Every company with a climate target needs a proper strategy for getting these. That’s easier said than done; for example, while more than 3,000 organizations have set science-based targets, our data suggests that only half of these companies publish climate transition plans — and just a fraction of these plans have tangible effects on resource allocation and business strategy.
But without a credible roadmap and strategy, it’s unlikely that organizations will achieve their climate targets.
Enter Manifest Climate, a climate risk management platform that helps companies supercharge their climate strategies. Manifest Climate helps sustainability teams craft effective strategies in four key ways.
1. Peer benchmarking
While the results may not appear in public-facing strategies, peer and industry benchmarking can be an invaluable exercise when developing your own climate strategy. Studying the climate disclosures and transition plans of industry peers and climate leaders can help inform your own materiality assessments, offer insights into potential challenges to your industry’s unique net-zero pathway, and provide ideas for initiatives and next steps to work on.
When done correctly, benchmarking can also spark collaboration within and between industries. This collaboration is essential for achieving meaningful climate action at scale. It also helps to unify industries, creating universal environmental standards for suppliers and partners across an organization’s value chain.
Benchmark better with Manifest Climate
Manifest Climate analyzes hundreds of data points per company to reveal how your competitors and industry leaders are reporting on and managing climate risk. Rather than manually conducting a climate benchmarking assessment every year and working from potentially outdated information, you can keep up with competitors’ climate management as new information is released.
2. Disclosure assessment and next-step prioritization
The bulk of your climate strategy should focus on the specific actions and initiatives that will take your organization from its baseline to its ultimate climate goal.
Many of these initiatives should be ready to implement in the here and now. For example, you may set a short-term target to increase your renewable energy mix to lower your Scope 1 and 2 emissions. You might also re-evaluate your spending for climate-related R&D and climate policy lobbying, as well as assess how climate-related factors can and should play into procurement decisions.
Planning for specific climate initiatives requires a detailed understanding of both your emissions baseline and other potential risks or weaknesses in your value chain and operations. It’s also important to hear from as many stakeholders as possible, as well as to seek out competitor and industry best practice climate disclosures and transition plans for inspiration.
Identify next steps with Manifest Climate
Manifest Climate’s proprietary methodology helps you identify data-driven next steps for your climate action plan. Our technology also helps you prioritize what to do next by suggesting the five most important next steps for your organization based on your industry and peer disclosures.
3. Establishing good governance
It may be the forgotten letter in ESG, but good governance is the key to putting climate strategies to work. It’s critical to ensure that the climate mitigation and any adaptation initiatives in your strategy align with your broader business strategy and financial plans. While certain details might need to be kept private for business reasons, make sure you know what specific initiatives will cost and confirm that your company will allocate the appropriate funds to start and sustain your climate ambition. In this context, be as transparent as possible and understand potential criticisms if details are omitted. What might appear to be a perfect transition plan on the surface may crumble under scrutiny.
Net zero should become a core part of your company’s business strategy — not an add-on. Look for ways to incentivize and reward climate progress as you would with other KPIs. One effective governance mechanism can be adjusting executive and broader employee compensation to better match your transition plan’s objectives.
Another strategy, and one that Manifest Climate recommends, involves empowering a climate champion to build internal climate expertise, as well as to integrate climate risk management and mitigation activities throughout the company. However, buy-in from a single person is not enough — your climate champion needs the whole company on board. That might involve difficult but necessary conversations.
Centralize climate management with Manifest Climate
Manifest Climate is your single source of truth for guiding your organization through the climate transformation. Our software ensures institutional continuity within your company and keeps your entire organization on the same page. Our Resources feature allows employees from any team to gain the skills required to identify climate risks, stay ahead of climate trends, and manage the climate transformation.
4. Adhering to standard/framework requirements
As more climate disclosure regulations come online, companies should look carefully at which rules they will need to comply with and what these regulations say about climate strategies and transition plans.
Each climate regulation or standard defines a transition plan differently, requiring unique elements and approaches. For example, the SEC’s proposed climate disclosure rule references adaptation in its transition plan requirement. Meanwhile, the TCFD, ISSB, and CSRD place a heavier focus on decarbonization.
Companies subject to multiple regulations or that have pre-existing commitments to voluntary reporting frameworks will need to investigate the differences and similarities between these various standards and frameworks. After that, they will need to decide how they can best meet all the requirements. Companies may be able to address all of them through a single, all-encompassing transition plan, or they may find it simpler to develop multiple transition plans that each have a unique focus.
This step is equally important for companies with existing transition plans that are facing new regulations. A new regulatory requirement indicates that it’s time to review and potentially update your existing transition plan.
Centralize climate management with Manifest Climate
Manifest Climate is your single source of truth for guiding your organization through the climate transformation. Our software ensures institutional continuity within your company and keeps your entire organization on the same page. Our Resources feature allows employees from any team to gain the skills required to identify climate risks, stay ahead of climate trends, and manage the climate transformation.
Craft a credible climate strategy with Manifest Climate
Manifest Climate is a climate risk management platform that helps companies supercharge their climate strategies. Our platform is the world’s best at assessing climate disclosures. We help to highlight your climate disclosure and management gaps across multiple standards and frameworks and provide data-driven recommendations for improvement. Our technology also helps your team reduce time spent on manual research by 75%.
Our climate assessments don’t just tell you what’s missing from your climate management. They also tell you what to do next. Our customized, next-step recommendations are based on what’s worked for organizations just like yours and will help you develop a data-driven action plan to turn your climate commitments into action.
Manifest Climate helps your company:
- Identify material climate risks and opportunities
- Uncover gaps in your climate disclosures
- Improve your disclosure management with customized recommendations on what investors are looking for
- Benchmark your disclosures against peers and industry leaders
- Easily improve alignment with world-recognized frameworks and standards, including the TCFD and ISSB, as well as reporting rules out of the US, Canada, and UK
- Build internal expertise and manage climate knowledge from a central location
- Keep team members up-to-date on business-relevant climate trends and regulatory updates
