the room during meetings with ministers and delegations from around the world. Listening to international ministers and speakers was a powerful reminder of how achieving net zero is a global challenge.

As a pragmatist favouring progress over perfection, I sit firmly on the side of the former with commitments stepped up but I hope also greater transparency over implementation where the hard yards lie. While many large-scale energy and transport projects can be delivered commercially for national governments the reality is that most of the tough stuff will be implemented locally by local governments, businesses and corporations.

In particular, the importance of finance cannot be overestimated. The cost of meeting net zero targets will be enormous. Many people believe the bills will be footed by the public sector. Indeed, according to a recent survey by Business in the Community (BITC), and funded by Siemens and other responsible businesses, most (71%) employees think national governments have prime responsibility for tackling the climate crisis.

Like heads of state, the private sector must be much more open and transparent about its actions. And it must deliver on its commitments.

As it’s been said before, the only promises that matter are the promises kept

UK100 continues to provide outstanding advocacy and support for local government leadership and their new report, supported by Siemens and National Grid, looks at how ‘in-country’ local government climate networks accelerate delivery on Net Zero.

This UK100 report, published during COP26 in Glasgow, is a vital piece of advocacy and practical guidance to local authorities and community networks tackling decarbonisation and mitigating climate change. You can read it here.

It focuses on the efficacy of in-country local government climate networks, and their ability to deliver solutions and advocate for the change that can facilitate further progress towards reaching national Government goals.

Carl Ennis and me in the Blue Zone of the Scottish Events Campus

Steve Goldspink – Head of Business Development, Smart Infrastructure

I went to the Manchester COP26 event called Power to the People, which was a satellite event hosted by Andy Burnham and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA). It was all about trying to raise the profile of what we’re trying to do in the North West and trying to attract that inward investment to support decarbonisation in the region.

We work very closely with the GMCA and the session I was speaking at was all about the role cleaner, digitalised cities can have in limiting climate change. My objective was to try and get across some of the key messages about the fact that, as a technology company, there’s things we could do today. We don’t need to wait and we can encourage people to take action now.

There are things we can do today, and Siemens has the technology to deliver them

One of my key takeaways was listening to varied speakers and companies and really appreciating their challenges. We’ve now got this complex landscape where traditional customers are also eyeing the opportunity to diversify a little and get into spaces that are not traditional to them. We have an amazing opportunity to approach them in a new capacity beyond our traditional portfolio, potentially becoming technology partners, using the full breadth of our capability in support of their endeavours to decarbonise their industrial and commercial businesses.

The bottom line is this – the vast majority of organisations in the UK can’t do any of this without Siemens. There are only a small handful of companies with the technology and the investment and the R&D power to make some of these things happen.

It can be frustrating that customers sometimes don’t know what they want or even know how to get to 2050 and set their own timescales, but there lies the biggest opportunity for us. Our traditional installed base will be calling for decarbonisation planning in the next 5-10 years and with that comes digitalisation. It’s such a massive moment in time for us all to really capitalise on the voice of the customer, and bring some decarbonisation clarity to their worlds.

Faye Bowser – Head of Energy and Performance Services

I was in Glasgow for the entire two weeks. I was splitting my time between fringe events, hosted talks, seminars and also debates in the ‘blue zone’ which was where the global political leaders were congregated.

I was able to talk about a number of reference projects and really champion the work we’re doing right now. I talked about the value of digitalisation and some of the pragmatism needed to deliver short-term wins. It felt like it was a much-needed voice at an event that had a tendency to either get too politicised or too emotive.

All of the business leaders I spoke to had their heads firmly in problem-solving mode. This is one of the hardest challenges we’re ever going to face. Nobody is deluded enough to say we’re on track, everything’s fine, which in the past might have been the tendency. Even though we may be on track at Siemens, we have a responsibility to help our customers and our suppliers to reach net zero. The general consensus is that this is now an accepted problem, no longer on the periphery and this is everyone’s challenge to solve.

Let’s not let perfection get in the way of progress

I genuinely felt proud when I was telling people about our DEGREE framework and talking about the practical details of this. If things are too high level and too abstract that people don’t know what to do about it. I was using examples such as, what do we do about our procurement strategy and who are we buying from? What standards do we set for our supply chain and how are we helping them transition? And how does that influence our decision-making process?

COP26 gave us a new sense of urgency, especially in the political spheres. Where business is slightly different is that we can be driven by opportunity. That’s why people like Mark Carney were pushing that message and saying the green industrial revolution is the biggest opportunity of our lifetime. We have the opportunity to create new jobs, new industries and new sectors right across the country. Engineers can work on new, exciting projects and we have the chance to export those ideas and share our technology.

I’m genuinely going back into project reviews, steering groups and team strategy meetings with a renewed sense of optimism. I’m now totally in a ‘what else can we do?’ frame of mind. I believe everybody has to try and do more and that starts at an individual level.

Olivia Whitlam – Head of Sustainability

I really sensed the level of frustration from different governments and businesses. We’re now at a stage where we’re saying, ‘stop making commitments, what are you actually doing?’ In a sense, commitments were in 2015 in Paris. It’s now, can you deliver?

What surprised me at COP was that there were still a lot of people talking about technology and do we have the right technology to enable decarbonisation? Does it need more R&D? Having a voice like Siemens there cuts through that and says, yes, just look at the decarbonisation pathways mapped out by organisations like the International Energy Agency (IEA). They’ve mapped out the tech needed to enact large scale decarbonisation projects and the majority of it exists today.

COP presented us with such a good opportunity because we’re going to have to rethink so many things about the way our economies and infrastructure work. We can make it better. This is a really good way to engineer out some of the societal barriers we have simply because of the way we structured our societies decades ago.

For me, COP26 really shone a light on the fact that this isn’t all about carbon, but how climate warming affects society and people. So, the concept of a just transition needs to be right at the core of any net zero challenge.

Transforming the everyday is all about doing things for the good of society

We are lucky in that at Siemens we already complete class-leading work around diversity and inclusion and equity in STEM. Pair that with our leadership in digitalisation and decarbonisation planning and you start to layer on what it means to go through a just transition – one that brings everyone on the journey rather than the few.

At times we need to embrace complexity. We can have high-level messaging around long-term impacts, but the world we are going to have to create is highly complex. Where we have a strength is taking that complexity and ensuring that it doesn’t translate to the customer or end user.

Every solution isn’t going to be perfect, but it’s still better to have tried and learnt and moved on.

We are transforming our business because the world is transforming. It’s no longer acceptable to be behind in any area, it’s time to be out in front, leading the narrative. We’re doing it for the good of the world, and that’s the living embodiment of technology with purpose for me.