“Because we are ultimately selling more cars, even though they are EV and hybrid cars, the emissions do increase.” Jaime Z. Urquijo · Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change
Climate & Energy · September 2026
Urquijo is chief sustainability officer at Ayala, the Philippine conglomerate, and had been walking through which of its businesses have accredited climate targets. Asked about the car business, he concedes that moving customers from combustion engines to EVs and hybrids has not brought the group's emissions down, because it keeps selling more vehicles. He says they have started watching emissions per unit of revenue instead, since the absolute number keeps climbing.
Transcript
so? Of the four main businesses, two of them are now SBTI accredited. So, Globe Telecom and Ayala Land are there. The two that have been a little bit more challenging have been ASIN and Bank of the Philippine Islands. The banking sector, as we know, Is a very, very, very difficult one to sort of think through, especially as you think through financed emissions and sort of scope three. Where we've really decided to focus is on scope one and scope two. Scope three is a little bit more challenging. And so we're still trying to wrap our heads around how best to tackle that. And, you know, ASIN, as a renewable energy developer, the irony there is that it is still a little bit more complicated because of the timeline. Actually, for energy companies, it's not a 2050 target, it's 2040 one. And so we're still trying to sort of wrap our minds. So we have a plan that's aligned, but it's not accredited yet. And again, I come back. I think one of the areas where our life has been made a little easier is that some of these switches that can be made, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit. And for us, the big one has been a switch over to renewable energy procurement. Obviously, with a renewable energy developer within the group, we've been able to really track how the prices are ultimately evolving, how the options are evolving, especially for businesses to procure renewable energy. One of the benefits of the Philippine energy environment is that companies can procure directly from retail energy suppliers, directly or res suppliers. And so we've been able to have a massive switchover. So over the last kind of three to four years, from about a quarter of our energy from renewable energy sources, it's now about three quarters group-wide. And that's led to a huge amount of savings. It's roughly about $4 million a year that we've now saved by switching over to that. And so scope one and scope two, we have decently good kind of control over. We understand what those levers are. Scope three has been a challenge. And I think one of the ironies of this is we have seen our group-wide scope three increase over the last few years. Obviously, as the group grows, this is always going to be a big challenge that we need to kind of debate around. But one of the biggest areas of growth in our emissions has actually been because of our mobility platform, because of the success of the BYD business. And so you would because
more energy being drawn, 60% of the grid still coal-fired.
There are still emissions that are greenhouse gas emissions that are generated when producing one of these vehicles. So even though you are switching these individuals over from an internal combustion engine to a EV or hybrid vehicle, as a company, we still are our emissions still increase because of that. Because we are ultimately selling more cars, even though they are EV and hybrid cars, the emissions do increase. So that's another thing that we've also had to kind of navigate through that ultimately the sort of number increases, but we clearly know that this is having a good impact in the country. And so that's something that we've had to sort of navigate through. And I think the last point that I'll mention is one of the numbers that we've increasingly been looking at is the greenhouse gas economic intensity number. So ultimately, the amount of revenue that you generate for the amount of emissions. And so it's, again, not necessarily used when talking through SBTI, but it's an interesting number for us to think of, especially as the company continues to grow, are we getting better at decreasing that intensity?
I mean, it's one of the big, I would say, macro perspectives on the region, right? So across Southeast Asia, our growth is still directly linked to emissions growth.
Yes. And
that's what I think one of the big challenges in this region is: how do we keep growing? Because growth is so necessary. And we have one of the fastest growing regions in the world.