Climate and Energy

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Established in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading authority on climate change knowledge, and is dedicated to providing objective, scientific information relevant to understanding the scientific basis and risks of climate change. If you are looking for reliable summaries of published, peer-reviewed literature on climate change to inform your strategy and decision-making, this is an excellent place to start. The IPCC's newly released Synthesis Report is the fourth and final instalment of the Sixth Assessment Report (6AR). It summarises the first three sections of the 6AR, which explained the physical science of the climate crisis, including observations and projections of global heating; the impacts of the climate crisis and how to adapt to them; and ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Synthesis Report makes it clear that time has run out for incremental action - humanity must respond with swift and significant action to avoid the worst impacts of increasingly extreme heatwaves, droughts, flooding, and other crisis conditions.

The IPCC also produces Special Reports, which assess specific issues, and Methodology Reports, which provide practical guidelines for the preparation of greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories.

Global Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

If you are looking for a reliable and comprehensive starting point for building up your knowledge and understanding of climate change, NASA's repository on climate change is your one-stop shop. This platform provides a wealth of relevant and credible information that will support the learning of executives and boards, sustainability change agents, and managers, including the latest research, breaking news, and nuanced Q&A on climate change evidence, causes, effects, and solutions.

State of the Global Climate 2023

This annual report from the World Meteorological Organization provides an update on trends in global climate indicators; explores recent high-impact events, including heatwaves, wildfires, flooding, drought, and severe storms; and explains the risks and impacts of climate crisis conditions on food security, population displacement, ecosystems, and more.

Emissions Gap Report

The UNEP Emissions Gap Report provides a yearly review of changes between where greenhouse emissions are predicted to be in 2030 and where they should be to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. The report also analyses low-carbon recovery measures, summarises the scale of new net-zero emissions pledges by nations and looks at the potential of the lifestyle, aviation and shipping sectors to bridge the gap. This is a helpful resource for remaining abreast of the 'commitment' gap and for understanding the scale and scope of climate change-related goals that your company will need to set in order to do your part in slowing - and eventually reversing - the rise in GHG emissions.

Climate Action Tracker

The Climate Action Tracker (CAT) is an independent scientific research group that tracks climate action and measures it against the globally agreed Paris Agreement aim of "holding warming well below 2°C, and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C." A collaboration of two organisations, Climate Analytics and NewClimate Institute, the CAT engages in a wide range of activities for the benefit of advancing climate change education and action, including quantifying and evaluating climate change mitigation targets, policies, pledges, and initiatives; determining likely temperature increases during the 21st century using the MAGICC climate model; developing sectoral analysis to illustrate required pathways for meeting the global temperature goals; and more. This is an excellent source of information on climate trajectories and the emissions gap, and for understanding climate governance at the national level.

State of Climate Action 2023

This report is a good resource for helping business leaders and sustainability professionals understand where global efforts to address climate change should be prioritised. It provides a comprehensive overview of the global gap in climate action across the world’s highest-emitting systems, highlighting where progress must accelerate over the next decade to keep the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit warming to 1.5°C within reach. It identifies 1.5°C-aligned targets and associated indicators for power, buildings, industry, transport, forests and land, and food and agriculture, and includes targets and indicators to track progress made in scaling up carbon dioxide removal technologies and finance. It also explores the barriers to more ambitious action, as well as a key set of factors that can enable transformational change across each system.

Breaking Boundaries: The Science of our Planet

This film is among the first mainstreams efforts to explain environmental limits (such as the Paris Agreement's limits on greenhouse gasses) to the broader public. Hosted by David Attenborough and Johan Rockström, and based on the Planetary Boundaries Framework, the film provides a good summary of nine key earth system processes and explains how abrupt and irreversible changes are likely to occur when key “limits” or “boundaries” are trespassed. The film will help to acquaint you with the concept of thresholds, and will explain how close we are to exceeding them, or - in the case of climate, biodiversity, and other process - how far past we have already gone.

