A growing number of countries and companies are setting climate neutrality and net-zero targets. Many countries’ and companies’ efforts towards climate neutrality play a positive role contributing to the fight against climate change and reducing global emissions. However, some of these commitments only obscure the actual impact and ambition of actual climate efforts. In order to enable citizens, investors, consumers and other stakeholders to make an informed judgement, it is crucial that countries and companies are transparent about what exactly their target covers and how they intend to reach it. This discussion paper explores a number of climate neutrality targets and what factors are important to consider when trying to gauge their ambition.
“Climate neutrality” or “Net zero” targets have become increasingly important in the public debate for consumers, voters, and investors alike. This stems in large part from the Paris Agreement, which set out the goal “to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century” (Article 4.1) in order to “hold the increase in global average temperature to well below 2˚C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5˚C” (Article 2.1.a). To contribute to this overall goal, some countries have set “climate neutrality” targets as part of their “long-term low greenhouse gas development strategies” (Article 14.9). Further, a growing number of companies set climate or carbon neutrality targets or offer “climate or carbon neutral products” – ranging from car fuel to all-inclusive holidays, and from parcel deliveries to flights and train trips.
There are large differences in the transparency of these claims and targets and what they actually mean in terms of GHG impact. Both governments’ and companies’ climate neutrality targets and claims vary in terms of coverage, target year, and the extent to which offsets and negative emissions are expected to play a role. While some actors provide detailed information on important aspects such as current emissions levels, interim targets, reduction strategies, and – when relevant – what type of offset credits are used, other targets and claims are less clear on such details.
As a result, it is difficult to understand the meaning of climate neutrality targets and their impact on global emission levels. Targets can represent ambitious and Paris-aligned actions, but they may also misrepresent climate action and have no or a negative impact on global emission levels.
Waste recycling rates are improving overall, but what are the measures that can really drive plastic recycling forwards?Legislation designed to promote waste recycling appears to be working.
In Europe, the latest data shows that, even with more waste being generated by EU nations, the total amount ending up in landfill continues to fall. Since 1995, 69m tonnes of rubbish – or 57% – less waste has been buried in the ground. Since 2005, landfilling has dropped by almost 4% a year on average.
Member states do seem to have adhered to the EU’s Directive 62/1994, in place since 2001, to ensure all nations recover a minimum of 50% of all packaging put on the market (further revised in 2008 with a 60% recovery target). Directive 31/1999 has also had an impact, which forced EU states to reduce the amount of biodegradable waste going to landfills to 35%.
All of this means more waste being recycled. Since the mid-1990s, the average annual rate of recycling has increased by 4.2% year on year. Now, more than 100m tonnes of waste is recycled annually. While that still only accounts for 47% of all waste, it’s a significant increase on the 19% recycled in 1995.
It is a similar story in the US, which produces more than 260m tonnes of waste a year. Over time, recycling rates have steadily increased – from just 16% in 1990 to a little over 35% in 2017.
Plastic progress
But while overall recycling rates have slowly improved, brands remain under intense pressure to do more, in plastics particularly.
Of course, boosting recycling rates requires action from a range of different stakeholders – among them brands that place products on the market, the local authorities and resource management companies charged with treating waste, and consumers.
But in which part of the chain can the biggest impacts be made?
For Ceris Turner-Bailes, CEO of WasteAid, it starts with properly incentivising the use of recycled materials. She says that products made from materials that are not recyclable because they use mixed materials should be phased out, and incentives created to utilise single-material packaging, which is more easily recycled.
Part of the solution is paying a fair price to the people that collect waste, not just the basic market value of the material, particularly in lower-income countries.AndWasteAid is working with waste pickers and training vulnerable and marginalised people to recycle plastics into products such as paving stones and tiles. Turner-Bailes says: “One of the biggest challenges is creating a market for the products in the countries that we work, and this is a big focus for us going forward.”
Joe Franses, VP of sustainability at Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP) agrees. He wants a step-change in investment of recycled plastic. “Certain sectors need help in securing access to post-consumer feedstock at a viable price,” he says. Currently, the beverage industry is the only sector which is obligated to meet a minimum recycled PET (rPET) percentage threshold. The EU Single-Use Plastic Directive requires a minimum of 25% recycled plastic to be used in beverage bottles by 2025. Franses says that “too much” collected PET currently goes to other applications or is exported once it’s collected for recycling. “More could be done to ensure that PET from beverage packaging that is collected can be recycled bottle-to-bottle.”
