Climate Positive Business

How You and Your Company Hit Bold Climate Goals and Go Net Zero

David Jaber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000450187
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

This is the decade for climate action. Internal and external stakeholders demand action. How we choose to act in the next ten years will determine our foreseeable future.

Businesses hold a critical role for climate futures. The need for businesses to reduce their carbon footprint is now unquestioned, but how to achieve reductions in a credible way is neither clear nor easy once you've tackled the obvious energy culprits. Climate Positive Business lays out the path of business climate strategy, highlighting how your business must set goals, measure impact, and improve performance.

Greenhouse gas protocols can instruct you on the core accounting process that lies at the heart of climate strategy. At least as important to success are the details that protocols don't tell you: the sticking points; the areas of controversy, and the best practices.

Rooted in real experience and written in an entertaining and engaging style, this book provides you with the tips, tools, and techniques to tackle your company's carbon footprint, and it helps you do so in a way that is credible and appropriately ambitious to meet stakeholder expectations. The book will equip you with tools to think critically about GHG reduction, carbon offsets, and carbon removal, as well as help ensure we collectively implement real solutions to slow and eventually reverse the climate crisis. It includes lessons learned from real-world consulting projects and provides a plan of action for readers to implement.

A go-to book for business looking to understand, manage, and reduce their carbon footprint, it is an invaluable resource for sustainable business practitioners, consultants, and those aspiring to become climate champions.

Chapter 1

Evolve with the business landscape

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191544-2

Focus on contribution to the larger good—and the needs of the decision-maker—not just the achievement of your objectives.

– Marshall Goldsmith, leadership coach and business author

Koyaanisqatsi is the Hopi word for “life out of balance,” highlighted in the 1980s by director Godfrey Reggio in his film of that name. It is telling that we do not have just a single word in English to simply convey that same sense, as life out of balance is the situation in which many English speakers find themselves today. If life is out of balance, then the business landscape is out of balance, too.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely already attuned to the environmental crises of which plenty has been written. Let me cut to the chase.

Businesses need to be responsive to their social and ecological surroundings of which they are part, maintain healthy practices, and innovate where practices are less healthy. The good news is that many industries have made strides in better directions—investing in renewable energy, launching product lines with improved material choices, and tackling their environmental footprint. But the effort has not been anywhere near requisite to our challenge.

This is the reason we have sustainability-oriented job positions and a climate consulting industry. If business as usual didn’t create problems, in theory, we would not need people to help mitigate those problems. Also, in theory, as climate practitioners, we are trying to work ourselves out of jobs, by embedding better practices into business operations and making stand-alone sustainability positions irrelevant. However, impacts are a matter of degree, not either/or, and embedding better practices is a process, not an end state. I suspect we’ll need people to monitor trends, measure impacts, manage certifications, engage employees, and reduce emissions for a long time.

To reiterate, for you to be successful on climate fronts, you will need to:

• Craft bold climate strategy
• Implement the strategy, applying tips, tools, and best practices
• Avoid pitfalls by learning from the lessons of others

Before delving into climate specifics, though, it’s important to understand the context of the trends in policy, markets, ecosystems, technologies, and customer preferences that are connected to business climate strategy. There are many themes among those business trends: international goals, business organizational standards, reporting, purchasing practices, sustainable water use, non-toxic materials, and diversity/inclusion. Let’s touch on them at least in brief.

20/20 vision for the 2020s

Successful business leaders must evolve a much more expansive view of time . . . One way to expand your thinking is to look to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, whose time horizon is 2030 . . . think of them as a purchase order from the future.

– John Elkington, author and corporate responsibility authority

Vision is crucially important in business. Vision sets the frame for the initiatives and goals by which our success is assessed. Vision is the frame around our day-to-day activity.

Multiple frameworks for an internationally accepted vision have been developed over the years to help guide actions across the globe. Out of an effort to craft a vision around the role of business, The Natural Step (TNS) movement was born nearly 30 years ago. TNS was an international network of stakeholders, charting out how businesses, communities, and nations could best align with the geology, hydrology, ecology, and atmospheric science of the planet.

TNS came up with four clear principles:

• We must strive to use 100% renewable resources.
• We must strive to use 100% non-toxic materials.
• We must maintain the productivity of the earth’s living systems.
• Resources must be used fairly and efficiently to meet human needs.

There is a readily understandable logic behind these principles:

• Renewable: If resources are non-renewable, then by definition, they won’t be available for the future, and their use at an unsustainable rate hinders future generations.
• Non-Toxic: If materials are toxic, then by definition, they are harming life.
• Abundant: If we are hindering the ability of living systems to be productive, we’re increasing the risk that their yield won’t be available to sustain life.
• Equitable: If we exacerbate inequity, we risk immigration pressures, unrest, rebellion, and invasion where peoples aren’t able to meet their basic needs.

TNS was very influential in the mid- to late 1990s among many of the people who came to characterize sustainability consulting as a profession. I’m not going to drop names, but you know who you are.

If not top of mind often these days, the general direction of the TNS principles has been broadly validated by billions of people. On September 25, 2015, the United Nations adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to “end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all” by 2030, building on the eight Millennium Development Goals set in 2000.