Points of No Return

This resource explains how climate change is threatening to push Earth's arctic, land, and oceanic systems towards and beyond "tipping points," the result of which may spell catastrophic regime shifts. The information here has been compiled by Grist - a nonprofit organisation dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. This resource will help you to quickly build an understanding of how climate-related change is manifesting in key systems and regions, such coral reefs, in Atlantic circulation, in Greenland and Antarctica, and in permafrost and forests.

ISIpedia: the open climate-impacts encyclopedia

ISIpedia provides public access to climate-impact science materials to improve understanding of climate related risks. These materials include simulations from Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP), which offers a framework for consistently projecting the impacts of climate change across affected sectors and spatial scales; articles on extreme events, biodiversity, water, forests, fisheries, and other topics that intersect with climate change; and comprehensive glossary of climate- and climate change-related terms; and more. This is an excellent reference point for sustainability practitioners who want to learn more about national-level climate-impact projections.

En-ROADS Climate Solutions Simulator

This free climate simulator from Climate Interactive, the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and Ventana Systems will allow you to explore the connections and impact of dozens of policies - such as adjusting subsidies on energy types, electrifying transport, and incentivising the electrification of buildings and transportation - on hundreds of factors, such as global temperature, air quality, energy prices, and sea level rise. This system dynamics model is carefully grounded in the best available science, and has been calibrated against a wide range of existing integrated assessment, climate, and energy models to help you visualise the effects of our actions on global warming.

WMO Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update

This annual report from World Meteorological Organization (WMO) provides a synthesis of near-future predictions that can help sustainability change agents to educate leaders within their organisation and to inform the company's strategy and messaging. For example, this latest report suggests that there is a 50/50 chance of average global temperature already reaching 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels within the next five years, and a 93% likelihood of at least one year between 2022-2026 becoming the warmest on record.

Climate Watch

Climate Watch is an online platform that that can help you to better understand, visualise, and convey climate-related trends and progress. The platform provides a comprehensive array of open data on countries' climate plans and nationally determined contributions, emissions data, national economic and emission scenarios, and more.

Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points

Climate tipping points are 'points of no return,' or conditions beyond which changes in a part of the climate system become self-perpetuating. This comprehensive article explains how global warming of even just 1°C, a threshold that the planet has already passed, puts communities, environmental systems, and economies at risk by triggering some tipping points. It reassesses known climate tipping points, as well as their timescales and impacts, and highlights steps to further improve understanding on these tipping points. This resource for achieving a more up-to-date understanding of the actions required to prevent the worst outcomes from climate change.

10 New Insights in Climate Science 2023/2024

This resource highlights the latest key findings and insights related to climate change. It is produced as a collaboration between Future Earth, The Earth League, the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), and others, and is updated annually. This resource may be of particular benefit to change agents and other sustainability professionals who are interested in presenting crucial (and compelling) climate-related bullet points to senior leaders.

The State of Climate Action: Major Course Correction Needed from +1.5% to −7% Annual Emissions

This white paper from the World Economic Forum can help you understand the insufficiency of climate action to date and the dramatic change of course required to limit global warming to below 1.5°C. It explains the insufficiency of national commitments and policies, the lack of corporate climate action, the lag in scaling up green technologies, and the massive climate funding gap. It also explains the need to radically ramp up emissions mitigation and reduction efforts even if the 1.5°C goal slips out of reach. These insights will be most useful sustainability practitioners and decision-makers, such as senior managers and boards of directors.

Climate TRACE

Climate TRACE has created a sophisticated and accessible inventory of greenhouse gas emission sites from around the world to help you pinpoint decarbonisation opportunities. This mapping platform uses machine learning, satellites, and other technology to detect and track more than 350 million sources of greenhouse gas pollution from around the globe.

The Climate Dictionary

This dictionary from the UNDP can help you to better understand and communicate the issue of climate change. It uses compelling visuals, concise explanations, and engaging storytelling to make climate terms and concepts widely accessible and relatable, and without scientific jargon. This resource will be most useful to sustainability change agents and other communicators seeking to engage with those less familiar with climate topics.