Engaging consumers
Making it easier for consumers to engage in the recycling process will also be key to boosting recycling numbers. “Industry-driven” deposit return schemes (DRS) are likely to deliver the highest collection rates for beverage packaging – and help to facilitate bottle-to-bottle recycling, as they reduce contamination, Franses says. But such schemes require strong support from policymakers and governments, as well as effective collaboration, to make them work, with producers and retailers working together. “Norway and Sweden offer best-in-class DRS, with a focus on creating a local, circular system via a strong connection to local recycling partners, such as Veolia.” Franses points out.
Another good example is the SRN (Stichting Retourverpakking Nederland) in the Netherlands, which is a scheme that gives access to feedstock at competitive prices for all those that participate in the scheme.
Deposit return schemes do, of course, have their detractors, particularly where there is near-universal local authority kerbside collection, such as in the UK. Introducing DRS requires development of new infrastructure, with reverse-vending machines installed in public places or retailers being required to devote space to collection and deposit returns.
Another potential downside is that DRS removes PET, which is currently amongst the most valuable recyclate, from kerbside waste streams, taking away that revenue and making the collection of other wastes less financially viable. DRS can create an incentive for increased use of plastic and penalises the use of other materials, notably aluminium, which does not require any venture financing and novel chemistry solutions to improve its recyclability.
Whatever your view, this is a debate that will, no doubt, continue .
Keep it simple
To get the attention of consumers, James Bull, head of packaging at Tesco, says it’s all about simplifying processes. He argues for legislation that drives “consistency in what is used and what is collected” and will make it easier to manage and more straightforward for the general public to engage with.
In fact, making it easier for people to understand how recycling supply chains actually work will give them the confidence and incentive to recycle more, Turner-Bailes says. “There needs to be full transparency in the movement and use of materials across borders, to generate confidence that materials are properly recycled and not dumped.”
WasteAid is currently working in Douala, Cameroon, where the local government is supporting recycling by ordering recycled products on a large scale to improve local infrastructure. “It’s a good example of local government working with commercial enterprises to support recycling efforts on a large scale,” according to Turner-Bailes.
Barriers remain
Closer collaboration and more effective consumer engagement are likely to have a big impact. However, some specific challenges remain. Bull highlights the difficulties in collecting and recycling the soft plastic bags, pouches and films that represent a large proportion of any shopping basket.
The solution? Companies should prove it can be done and influence governments to move quicker and legislate consistently for a set of materials that are to be used to “prevent food waste, provide functionality while limiting carbon and environmental impacts”, Bull says. Then, the sector should “generate demand, engage industry, and influence market investment and cost coverage”.
Franses reinforces the need for greater investment in new recycling technologies and infrastructure, in particular, to boost capacity within the rPET reprocessing sector to generate an increased supply of rPET. Through its innovation and investment arm, CCEP Ventures, the business has recently invested in recycling start-up CuRe Technology. CuRE uses a partial depolymerisation process to break down PET into its component building blocks to produce food-grade rPET – a good fit for CCEP as it aims to deliver 100% rPET for its bottles in the next five years.
Enforced circularity?
The European Commission’s long-awaited Circular Economy Package will have made brands and recyclers sit up and take notice. With revised legislative proposals on waste, a more stringent target for recycling, particularly of packaging waste, and lower limits for landfilling, companies will be forced to think more circular. And that’s a good thing, says Bull. “The best examples of driving positive behaviour are about driving a value into packaging, rather than it being provided as a disposable element.”
Turner-Bailes agrees, arguing that voluntary commitments from brands have been a welcome start, but they have had limited impact. “[They] need to be replaced with legislation and clear timescales for the phase-out of product packaging that is non-recyclable. This will be a strong signal of intent towards the creation of genuinely circular economies.”
Join 150+ experts to debate the future of plastics at Innovation Forum’s upcoming conference. For full details click here.
COVID-19 has impacted the world as a whole, making voices from developing countries in the Global South critical for finding solutions.
Southern Voice’s researchers from 25 countries are analyzing the impact the pandemic is having in areas such as the economy, gender equality, education, and the digital divide.
By Gabriela Keseberg Dávalos
While preparations are underway for this year’s UN General Assembly and the UN 75th anniversary, the world is still grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on all areas of life.
Cooperation and partnerships on the local, national, and international levels, as called for in Sustainable Development Goal 17, are more vital than ever. Many multilateral bodies have yet to show real leadership when it comes to this. The pandemic has exposed their internal rifts and animosities.
In the meantime, civil society, academia, and citizens are collaborating to help humanity soften the blow of the most significant event in recent history. COVID-19 has impacted the world as a whole, but some populations are more affected than others. That is why voices from developing countries in the Global South are critical at this moment.
