Over 130 businesses in the We Mean Business coalition have signed a letter to the global leaders attending COP28 in Dubai urging them to phase out fossil fuels by the 2040s.

The companies representing nearly $1tr in global annual revenue, are urging national governments to address the primary cause of climate change: burning fossil fuels.

The signatories, including BT, Vodafone, IKEA, eBay, Nestle and Unilever, says that it expects leaders to set concrete targets and timelines for phasing out fossil fuels. “Our businesses are feeling the impacts and cost of increasing extreme weather events resulting from climate change. We recognise the need to transition in a way that safeguards our future collective prosperity on a liveable planet. That means reducing our emissions, adopting clean solutions and reducing our use of fossil fuels to limit global heating in line with the Paris Agreement’s ultimate goal of 1.5C,” the statement says.

Acknowledging that challenges facing businesses might vary by region, industry and scale the coalition states that there are still distinct and clear steps that will allow countries them to be free of fossil fuels by the 2040s. In a call to financial institutions, fossil fuel producers and governments the coalition asks for policies that will lay the groundwork to transform the global energy system towards a full phase-out of unabated fossil fuels and halve emissions this decade, suggesting that this will be enabled by agreeing to a global target of tripling renewable electricity capacity to at least 11TW and doubling the rate of deployment of energy efficiency by 2030.

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