Climate Change and Climate Risks: What Corporate Directors Need to Know

Climate change threatens both the future success of businesses and the wellbeing of society. Corporate directors have the opportunity and responsibility to steer their businesses towards supporting climate resilience. To do so, directors must understand climate science, the risks and opportunities for businesses, and the actions needed to respond to them.

Five ways the climate crisis impacts human security

This short article from the UN is a good primer on some of the key ways climate change is impacting human security, including greater competition over land and water and increased security risks for women and girls.

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Tagged by Source

This visualisation from NASA shows atmospheric carbon emissions and sequestration across the globe over a one year period. It includes emission sources from fossil fuel combustion, biomass burning, land ecosystems, and the ocean. It also shows the areas of land and ocean that are sequestering carbon. This resource provides compelling visuals that can be shared with business leaders and anyone else who would benefit from better understanding the scale of our human impact on the carbon cycle.

Climate Risk Oversight for Directors

This 4-part video series will help corporate directors and leaders understand the risks of climate change and their role and fiduciary responsibilities to oversee these risks. We have also created videos specific to the Canadian and South African context.

Emerging Trends and Best Practice in Climate Position Statements

Climate change is happening, and the impacts are intensifying. Companies are expected to take a position on climate change and outline an appropriate response. The Embedding Project’s climate position guide helps companies to articulate a concise and transparent board level position on climate change. Drawing on in-depth analyses of over 2,600 climate position statements, this guidebook provides a checklist for crafting a climate position statement with concrete examples from a range of industries and global settings. 

From win-win to net zero: would the real sustainability please stand up?

This article is a great place to start if you are confused about the scale and scope of action required by industry to credibly address climate change. The article explores how two fundamentally different interpretations of ‘sustainability’ have come to exist: a net zero imperative that is informed by science and acknowledges social and environmental thresholds, and a type of "win-win" sustainable business model that favours “sustainable growth” and tries to promote palatable (yet inadequate) amendments to the status quo. Duncan Austin explains how net zero commitments are an imperative for stopping and reversing climate change, and that "win-win" cannot deliver the change we need in time. This article will also help you to understand how - and why - it is necessary for us to reimagine prosperity and to conceive of and create an economy based on no growth or even shrinking growth.

Project Drawdown

The Drawdown Review is Project Drawdown's flagship report, and was written to support the efforts of business leaders and sustainability professionals to rapidly assess the evolving landscape of climate change solutions. This publication offers key insights and a straight-forward solutions framework that will help you and your organization to move the world towards "Drawdown" - the future point in time when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and begin to decline.

Project Drawdown also conducts ongoing review and analysis of climate solutions, and offers other regular publications, including new solutions, scenarios, and insights. Their other top resources include an online course on climate solutions; job function action guides; a comprehensive table of solutions; and a video series "roadmap" for strategically mobilising these solutions.

How to Set Up Effective Climate Governance on Corporate Boards: Guiding principles and questions

Boards need to be equipped with the right tools to make the best possible decisions for the long-term resilience of their organisations and to provide effective governance around climate risks and opportunities. In response, this paper from the World Economic Forum and PwC proposes tools that support boards to navigate climate risks and opportunities. The principles herein are designed to increase directors’ climate awareness, embed climate issues into board structures and processes, and improve identification and navigation of climate-related risks and opportunities for business. This work contributes to the WEF’s Compact for responsive and responsible leadership, and provides a compass for enabling effective climate governance.

Climate Change Briefing: Questions for Directors to Ask

This brief is a good primer on climate change for directors. It offers 20 questions they can ask management about how they are adapting to and mitigating the impacts of climate change. Part of Chartered Accountants of Canada’s 20 Questions Series, it includes specific questions related to risk, strategy, financial performance, external reporting systems, and controls and governance.

Carbon Disclosure Project

Best known for their in-depth questionnaire, certification program, and scoring system, the Carbon Disclosure Project provides sector-related climate change research, with full reports available to members and signatories. These resources will help you to quickly survey the scene of climate change efforts, needs, and predictions within the context of your industry.