Like most organizations, the Southern Voice network has had to adapt. Luckily, our 51 member think tanks across Africa, Asia, and Latin America generated timely analysis of how the new coronavirus was affecting their countries. At the network’s Secretariat, we felt that researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders outside the network, should be able to access this knowledge. Hence, we created a sort of “one-stop-shop” on information on COVID-19 in the Global South. At first just a page on our website, it has now evolved into a full-fledged digital knowledge hub.
The digital hub shows how each SDG is being affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Southern Voice’s researchers from 25 countries are analyzing the impact the pandemic is having in areas such as the economy, gender equality, education, and the digital divide. The user has direct access to information on how each region (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) is dealing with the virus. In addition, information can be searched at the global level.
The hub also shows how each SDG is being affected by the pandemic. For example, the gulf between the “digital have and have nots” became even more evident this year. For the majority of people in the Global South, working or learning from home via virtual means is not an option. This fact is further widening the poverty gap, with a direct impact on SDG 1 (no poverty) and various other Goals.
The next generation of humans will be affected more than any other by the aftershock of COVID-19, in particular through impacts on education. Achieving SDG 4 (quality education) is critical to fulfilling the 2030 Agenda’s principle of leaving no one behind.
As a “bonus”, Southern Voice is also making available a database of experts from across the Global South. Various Southern Voice research centers are now teaming up to offer concrete solutions and recommendations to the crisis. Updates on their work will be available in the hub.
We hope that the database will be used for conference organizers and media outlets, but also by policymakers seeking advice on how to “build back better” with the help of fact-based, timely analysis.
Spaces like this hub represent a glimmer of hope among all the bad news this year. A concrete example of cooperation and partnership, it proves that humanity can come together. It shows that we can tackle a problem that affects us all, much in the spirit of the upcoming Declaration on the Commemoration of the UN’s 75th Anniversary. In it, the UN Heads of State and Government pledge to “boost partnerships” across the whole of society to “ensure an effective response to our common challenges.” To achieve that, new and diverse voices from all walks of life and cultures are pivotal. For this reason, Southern Voice members are working tirelessly not only to understand the effects of the pandemic, but also to promote hands-on solutions for the short and long-term.
We hope that the COVID-19 in the Global South knowledge hub becomes a go-to place for analysis and recommendations. It is a testament to the cooperative work of hundreds of researchers across the Global South and beyond.
2020 can go down in history as an apocalyptic year. Or it can be a time in which we finally join hands to make SDG 17 a reality, through a more robust multilateral system.
Gabriela Keseberg Dávalos is Head of Communications of Southern Voice (@SVoice2030), a network of 51 think tanks from the Global South.
The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 can sometimes hijack brain cells, using the cells’ internal machinery to copy itself, according to a new study.
The research, posted Sept. 8 to the preprint database bioRxiv, has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but it provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 can directly infect brain cells called neurons. Although the coronavirus has been linked to various forms of brain damage, from deadly inflammation to brain diseases known as encephalopathies, all of which can cause confusion, brain fog and delirium, there was little evidence of the virus itself invading brain tissue until now.
“We are actively looking at more patient tissues to be able to find how frequently such brain infections occur … and what symptoms correlate with infection of which areas of the brain,” senior author Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, told Live Science in an email. In addition, scientists must still figure out how the virus enters the brain in the first place, and whether it can be kept out of the brain, the authors noted in their report.
To see whether SARS-CoV-2 could break into brain cells, the study authors examined autopsied brain tissue from three patients who died of COVID-19. They also conducted experiments in mice infected with COVID-19 and in organoids — groups of cells grown in a lab dish to mimic the 3D structure of brain tissue.
“This study is the first to do an extensive analysis of SARS-CoV-2 [brain] infection using three models,” said Dr. Maria Nagel, a professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. Previously, there were only “rare case reports” of SARS-CoV-2 RNA and viral particles found in post-mortem tissue from patients, Nagel, who specializes in neurovirology, told Live Science in an email.
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In the organoids, the team found that the virus could enter neurons through the ACE2 receptor, a protein on the cell surface that the virus uses to enter the cell and trigger infection. They then used an electron microscope, which uses beams of charged particles to illuminate the tissue, to peer inside infected cells. They could see coronavirus particles “budding” within the cell, demonstrating that the virus had commandeered the neurons’ internal machinery to build new copies of itself.
While setting up shop in infected cells, the virus also caused metabolic changes in nearby neurons, which were not infected. These nearby cells died off in large numbers, suggesting that the infected cells might steal oxygen from their neighbors in order to keep producing new virus, the authors noted.
“We do not know if similar events are taking place in infected people,” though there is some evidence they might be, Iwasaki noted. In the autopsied tissue, the team found SARS-CoV-2 had infected some neurons in the wrinkled cerebral cortex. Near these infected cells, they found evidence of “small strokes” having taken place, hinting that the virus might steal oxygen from nearby cells in the brain just as it did in the organoids, Iwasaki said.
