Tech, entertainment giants team up for climate change solutions

Nongovernmental organizations and tech and entertainment giants including Amazon, Netflix and Disney on Thursday announced a partnership to pool solutions on scaling funding for responses to climate change.

The alliance, the Business Alliance to Scale Climate Solutions (BASCS), also includes Salesforce, Microsoft and Google, as well as the Environmental Defense Fund, the United Nations Environment Program and the World Wildlife Fund.

“It really is a virtual table for companies and [nongovernmental organizations] together around which to scale and accelerate climate funding solutions,” Elizabeth Sturcken, head of the Environmental Defense Fund’s net-zero efforts, told The Hill Thursday.

“It is really meant to be a platform and neutral for companies to come together and learn and figure out if there are areas where they want to work together on, for example, in saving tropical forests. … It’s born of the urgent need for action in this decade,” she continued.

Sturcken added that the work of the partnership will still require governmental action to be effective.

“All of that needs to take place in addition to policy action,” she said. “A few companies will never get us where we need to go. We need both groups like this business alliance to come together and infuse capital and funding and we need policy solutions to ensure the rest of the economy comes along.”

However, she said, partnerships such as the BASCS are “continuing to show that companies can lead the way, be really innovative and ambitious on that path and will hopefully pave the way for the government on policy solutions.”

Max Scher, head of Salesforce’s clean energy and carbon programs, told Axios the alliance aims to remove competition between the participants from the equation.

“[T]he intent of this is really to shift this kind of mode from lots of different initiatives coming at a small group of companies to a lot of companies sitting down and saying, ‘We have the same goal. And my goal is actually only going to be successful if you also succeed at the same goal. So we should probably do this together, we can share our resources and we can learn together, and by doing so, act better together,’” he said.