Climate Policy Tracker for Business

Policies resulting from the implementation of the Paris Agreement are reshaping national economies, value chains, and corporate strategies. In response, the We Mean Business coalition and BSR have created the Climate Policy Tracker - a free online platform designed to help businesses determine which climate policies are relevant across key countries and industries. This resource provides up-to-date information on climate regulations and will enable you to build a comprehensive picture of the policies impacting your operations and value chain based on sector and locations of operation.

Breaking Down Corporate Net-Zero Climate Targets

Critically assessing companies' decarbonisation targets requires breaking them down into individual components, such as target types and units, the boundaries for the emissions they cover, and associated timelines. The lack of uniformity can make comparison a challenge. This guide from MSCI introduces an analytical framework to help you evaluate climate targets across three key dimensions: comprehensiveness, ambition, and feasibility. This framework will be particularly helpful to institutional investors who are trying to better understand the credibility of climate commitments to better mitigate climate-related risks in their portfolio.

Primer on Climate Change: Directors’ Duties and Disclosure Obligations

This primer from the Climate Governance Initiative can help directors and other senior executives understand the material financial and systemic risks that climate change presents to corporations and their investors. It begins by providing an overview of the evidence of these financial risks, and then examines the obligations these risks create in respect to both the duties of directors and disclosure across different jurisdictions. It also considers the increasing attention to biodiversity risk and its potential to affect directors’ duties.

Corporate Climate Stocktake 2023

This report from the We Mean Business Coalition can help you understand the current state of private sector progress toward achieving net zero. Based on a survey of business leaders, it highlights the accelerating transition to clean technologies, system constraints impeding progress, recent breakthrough innovations, the key role of governments, and outstanding financial cost challenges. The report also provides sector-specific net-zero transition summaries, identifying the key transition challenges and opportunities within each sector. This snapshot of corporate climate action will be most useful to strategy teams and sustainability practitioners in general.  

Nature and Climate Action: A Resource Navigator for Companies and Financial Institutions

This comprehensive resource created by the Global Commons Alliance, the Climate Champions Team, and AccountAbility can help you navigate the resource landscape for business action on nature and climate. Section 4 maps out global frameworks, standards, methodologies, and decision-making tools, and section 6 provides a step-by-step pathway to learning and features resource tables that align with the target-setting frameworks of the SBTN and SBTi. Sections 7 and 8 then provide in-depth summaries of key resources. This resource will be especially useful to professionals seeking clarity on the use of both new and well-established sustainability tools and frameworks.

The right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment

In August 2022, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution recognising the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right. States, international organisations, businesses, and other stakeholders have a responsibility to “scale up efforts” to ensure a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment for all.

Business Guide to Advancing Climate Justice

This guide from B Lab and Forum For The Future was created to help business leaders, sustainability change-makers, and entrepreneurs embed equity and justice into their climate action efforts. The guide compiles the perspectives of people living and working at the frontlines of climate change, people working to support and advance social justice issues, and those who believe that there is a significant role for the private sector to take action. It also provides tangible guidance from business, policy-makers, and civil society experts working in partnership with frontline communities to advance these issues. This includes guidance on equitable partnerships, internal and external engagement, value chains, policy advocacy, and more.

This guide builds on previous guidance from B Lab, including the Climate Justice Playbook for Business. They have also created a series of case studies to illustrate how B Corps are advancing climate justice.

The Climate Justice Playbook for Business

Putting people and justice at the center of business efforts to address climate change is imperative to achieving the actions necessary to reduce and reverse its impacts on communities, the environment, and industry. B Lab’s Climate Justice Playbook for Business is a good starting point for understanding and enacting climate justice. It provides a sound business case for climate justice, features case studies of climate justice in action, and addresses key obstacles, insights, and questions. It also identifies the key stakeholders and rights holders who your business should collaborate with to maximise the scale and scope of your contributions to achieving a just transition.

In-depth Q&A: What is ‘climate justice’?