Notably, the infected brain tissue was not flooded with immune cells, as might be expected. When the Zika virus or rabies virus invades the brain, a large number of immune cells usually follow, the authors noted. So it’s possible that when SARS-CoV-2 manages to infiltrate the brain, it may somehow escape the body’s typical defense against such invasions. It’s not yet known how this unusual immune response might affect the course of the infection, but it may make the virus more difficult to clear from the brain. And though few immune cells flock to the site of infection, dying neurons nearby can trigger a chain-reaction in the nervous system that still leads to harmful inflammation, the authors noted.
Finally, in the mouse experiments, the authors genetically modified one group of mice to express human ACE2 receptors in their brains, while another group of mice only bore the receptor in their lungs. The first set of mice rapidly began losing weight and died within six days, while the second set did not lose weight and survived. In addition, in the mice with brain infection, the arrangement of blood vessels in the brain changed dramatically, presumably to redirect nutrient-rich blood to “metabolically active hot spots” where the virus had taken over, the authors wrote.
Next steps
The organoid and mouse studies offer hints at how lethal SARS-CoV-2 can be if it reaches the brain. But now, scientists must see if the same results carry over to humans.
“Every experimental system has its limitation,” Iwasaki noted. For instance, COVID-19 infection may progress differently in mice than it does in humans, and while organoids somewhat resemble a mini-brain, they do not contain immune cells or blood vessels like the full-size organ, she said.
In addition, “in humans, virus is not directly introduced into the brain” as it is in mouse experiments, Nagel said. Scientists will need to examine more autopsied tissue from COVID-19 patients to determine whether the findings of this preliminary work hold up in larger groups of people.
Nonhuman primates infected with SARS-CoV-2 could also serve as research models, since the supply of human brain tissue is limited, Nagel said.RELATED CONTENT
“Virus may be present in specific brain regions or may have more indirect effects on neurological function,” Nagel added. In particular, some patients experience symptoms reminiscent of chronic fatigue syndrome for months after their initial COVID-19 infection takes hold; it’s been suggested that the syndrome arises from changes in hormone function regulated by the specific parts of the brain, she noted. Another key question is whether the “virus affects the respiratory center in the brainstem — contributing to respiratory failure in critically-ill COVID patients,” she said.
What’s more, scientists still need to figure out how the virus sneaks into the brain in the first place.
When scientists learned that COVID-19 can disrupt people’s ability to smell and taste, some theorized that the virus might infect the brain directly by traveling through nerves in the nose, Live Science previously reported. The virus may invade the brain through the nose, Iwasaki agreed, or it might enter through the bloodstream by crossing compromised regions of the blood-brain barrier — a wall of tissue that normally separates brain tissue from circulating blood and allows only certain substances through. Learning what route the virus takes into the brain will be key to preventing and treating the infection, the authors noted.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) has released its second SDG Progress Report. It provides updates on the status of the global indicators for which FAO serves as the statistical custodian. The indicators under FAO custodianship measure global targets for SDGs 2 (zero hunger), 5 (gender equality), 6 (clean water and sanitation), 12 (responsible consumption and production), 14 (life below water), 15 (life on land).
The report titled, ‘Tracking Progress on Food and Agriculture-related SDG Indicators 2020: A Report on the Indicators under FAO Custodianship,’ was released on 15 September 2020.
The first such report, issued in 2019, found that the world was not going to meet most of the SDG targets related to food and agriculture by 2030. In the second report, the FAO finds that the COVID-19 pandemic has not only made it even more difficult to achieve the SDGs, and more unlikely that the food and agriculture targets will be met on time, but it has also made it more difficult to monitor progress.
Among the findings on SDG progress:
The prevalence of undernourishment is stagnating, and food insecurity is worsening;
Practices to conserve genetic resources have been disrupted, but in Northern Africa, efforts have increased;
Countries’ legal provisions do not adequately protect the rights of women to land, with only 12% of those assessed providing a very high degree of legal protection;
In Central and Southern Asia and Northern Africa, water stress levels are very high, but globally they are at a safe level;
In Southern Asia, water use efficiency has improved;
An estimated 13.8% of food is lost after harvest on farm and in transport, storage, and processing (it is not yet possible to estimate food waste at retail and consumption stages);
Most countries have made good overall progress in implementing international instruments to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing;
Globally, forest area continues to decrease, though at a slightly slower rate; and
The world has made some progress towards sustainable forest management.
