The government will be looking for the private sector to reduce its emissions in the years to come.

What does it really mean for a business to achieve net zero?

Should companies and their sectors account for only their direct emissions,

or must they also measure their indirect impact related to supply change or digital carbon

footprints? How should businesses address their historic emissions? And what might this mean

for a once carbon-intensive sector? Joining me to discuss all this and more is Tom DeLay,

chief executive of the Carbon Trust, Scott Leader, market director at V-Lux, and Chris Stark,

Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee. Welcome to you all, and a big thank you to V-Lux

for sponsoring this panel. Now, for viewers at home, we want to take your questions. I'm going

to put them to the panel over the next hour. You can submit them by typing in the text box on Spectator TV or by emailing events at spectator.com.

So we're going to hear a few minutes of opening remarks from each of our panelists. I'll abuse my position to chair for a few minutes with some questions and then we'll get straight to yours. So Tom, why don't you kick us off?

Okay, let's just look at net zero. It's an enormously challenging aim. It's many decades out in most cases.

And what it means is that the economies of the whole globally need to reduce their carbon emissions very significantly

on a pathway to the point at which they've reached virtually nothing. What is left of their

emissions, which they cannot reduce, it's really the absolute minimum. They then have to find

a way of offsetting using greenhouse gas removal. That's not just a straightforward carbon offset.

It's actually taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Now, with every organization in every country,

reduces and achieves net zero, we will globally have achieved net zero.

There are some points I've raised very quickly.

Firstly, net zero, there is no single definition for what net zero means, and that does create

a number of challenges.

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