This is an excellent primer on climate justice, and may be particularly helpful for executives, board members, other business leaders, and change agents who are not yet familiar with the concept and who may have questions similar to the ones posed. This resource explores the history of climate justice; explains why the impacts of climate change have such a disproportionately large effect on those who have contributed the least to global warming and who are most vulnerable to the consequences; and examines how the concept is influencing our social, political, and legal spheres.

Experts: Why does ‘climate justice’ matter?

What does 'climate justice' mean, and why is important? This article from Carbon Brief features a range of responses from scientists, policy experts, and campaigners that can help to grow your understanding of why it is important for businesses to move beyond climate mitigation and adaptation and advance climate justice in their strategy and goals.

The unjust climate: Measuring the impacts of climate change on rural poor, women and youth

This report from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations provides concrete and comprehensive evidence on the scale of the challenge posed by the climate crisis for rural and vulnerable peoples. It illustrates wealth-, gender-, and age-related disparities in climate vulnerability; highlights priorities and provides recommendations for inclusive action; and explains in detail its data, variables, and research methods.

A People's Orientation to a Regenerative Economy

This guide from the United Frontline Table is an excellent starting point for understanding what a "regenerative economy" is and how your company can play its part in achieving it. It provides nuanced definitions for a range of intersecting issues and phenomena, including Climate Justice, Feminist Economies, Sacrifice Zones, and a Just Recovery and Just Transition. It introduces five critical points of intervention that will help to develop your narrative of positive contribution and shape policies that will uplift people and communities. The guide also includes a series of prompting questions, a framework for policies that will help you to advance a regenerative economy, and fourteen themes (or planks) that must be addressed to achieve a regenerative economy.

Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration

The impacts of climate change will not be distributed evenly among the world's people, and the pursuit of clean water and fertile land and relief from rising sea levels and diastrous weather patterns is predicted to yield an historic wave of human migration. This report from the Word Bank will help you to understand the relationship between climate change and human migration; provides modeling and projects for climate migration within Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America; and explains how climate migration can be managed to reduce undue hardship.

Groundswell Part 2: Acting on Internal Climate Migration

A follow-up to Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration, this report from the World Bank uses scenario-based modeling to explain how climate change will push millions of people to migrate from East Asia and the Pacific, North Africa, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It will further build your understanding of how climate change impacts are shaping mobility trends, and highlights how far-sighted planning is needed to ensure sustainable development outcomes.

Climate Inequality Report 2023: Fair taxes for a sustainable future in the Global South

Climate impacts are not equally distributed across the world; on average, the countries of the Global South suffer greater impacts than their counterparts in the Global North. This comprehensive report from the World Inequality Lab can help you to understand the inequality of climate change contributions, the inequality of exposure to climate change impacts, and how these inequalities can be addressed.

Although the report is intended for the public sector, the findings and recommendations may provide valuable insights for sustainability and public affairs teams seeking to support resilience in the communities where they operate.

Climate Equality: A planet for the 99%

This paper from Oxfam can help you better understand how inequality is intertwined with the climate crisis. It explains the inequality between those emitting the least and most greenhouse gasses and highlights how those least responsible also have the least ability to mitigate climate change and adapt to its impacts. It also highlights three solutions to address both inequality and the climate crisis together and provides policy recommendations. This resource will be useful to sustainability practitioners and anyone interested in supporting the Just Transition.

Climate Action Now: Online Course

This free, self-paced course from the Pachamama Alliance can help you understand the climate crisis through the lens of climate justice. It begins by exploring the crucial role equity plays in addressing climate crisis, and then dives into the interconnected systems of inequity that have created - and are being perpetuated by - the crisis. Finally, it demonstrates the importance of centering communities in climate solutions and how to find your role in the climate fight.

Climate Justice is the Solution to Our Climate Crisis

Leading companies recognise the reality of climate change and its effects. In response, they often focus on mitigating emissions. But these efforts are only part of the solution. This blog post discusses the need for companies to participate in a just transition to a net-zero economy.

