High Liner Foods is a leading frozen seafood supplier in North America, sourcing and processing over 20 species from all over the world. In 2024, the company celebrated its 125-year anniversary. With a long legacy behind it, High Liner Foods is focused on building a sustainable future.
The company’s sustainability team is intensely focused on taking ESG action across the organization, from climate initiatives to sourcing responsible fisheries, championing human rights, and developing robust and comprehensive due diligence practices. The team is hard at work implementing and reporting on sustainability initiatives and complying with climate disclosures — which is how they discovered Manifest Climate.
How would you describe Manifest Climate?
Manifest Climate is a tool that allows you to look introspectively at what you’re currently doing around climate disclosure and build a plan to improve in the short, medium or long term.
It really allows you to see your climate disclosure from an unbiased third-party perspective and ask, “am I meeting the benchmark or not? Am I meeting the intent of the disclosure, or not?”
Josh Austin, Senior Manager, Sustainability @ High Liner Foods
Building climate competence internally
Although climate disclosures are not currently a requirement in Canada, (High Liner Foods is headquartered in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia), the sustainability team knows that disclosure mandates are on their way. To get ahead of upcoming regulatory requirements, the team considered hiring external consultants, but instead found Manifest Climate. “We started looking at how Manifest Climate could help High Liner strengthen our reporting muscles,” says Josh Austin, the company’s Senior Sustainability Manager.
“We didn’t want to rely on hiring consultants every year for reporting, and felt we could do this internally with Manifest Climate’s guidance and expertise,” Austin explains. “Manifest Climate offered a blend of the human side and the tech side that allowed us to understand how to comply with any relevant climate disclosure framework. It also helped us identify any compliance gaps and build an action plan to be self-reliant.”
While engaging consultants would get the job done, High Liner believed that Manifest Climate would help the team grow their climate disclosure capabilities internally, bringing expert advice and guidance while simultaneously taking much of the manual burden off the team’s shoulders.
Manifest Climate also allows any climate information to be stored centrally, avoiding the trap of keeping climate knowledge and competence confined to a single team member. “It’s not just information that’s residing with one person,” says Austin. “The ability for the rest of the team to work within the system and have discussions with the Manifest Climate team has been a good opportunity to share that information,” he explains, effectively democratizing climate knowledge at the company.
Saving time and reducing costs
“We don’t necessarily have the resources to be combing through every single piece of the TCFD or ISSB with a fine-toothed comb,” says Austin. “Having a platform like Manifest Climate, which pulls out the key disclosures we should be trying to meet, is helpful. It allows us to spend our time efficiently on understanding how we’re going to comply, as opposed to what compliance looks like.”
Leveraging a platform has also had the benefit of being more cost-effective. “There’s certainly a cost savings there,” says Austin. “In the end our disclosure will be just as robust and thorough as it would have been with any other consultant that we could hire, so there’s a financial benefit,” he added.
Building a task force for climate disclosure
With the goal of keeping reporting in-house, High Liner built a small task force focused on climate disclosure, bringing in two members of the finance team, a project manager, and Austin himself. The task force has already put Manifest Climate to work and generated an action plan to help the company prepare for Q1 2025 disclosure requirements. “If it’s voluntary, or if it’s mandatory, we’re ready to comply,” says Austin. “We’ve used Manifest Climate to help us understand the gaps in our current disclosure framework and how we can fill those gaps — whether it’s through saying more about what we’re already doing or building different processes or mechanisms in order to meet the disclosure standards,” he explains.
Expert guidance for complex disclosure standards
While the High Liner team have found Manifest Climate’s gap analysis and peer benchmarking functionalities helpful, what stands out for them is the human element — the team behind the software. High Liner has been able to share feedback on the platform, which Manifest Climate has integrated, building out new functionality to support High Liner’s needs and goals.
At the same time, High Liner has leaned on the climate and technical expertise of Manifest’s team to support their complex disclosure compliance requirements. “What’s been the biggest help is working directly with people at Manifest Climate,” says Austin. “It really allows us to look at exactly what is required of us if we want to be 100% compliant,” says Austin. “The team has been super helpful, just listening to our needs in terms of what we need to understand to build out our disclosure.”
Building confidence for any future disclosure scenarios
“Prior to working with Manifest Climate, there wasn’t a lot of knowledge around what would be required [for climate disclosures], which concerned us,” says Austin. The team was unsure what they would need to do to prepare, how much it would cost, and how long it would take them to achieve compliance with whichever frameworks would end up being relevant to the company. Very quickly, Manifest Climate was able to give the team answers to these questions. “It’s given us the confidence to understand what we need to do to comply with any type of climate disclosure in the future,” says Austin. “We feel really comfortable that we know what we need to do to build mechanisms and publicly disclose what we’re doing around climate. We know that we can talk to senior leadership and let them know we have a plan, we feel good about the plan, and when it comes time for disclosure, we’ll be ready for it. The ability to have that confidence and to reduce the stress around the unknowns has been a huge advantage for us, thanks to Manifest Climate,” he added.
Get Manifest Climate — the global climate intelligence tool for sustainability teams
Manifest Climate is the leading Climate Intelligence Software that provides decision-makers with climate-related insights and recommendations to inform decisions, seize opportunities, and mitigate risk.
Manifest Climate uses industry-leading AI models to create comparability from qualitative climate information faster, more accurately, and more consistently than humans.
Issuers, service providers, and financial institutions choose Manifest Climate for ease of use, in-house climate expertise, and depth of qualitative climate data.
With Manifest Climate, teams reduce time spent on manual research by 99%, improving precision and consistency as a result.
