“Because we are ultimately selling more cars, even though they are EV and hybrid cars, the emissions do increase.”
Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change · Climate & Energy · September 2026
Context
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
…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…
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.
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