9 Actions That Will Help Your Company Support Climate Justice

Advancing climate justice is the responsibility of every company, but it is a complex, multifaceted undertaking, and you may be wondering where to begin. Here are some key actions your company can take right away.

Toolkit - Impact of Climate Change on Indigenous Women, Girls, Two-Spirit, Transgender and Gender-Diverse People

This toolkit from the Native Women's Association of Canada can help you to understand how climate change is impacting Indigenous women and their communities, as well as the vital roles these peoples play in protecting the environment. This kit features a collection of tools that highlight how Indigenous practices and traditions can advance climate change adaptation and mitigation at all geographic levels; provide information on biodiversity improvement tactics; and link to resources that support food security, wildfire management, funding opportunities for climate action, and more. This is a good resource for change agents that want to apply an Indigenous world view and gender lens to their climate justice education and activities.

Advocating for Change: A Compendium on Climate Mobility

This resource by the Climate Migration Council can help you understand the complexities of increasing climate change-related mobility and the need for action. The first part of the guide outlines five action areas, or “pillars”: 1) improving displacement prevention; 2) supporting disaster-affected people who persist in place; 3) enhancing mobility pathways; 4) protecting displaced persons; and 5) taking action on loss and damage. Each pillar is broken down into two or three sub-sections, and each sub-section features a backgrounder and a list of recommended actions. The second part of the guide highlights a diversity of perspectives for addressing climate mobility, including a climate justice lens, a development lens, a (human) security lens, a migration management lens, and others. Users can draw on different approaches based on what best suits their context and resonates with their target audience. These insights will be most useful to changemakers seeking to better understand how climate displacement dynamics may affect business operations and value chains.

Blueprint for Implementing a Leading Climate Transition Action Plan

This report from Ceres makes the business case for climate transition action plans (CTAPs) in response to climate-related risks, opportunities, and regulations. The report provides specific ways companies can create a leading plan across six action areas, including goal- and target-setting, decarbonising the business, ensuring a just transition, advocating for public policy, supporting integration and accountability, and tracking and reporting progress. By developing a credible and effective CTAP, companies can better position themselves for not just compliance but success in the low-carbon-economy.

Just transition litigation tracking tool

The trend of systemic abuse of communities and workers in renewable energy value chains has created a surge in litigation from Indigenous Peoples, communities, and workers. This tracking tool from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre was created to be the primary hub for just transition-related litigation lawsuits against companies or states for authorising a specific business activity linked to transition mineral mining or the renewable energy sector. It allows you to search by type of lawsuit, company, project, sector, natural resource, rights impacted, and more.

The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures

Momentum is growing for organisations to formally and transparently articulate the risks that climate change poses to the value of their assets and their future profitability. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) emerged as a response to this call for action, empowering companies to more effectively measure and evaluate their own risks and those of their suppliers and competitors. The TCFD promoted “consistent, comparable, reliable, clear, and efficient” voluntary climate-related financial disclosures, and has developed comprehensive recommendations and resources in support of this. These resources focus on governance, strategy, risk, metrics, targets, and the use of scenario analysis for evaluating climate-related financial risks and opportunities.

The TCFD has produced a comprehensive Final Recommendations report and several supplemental reports, including a Technical supplement, which provides in-depth information and tools for using scenario analyses to understand the strategic implications of climate-related risks and opportunities to your organisation.

Although these resources remain to be an invaluable source of guidance, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and IFRS have announced that the TCFD has fulfilled its remit and disbanded, and that monitoring of the progress of corporate climate-related disclosures now rests with the IFRS Foundation's ISSB.

Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures: Guidance on Metrics, Targets, and Transition Plans

The Task Force developed this guidance to complement their flagship report and to help change agents, finance professionals, and leaders to disclose decision-useful metrics, targets, and transition plan information and link such disclosures with estimates of financial impacts.

This guide will help you to select and disclose the right metrics and climate-related targets; understand how aspects of transition plans may be included in climate-related financial disclosures; and understand how climate-related metrics, targets, and information from transition plans provide information that can be used to estimate the impact of climate change on financial performance.

