Various recent articles can be found that suggest the quest towards carbon reduction will negatively impact both productivity and profitability. One such article, relating to the South African mining industry, speculated that: ‘carbon emission reduction plans could cost SA’s gold and PGM miners up to 20% in market value from a detrimental impact on costs and financial benefits’.

Contrary to this received wisdom, Partners in Performance’s experience is that the path towards carbon neutrality is in fact almost always NPV-enhancing. We are assisting some of the world’s leading industrial companies and miners to become carbon neutral and in the past few years have developed business cases for over 8GW of renewable energy. For the majority of these engagements, the path towards carbon neutrality is NPV-positive.