Mastercard and Partners Launch Priceless Planet Coalition to Act on Climate Change - Seite 2

Empowering Consumers & Corporations

Participating companies will continue to implement their own sustainability strategies, as well as collaborate across the Coalition for joint campaigns. One early initiative will see the Coalition encourage consumers to use mass transportation, rewarding public transport riders for taking journeys with the planting of a tree. The campaign will be launched in partner cities around the world, including London, New York, Stockholm, Helsinki, Ankara, Barcelona and others.

In parallel, Mastercard’s corporate card customers will be able to contribute to the Coalition’s forestation initiatives worldwide whenever and wherever their employees use their cards for travel, goods and services. This complements these businesses’ own environmental sustainability goals and enables their employees to actively support these commitments through the business purchases they make. Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions will be our first issuer partner in promoting this initiative with its corporate customers, with IHS Markit, a London-based global information provider, as the first corporation to participate.

Interested financial institutions, merchants, consumers, and digital partners from around the world are invited to join in this effort and engage consumers and employees to contribute to the tree planting program. Mastercard's global payment infrastructure provides additional ways for cardholders to contribute, like ‘round-up’ campaigns at a range of leading retailers, allowing consumers to add a tree-planting donation at the point-of-sale.

Establishing Roots

Trees are one of the critical networks on which the earth runs. Current levels of carbon emissions, use of natural resources and pollution are exceeding limits that are environmentally sustainable or safe. In turn, people across the globe see and feel these realities affecting their communities today and potentially for generations to come.

It is recognized that natural climate solution and in particular tree planting programs are an effective mechanism to respond to climate change. According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), limiting the rise in average temperature to the critical target of 1.5C by 2030 requires an extra 1bn hectares of trees¹.

Large scale reforestation programs need to be executed carefully, with consideration given to a number of factors including local climate, adverse biodiversity impacts, lax or poor forest management practices, unintended future deforestation, risk of reversal, and unintended social impacts. Mastercard has selected global environmental organizations Conservation International and World Resources Institute (WRI) to lead the tree planting efforts. The organizations were selected based on their science-based and holistic approaches to reforestation and their successful track records.