IKEA CEO on ‘massive economic advantages’ of climate action

As the UN COP29 climate meeting in Baku wraps up this week, IKEA CEO Jesper Brodin has a message for those who missed out—or who would like to back out: “Our transformation has begun and is irreversible,” he told me on the phone from Azerbaijan. “There’s no way we would reconsider because of politics.”

As for the U.S. and other global governments, he and other “climate CEOs” said in a letter released before the meeting, it’s “time for to double down on climate action”, rather than to turn away from it.

Yet sadly for Brodin, it’s a message that seems to be falling on deaf ears, both in Baku and Washington.

In Baku, negotiators of developing countries called the climate finance offered by the EU and other leading economies a “joke”, considering them far too low for the transition required. In the U.S., meanwhile, the new Trump administration is almost certain to leave the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Why is Brodin staying the course, then, when so many others are falling by the wayside?

Perhaps the answer is that the logic of companies such as IKEA, which are “speeding up” their climate action, is an indisputable one, he suggested.  Decarbonization is “the biggest economic transformation that happened since industrialization”, Brodin said, and for companies that are leading rather than lagging in the field, it “has given massive economic advantages” already.

For some of its products, IKEA already recycles more than 90% of its inputs, reducing costs in its supply chain, while reducing their carbon footprint, he said. And in its stores, IKEA is already carbon-neutral while saving money, having invested more than $4 billion in its own renewable energy production, he said.

“Carbon-smart is cost-smart,” he said. “It has nothing to do with who is President in the U.S.”

And in a curious twist, IKEA and the new U.S. administration may become bedfellows after all. Even as the furniture company’s climate views and hyper-global sourcing approach clash with Trump’s, the company is also planning to increase both its retail footprint and its local sourcing in the U.S. in the years ahead, Brodin said, providing a boon to consumers, workers, and politicians alike.

“We have a very ambitious plan in the U.S., Brodin told me. “Strategy No.1 is to increase penetration. We need to be where the people are. But we are looking into sourcing more in the North Americas as…