Among the findings on how the pandemic has affected SDG monitoring, the report notes that COVID-19 disrupted national agricultural censuses in many countries, meaning they were delayed, postponed, or suspended. Such censuses are key to identifying immediate needs, the authors note. In addition, for one in four countries surveyed, nearly all data collection by national statistical agencies was adversely affected, “vastly complicating FAO’s work as the custodian agency” for the global SDG indicators.
The FAO is turning to alternative data sources to continue monitoring trends and to ensure real-time assessment of how disruptions caused by the pandemic are affecting food systems. It reports that satellite imagery and machine-learning models are being integrated with other data sets.
A major question of international climate policy is which countries have to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by how much. As ambitious global climate policy has been delayed for long, emissions now have to be reduced in all countries as fast as possible. Considerations whether the national emission pathway itself is in line with the responsibility and capability of that country moves more and more into the background. It is now more a question of who pays for the transition, not where it is happening. In this paper with Fraunhofer ISI, we argue that only the combination of assessments on “what is a fair contribution” and of “how much could emissions technically be reduced” can give sufficient guidance for national greenhouse gas emissions targets that are in line with the Paris Agreement. If the national potential is not large enough to represent a fair contribution (likely for most developed countries), these countries should support other countries to make the transition. If the highest possible ambition leads to faster reductions than the fair contribution (likely for many developing countries), these countries would receive financial support.
***Main findings:
Five years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the need to reduce global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions without further delay is more urgent than ever. Emission reduction rates never seen before are necessary to meet the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement and to avoid the worst impacts from climate change.
In the longer term, all sectors and countries will need to reach GHG neutrality and in particular, mitigate all avoidable energy- and process-related GHG emissions, in order to be in line with a Paris-compatible pathway.
Given the agreement on the global challenge, the combination of equity-based assessments and domestic mitigation potential together can give guidance for exploring and setting national targets for greenhouse gas emissions that are in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. While both methods yielded quite similar results only 10 years ago, they provide very different results today. The concept of a fair contribution applied only to domestic emissions may either stop the discussion before it started for developed countries (requiring net zero emissions within a decade) or suggesting that an increase in emissions is in line with the Paris Agreement for some developing countries for a longer period of time (while it is actually not).
To make the stringent global mitigation pathways possible, emissions in all countries have to be reduced as fast as possible. Whether a national emission pathway itself is in line with the responsibility and capability of that country becomes less relevant. It is now more a question of who pays for the transition, not where it is happening.
It is therefore fundamental that all countries explore their full mitigation potential, also considering global cost effectiveness or the “highest possible ambition“ as it is termed in the Paris Agreement. Until 2030 – most relevant for the updates of NDCs – substantial effort is needed in all sectors (energy supply, industry, buildings, transport), but speed of cost-efficient decarbonisation will be different across sectors and countries. From the sectoral evaluation, we conclude that national sector targets will be required in addition to national economy-wide targets, to avoid lock-ins in the more difficult-to-decarbonize sectors. In particular, there is a strong need for ambitious sector-specific 2030 targets, best enshrined in national law. Complementing global model results with national bottom-up scenarios can provide valuable insights about national leeway in this regard.
If the national potential is not substantial enough to represent a fair contribution (likely for most developed countries), these countries should support other countries to make the transition. If the highest possible ambition leads to faster reductions than the fair contribution (likely for many developing countries), these countries would receive financial support.
Such support should not finance the cheapest reductions in developing countries as such reductions are to be implemented by the countries themselves in order to set and meet their stringent domestic emission targets. The financial support should, in particular, help to avoid sectoral lock-ins which usually require much higher efforts compared to current NDC pathways, most of which were designed to be in line with the now outdated below-2°C limit. The difference between cost-effective 2°C and 1.5°C pathways can help identify the difficult steps that could be supported, although some caution is required in the interpretation due to uncertainties about future cost developments.
For instance, highly developed countries could support:
– In the energy supply sector: a “top up”, e.g. for each coal plant that the country replaces itself with renewables, developed countries offer to finance the replacement of an additional plant, especially when closing the plants is costly and requires significant societal change.
– In the industry sector: the switch to low- or zero-carbon industrial production processes.
– In the buildings sector: the transformation of building stocks based on the difference between globally best available technologies and a local building standard.
– In the transport sector: the development of infrastructure for low-carbon transport (electrification, public transport) that requires high upfront investments.
The support of highly developed countries to other countries to reach a 1.5°C pathway can be addressed through various instruments, e.g. international climate finance through multilateral or development banks, but also through international market mechanisms to be established under Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement. In addition to financial support, instruments to overcome non-financial barriers, such as labour constraints, will be required. Both financial and non-financial instruments must be designed to support high-ambition activities in a coordinated manner.
