New service unveiled to help firms achieve net zero economy

The Carbon Trust Climate Leadership Framework helps senior management understand how their company is currently performing on climate change, identifies the opportunities for measurable improvements via a low carbon roadmap, and guides their strategic planning.

As a trusted partner of leading organisations globally, the Carbon Trust has identified a growing demand from companies for expert evaluation and guidance on their overall strategic approach to climate change. To meet this demand and ensure that companies are equipped to take comprehensive action towards net zero, the Carbon Trust has spent over a year developing this new framework.

Hugh Jones, Managing Director – Business Services, the Carbon Trust said: “Organisations are more aware than ever of the need for bold action on climate change. The recent publication of the Committee on Climate Change’s Net Zero report and heightened public and political awareness of climate change issues have highlighted the need to transition to sustainable, low carbon economies across the world.

“This framework enables businesses to play their full part and ultimately become climate leaders.”

The framework has been tested and refined in partnership with five businesses over the past six months to ensure it provides a straightforward process to produce robust, relevant and actionable insights for company leaders.

Using the framework, the Carbon Trust works with each client to assess its own operations, its upstream and downstream value chain, and the avoided emissions brought about by the use of its products or services.

The framework analyses the company’s performance in target setting, implementation, awareness of the impact of climate change on the business, innovation, and influencing stakeholders.

After the assessment, each company is scored and given a bespoke roadmap containing practical next steps.

Hugh Jones, Managing Director – Business Services, the Carbon Trust added: “Businesses may already be addressing some of their climate change impacts but this framework helps evaluate their overall performance, strategically positions existing schemes and initiatives for them and, crucially, provides a tailored company-wide roadmap for improvement.

“Experience from working with companies on its development has shown that it is extremely effective at facilitating company-wide understanding and ownership of climate change impacts and stimulating long term strategic planning.”

The Climate Leadership Framework has already been taken up by five companies working with the Carbon Trust – Pearson, Quorn Foods, SGN, Sky and Marshalls.

Louise Needham, Sustainability Manager, Quorn Foods said: “We found the Climate Leadership Framework project to be very valuable indeed. To complement the confidence we have from a product-led perspective, we needed an objective and independent assessment of our organisational climate change strategy, plus key recommendations to make improvements – this is exactly what we achieved with the project.”

Nicholas Drake, Climate Change & Sustainability Senior Manager, SGN said: “SGN was keen to take part in the initial group of companies to be taken through the Climate Leadership Framework, which lays out a clear path for companies to align with a net zero future. It has helped us to demonstrate our commitment to taking action on climate change and recognises the severity of the current situation.”