Figure 1.1 UN SDG Chart.

Source: United Nations.

All 17 goals are highlighted in Figure 1.1. In addition to stressing clean water, clean energy, and healthy life on land and sea, the SDGs emphasize social equity.

• No Poverty
• Zero Hunger
• Good Health (maternal survival, epidemic reduction, road traffic safety)
• Quality Education (access to primary, secondary, and university education; vocational and technical skills)
• Gender Equality (equal rights, pay, access to resources)
• Access to Clean Water (sufficient for quality of life)
• Access to Affordable and Clean Energy (energy to provide quality of life, while not hindering quality of life elsewhere)
• Decent Work and Economy (economic growth in least developed countries, improved global resource efficiency)
• Reduced Inequality within and among Countries (higher income growth in the bottom 40%, reduced discrimination policy, orderly migration)
• Peace and Justice (free of war, just rule of law)

The SDGs, like TNS, provide a model framework for results whether you’re an external sustainability consultant, internal company staff, or involved in non-profit, philanthropic, or academic endeavors. If in the United States we were measuring ourselves against SDG goals, we would see that we have much to do. It’s not simply an exercise for the developing world, as in the international contest, we’re in 31st place(!), according to the Sustainable Development Report,¹ the global study that shows where each nation stands on SDG implementation! The thirty-first place for the United States would never happen in an Olympics contest. Yet, here we are.

The question many businesses face, in considering how to contribute, is: how are SDGs relevant? As a business, you might not directly impact transboundary integrated water resources management or the poverty rate of your nation. But you can pay living wage. You can donate to poverty alleviation and workforce development efforts. There are ways to work with SDGs, and smart companies are figuring out those ways.

Given there are 17 goals with 169 targets, it is admittedly a little overwhelming. The key is to identify those that are most relevant to your business. If you’re a seafood restaurant chain, Life Under Sea is a logical choice. If you’re teaching STEM skills to girls, Gender Equity is well aligned.

In addition to vision, implementation is crucial. “Vision without execution is hallucination” is a quote attributed to people ranging from Thomas Edison to Steve Case. Without translation of a vision into clear actions, you’ll remain in the realm of delirium. As it turns out, there are structures and standards developed specifically for businesses that help address the SDG spectrum of issues.

Have some standards

People should have values. Companies are nothing more than a collection of people . . . by extension, all companies should have values.

– Tim Cook, CEO of Apple

If you believe you should have standards in some relationships in your life, you should have standards for your business relationships, too. Certain standards are required by the government, yet many important standards are instead adopted voluntarily after an informed review of a business challenge.

The B Corporation standard is a standard for responsibility that predated the SDGs. B Corporation is similar to TNS and the SDGs by providing a holistic framework as outlined in Figure 1.2, but different in serving as a business-specific standard rather than an international model. Even if the broad TNS principles can be applied to business, B Corporation gets into details that are more readily incorporated by businesses.

Figure 1.2 B Corp Logo.

Source: B Lab, bcorporation.net.

As much as I hear about B Corporations, I’m often surprised that there are only 4,000+ of them currently in the world, less than 0.001% of all businesses. B Corporations tend to be smaller businesses, as the governance requirements can be challenging for publicly traded companies, even if a few companies like Danone and Etsy have proven a publicly traded B Corporation is not a complete unicorn. You join the B Corp club by scoring 80 or more on the 200-point B Impact Assessment (BIA). Additional requirements may be added in the near-term, but that’s the key threshold for now. Note the self-assessment involved in the BIA requires you to provide documentation, run numbers, and formalize policies in what is generally a process of several months, including cycles of review by B Corporation support staff.

To be a successful B Corporation, you must prove good practice in the areas of governance, worker care, community, customers, and the environment, as depicted in Figures 1.3 and 1.4. Good practice is inclusive of climate strategy and climate action.

Figure 1.3a B Corp Environment.

Source: B Lab, bcorporation.net.

Figure 1.3b B Corp Customers.

Source: B Lab, bcorporation.net.

Figure 1.4a B Corp Community.

Source: B Lab, bcorporation.net.

Figure 1.4b B Corp Workers.

Source: B Lab, bcorporation.net.

Figure 1.4c B Corp Governance.

Source: B Lab, bcorporation.net.

As good as B Corporations are, you can go further. Enter LIFT Economy, a consulting firm whose mission is “for the benefit of all life.” I have been watching LIFT for years, and I have appreciated their thought leadership around how a business should operate in service of that mission. Elements they encourage to build upon a B Corp baseline include the following:

• Need-Oriented Products and Services. The COVID-19 pandemic was a lesson in the resilience of providing “essential services” and meeting core needs. If your offering is not essential, you’re at risk of being shut down. With B Corporations, you do need to show benefits of your products and services, but the Assessment as a standard doesn’t explicitly require need-oriented goods and services. The difference is in providing products and services for which there is a real need, rather than optional products that happen to find willing buyers, like manufacturing small umbrellas for exotic drinks. Defining “need” is certainly nuanced, and different people can have different yet valid answers. If someone chooses to buy something, it suggests they have a need, but products that are cosmetic or ornamental are less connected to what are generally considered basic ...