This paper presents the first global database of supply-side climate initiatives seeking to constrain fossil fuel production. There is a clear imperative to keep a large proportion of fossil fuel reserves underground to keep global temperature rise under 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Yet, there is no global overview of supply-side initiatives taken to constrain fossil fuel production, making it difficult to track trends, compare efforts across countries, and assess the effectiveness of different supply-side approaches. The Fossil Fuel Cuts Database presented here identifies 1302 initiatives implemented between 1988 and 2017 in 106 countries across the seven major types of supply-side approaches. Documenting temporal and geographical patterns, we show a rapid growth in the number of supply-side initiatives taken during the past decade and their highly uneven adoption across the world. Most initiatives occurred in countries with low economic dependence on fossil fuel production and limited fossil fuel exports, with the partial exception of Canada and Norway at the national level, and the US at the sub-national level. We discuss policy implications and the need for further research to identify adoption factors, effectiveness, and policy implications. The documentation of a wide range of supply-side initiatives serves as a reminder that constraints on fossil fuel production need to be analysed and considered on a par with demand-side interventions, including in Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Key policy insights
Supply-side constraint initiatives have increased in the past decade, suggesting growing policy take-up and potential mitigation impacts.
Supply-side initiatives clearly emphasize the key role and responsibility of major carbon producers, and help mobilize demand for greater accountability.
Supply-side initiatives take many forms and can suit the capabilities of different actors, from civil society organizations to governments.
Supply-side initiatives can usefully complement demand-side measures and help tackle free-rider problems.
Larger coalitions of fossil fuel producers are required to address uneven adoption, prevent the relocation of production, and help producers transition away from fossil fuels.
Even before the corona-virus disrupted the planet, remote working has gone from that rare occasion of workforce arrangements to a standard component of many people’s workweek.
Businesses, large and small, continue to embrace the remote workplace – even startups are on board with this. With remote working being the new trend, collaboration is also found to be the new normal; employees are no longer expected to work independently. Instead, working together is more beneficial. While collaboration means improved efficiency and increased productivity, you still need the right tools to work together successfully.
Most notably, during this unprecedented time where remote working is a first for some companies that haven’t yet adopted this policy, challenges can quickly arise. Odoo has several apps available to help your team stay connected while transitioning into the remote workforce. From instance, messaging to task and productivity trackers, from customer service web chats to SMS text messaging, Odoo has this covered.
Real-Time Communication/ Instant Messaging
Communication within the team can be the biggest challenge when your workforce is remote.
Odoo Inbox
Odoo Inbox can be customized as much or as little as you’d like. It allows seamless communication between individual team members, departments, and/or the entire company. Different chat channels enable people to discuss work, brainstorm ideas, and stay connected throughout the workday. It allows direct messages (DMs) and files to be sent to a single person or a group of employees, including the ability to organize conversations into different channels.
New channels can be created for different teams, projects, or whatever else is relevant to your business. In each channel, members can tag each other, share documents, and communicate through voice calls. In addition to this, the built-in bot will notify you if you’ve missed any important messages.
Odoo Live Chat
Odoo Live Chat integrates with your Odoo website to allow your team to chat with your customers in real-time and answer questions, schedule appointments, and sell your products or services in 1:1 conversations. The Odoo widget can be customized to include an avatar greeting and place an ‘away message’ for any queries that come in after regular business hours. It’s a great personal touch to add to your “online office” and e-store.
Odoo SMS
Today, businesses use a wide range of methods to interact with customers. From a VoIP phone system to personalized emails, most brands aim to create an omnichannel experience that best serves their consumers. That’s why email, messaging, SMS, or IM services have become a highly effective form of communication; a channel that many customer service teams are beginning to adopt. Odoo Voip truly provides two-way communication, meaning that your customers can write back to any message you send, and you’d be able to reply directly.
Project Management
Working remotely requires a top-notch project management tool because your employees most likely has several ongoing projects to complete. With several ongoing projects, you’ll need a clear form of communication to keep the details organized for your employees. Odoo Project Management is the right tool for this if you haven’t already got it, now is the time to set it up. It allows you to plan, track, and collaborate on projects in a visually simple manner. You can monitor tasks, discussions, documents, scheduling, milestones, collaboration, and more, in a user-friendly dashboard.
The simplicity of the drag-and-drop functionality is particularly useful for projects and general workflow management among teams. It integrates with Google Drive, Outlook, and Google Calendar, so you can use this as a central focal point for teams to work together. It’s very flexible and allows you to use boards, lists, and cards to map out your projects.
Tasks are easy to assign and break down since status updates and project progress are available at a glance. Once you’ve created a new board for your projects, you can add any relevant team members to the board. From there, you can create tasks, assign them to other team members, and share documents, all within your Odoo dashboard.
Additionally, Business Owners can also stay on top of every ongoing projects within the company; you can always see the bigger picture, what’s in progress, what’s coming up, and who’s in charge of what. In addition to this, project managers can easily delegate work, set deadlines, review, and evaluate what’s left to do.
Ultimately, for remote employees, the Odoo Project Management app includes all the tools needed to avoid missing deadlines.
Odoo HR
Human resource management is a difficult job. It includes managing time off, negotiating salaries, booking meetings across various time zones, and managing conflicts; with a lot going on, there is more potential for things to slip through the cracks.
Odoo HR is an employee management solution with integrated team communication features. Not only does it offer a way for you to contact your employees, but it also tracks the daily aspects of managing them. With Odoo HR, you can track your employees’ work hours, handle scheduling, and communicate efficiently with them in team chats. The app is easy to customize to the needs of your business.
Employee profiles
To make sure business communication stays strong and connected, it is essential to make sure that your employees know one another. Whether a company is large or small, challenges can arise if a member doesn’t know who or what other employees do. With that said, employees need to know which department colleagues work in to improve communication about specific topics or ask particular questions to the right person.
With the Employees app, employee profiles provide context about each person within your organization. Members can read about specific individuals, understand their roles, interests, and who they report to. Furthermore, the profiles put a name to a face making it easier to know who is who within the company.
Task management
Task management and collaboration can be extremely challenging while working remotely with various teams. If you do not have an efficient task management tool, overall business performance will not be as successful as it can be. A task management tool that combines stable communication features with assignment tracking capabilities, will transform the way employees complete the most vital aspect of your company: their jobs. Without a reliable project management system in place, projects can be confusing, which may result in a wasted amount of time for team members trying to figure out what they should be doing. These issues further escalate when management does not have a direct way of monitoring progress, thus detaching them from the situation.
Odoo Project’s task management is one of the most effective business communication tools compared to others. This tool is made easy from the execution to completion of each task as it helps employees and directors reach their goals as successfully as possible in a timely manner. Managers can directly assign tasks to team members and track their progress. They can also set due dates and priority settings, which appear in an organized list for everyone involved. With built-in communication tools, Odoo task management helps employees know who is delegating an assignment, when it is due, and the level of importance to plan projects accordingly.
Appointment
The best meetings are held when people prepare for them. Creating a way to efficiently schedule your meetings can give you more time to prepare for the actual meeting. With that said, one may think that scheduling meetings are an easy process, but it can take up a lot of time when choosing a time and date for your meeting. Additionally, this process usually involves an unnecessarily long email chain. Appointment schedulers help make the process quick and easy. They allow you to poll colleagues and friends on the best date and time for the meeting to be scheduled. It makes your availability known to others and helps ensure that you don’t double-book a time slot. The Appointments app connects to your online calendar, which is fully integrated into your Google and Outlook Calendar, making it easy to schedule meetings.
Amongst everything else, the app provides you with the option to send invitations to the people you need to meet with, allowing you to see what day and time work best for them too. It syncs all the confirmed appointments to your calendar and creates an event on your invitees’ calendars. While it works well for scheduling meetings with individuals or team members within an organization, it also makes it ideal for connecting with external clients, customers, and colleagues.
Meeting Management
Poorly planned or unnecessary meetings waste the valuable time of your most important resource—your team members. Bad meetings slow processes down, create confusion, and breeds a lack of confidence in the organizer. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to spend all your time planning the perfect meetings; instead, let technology help. With Odoo, you can put most of the work behind scheduling meetings on autopilot and focus on other things that matter, technology handles the rest.
Automatically Create Meetings from Events in Your Other Apps
With easy automation, you can generate new meetings from actions in your other planning and organizational tools. You’ll never find yourself scheduling pointless meetings.
Get Reminder Before Your Meeting Begins
The right meeting scheduler tool helps you get meetings onto your calendar quickly and efficiently, and that helps keep you productive. But you don’t have to stop there. Another way to stay productive is to automatically have notifications sent to you before a meeting occurs in whatever app or device that best suits you.
Not only can you receive reminders in your Google and Outlook calendars or by email, but also you can get SMS notifications however far in advance you like before events in your Google Calendar start. Anything you can do to make your routine of scheduling meetings more efficient is a win for everyone because it allows you to focus on preparing for the meeting instead of finding the right time for it.
Share and Collaborate on New Notes
The takeaway points and action items are the most important outcome of most meetings. It’s important that you don’t forget to share these with your team. With that said, you can automate that process, so you never have to think about it again.
Send Meeting Minutes to the Right People
Taking notes and sending them to the right people can take up time, making it feel like a time-waster. Don’t let it waste your time. After taking notes during your meeting, Odoo can send these to your team (and your supervisor) to keep everyone on the same page.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a great way to stay in touch with your customers. The easy-to-customize templates can help you build an appealing newsletter with relevant information, business updates, and entertaining content. Email is one of the best ways to reach someone, too. Email marketing is 40 times more effective at reaching your target consumer than Twitter or Facebook. While your store is closed, use your newsletter to share content that entertains people or keeps them engaged with your brand. Email Marketing is equipped to help you build something that generates a high open-rate.
Social Marketing
Whether you’re managing social media for your business or are trying to build a personal brand, managing all social media platforms can be a huge responsibility. You might be creating a Facebook Page, trying to improve your LinkedIn profile, or waiting for company mentions on Twitter. On the other hand, many customers automatically resort to social media channels to stay in touch with businesses. Your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn pages are the default place where they will go to find out if you’re open, selling or accepting returns.
A team working remotely is likely to have a pretty varied schedule. To ensure that social marketing doesn’t get left behind and your content marketing stays on track, you can use Social Marketing to schedule posts in advance, so they always publish at just the right time. With Social Marketing, your team can simultaneously respond to comments, direct messages, and posts that your company has been tagged on to keep up with any questions and concerns. Social Marketing allows you to:
Share New Content
One of the best ways to build a stable community on any social network is to share content that your followers will find interesting.
Cross Post and Syndicate Content
You’ve written a great post. Now it’s time to ensure your audience sees it regardless of what platform they’re using. It’s tedious to share content across platforms, but with Social Marketing, you can automatically cross-post content between all of your social media accounts.
Monitor Your Brand Online
Tracking your online brand mentions can be tedious while working with multiple tools, sifting through pages and pages of links to find legitimate brand mentions. Social Marketing can help monitor social networks for you automatically.
Odoo NOTES
Whether you’re in a meeting or doing research, taking notes helps you concentrate and gives you a reference later to remind and reinforce the context of your work. It may be less effort than writing a full transcript, but notes still take a significant amount of time to format, organize, and follow-through. Whenever you need to take notes about something, you should do it in Odoo Notes.
It helps you make your notes actionable
Having your notes convert into a task list where you can check things off allows you to stay on top of your work and ensures that you don’t miss following up on those critical items. Or, you could create notes from your new tasks. That way, whenever you add something new to your to-do list, you’ll have a perfect space to track your thoughts and notes.
Get Reminded About Notes on Your Calendar
Sometimes we as humans make mistakes and forget things. Following up with all the action items that you just jotted down can be a repetitive task. But, you can create a workflow that automatically turns your notes into reminders in a calendar so you’ll remember to check back on your notes.
Documents and Files Cloud storage
When it comes to remote work, collaboration doesn’t just take place through video chat, but on files as well. This is why it’s imperative to have an app that enables project stakeholders to share and edit files with their remote teams. This is where cloud storage applications like Odoo Documents can come in handy. By moving all your files to the cloud, it ensures that your team has uninterrupted access to relevant documents, spreadsheets, presentations, videos, and more.
With Documents, you can store multiple versions of all of your documents and control access rights to ensure everyone has access to what they need. You also have access to file edit history to see who changed what. Plus, it’s easier to collaborate in real-time and avoid sending edited versions of documents back and forth. It’s also a great way to organize work from freelancers and your remote team when they need to submit projects.
Make Signing Documents Easy
While ink pens and paper may seem like a thing of the past, signatures still hold weight and make business deals real. You can simplify the process and automate and sign documents with digital ink, and modernize this old-world aspect of the company.
Time Tracking and Productivity
One of the challenges with remote work is that employers and clients want to know that work is getting done, and productivity isn’t falling short. At the same time, employees don’t want to have constant check-ins, neither do they want to feel like someone’s watching over their back. This is when using a time tracking tool comes in handy.
It is a great way for businesses to measure employee productivity but also hold employees accountable for their work. On the employee side, especially for freelancers and independent contractors, time tracking software can be critical when it comes to sending invoices to payroll. All parties involved benefit from unbiased time and productivity tracking.
Conclusion – Working From Home Is Here To Stay
The corona virus lock down has shown remote working is possible on a far wider scale than many companies anticipated. The flexible working conditions are turning into a new norm, and this shift is noticeable in the working culture. Even after the pandemic passes, it is expected that there will be more of a cultural shift towards working from home as a norm and many employees will want to do this, at the very least for part of the week. On the other hand, employers, managers and founders will realize that the home office can actually help productivity. With great tools, resources andadvanced technology, it has never been this simple to set up a professional working environment at home that empowers efficiency.
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