CEO Guide to climate-related financial disclosures

Written for an executive audience, the WBCSD's CEO Guide to climate-related financial disclosures is a concise complement to TCFD resources. This summary guide will help bring you up to speed on investor demands for better climate system knowledge among business leaders and for the transparent disclosure of climate-related risks and opportunities.

TCFD Good Practice Handbook

This handbook from the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB) and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) identifies good practices in implementing the TCFD recommendations. Drawing upon a diverse range of examples, these good practices cover the four core elements of governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets.

Climate Change and Climate Risk Oversight

Climate change is a planetary emergency that presents severe risks to businesses, society, and the global economy. No business, regardless of the sector, is immune – and businesses around the world have a key role to play to help avoid the worst impacts. This guide will help you understand the science behind climate change, why climate change matters to your business, and what actions your business can take to accelerate the transition to a net-zero, climate-resilient future.

Navigating climate scenario analysis: A guide for institutional investors

A key recommendation of the TCFD is for organisations to conduct scenario analyses to understand the risks and opportunities of possible climate futures, but many companies struggle with developing such scenarios. This 'how-to' guide from the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC) builds on existing reports and research and will help you to create credible climate change-related scenarios. It introduces a five-step framework for understanding and using scenario analysis, and includes instructions for identifying scenario analysis objectives; understanding and selecting scenarios based on available criteria; applying scenario analysis to investments; and taking appropriate action upon review.

Climate Scenario Analysis Reference Approach

This resource from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the Energy Forum was created to provide a common and transparent approach to the use of climate scenarios. The report describes the context and basis for the Reference Approach, and outlines the Energy Forum's rationale, principles, process, and reflections in regards to scenario analysis. This report is also accompanied with an online platform, which collates a broad range of scenarios and variables (e.g. investment, demand, emissions, capacity, etc.) and provides analysis.

Although designed with the energy sector in mind, these resources may be of help to sustainability professionals in any industry.

Scenario Planning for Climate Change: A Guide for Strategists

This book from Nardia Haigh takes a deep dive into climate change-related scenario planning and provides a framework that can help decision-makers develop a climate change strategy. The book builds on a range of rigorously tested scenario planning frameworks and provides a practical, four-step method for developing a scenario planning project. It also includes summaries of common climate change trends.

Her website also offers complementary videos, climate driver summaries, a sample scenario planning project proposal, and various worksheets to help you get started.

How to Conduct Effective Scenario Planning: An Interview with Dr. Nardia Haigh

Scenario planning is a tool for companies to prepare for the unpredictable impacts of sustainability issues. In this blog, we interview Dr. Nardia Haigh to learn more about how to conduct effective scenario planning.

Scenario Planning Made Simple: An 8-Step Method

Scenario planning is an effective strategic tool for decision-makers, but it can be challenging to know where to begin. In this blog, we break down Dr. Nardia Haigh’s scenario planning framework into eight straight-forward steps.

Push It to the Limit: Scenario Planning That Takes Sustainability Seriously

Scenario planning can be an effective strategic process for understanding risks and opportunities, but what about your company’s impacts on society and the environment? In this blog, we provide five recommendations to help create scenarios in which your company supports sustainable futures by operating within the limits of key systems.

The 2030 Calculator

Performing a lifecycle assessment can be a complex, time-consuming, and costly procedure. The 2030 Calculator from Doconomy tries to simplify this process to give companies a better understanding of their full environmental impact - quickly, and at no cost. Although this tool cannot fully replace a detailed analysis, the 2030 Calculator will help to immediately improve the impact transparency of your products and services.

3 common pitfalls of using scenario analysis – and how to avoid them

Climate-related scenario analysis is one of the best available tools for navigating an increasingly unknowable future, and yet common pitfalls are limiting its potential benefits to companies. This article from the CDP highlights three simple recommendations that will help you to make the most of scenario analysis: using a range of distinct and realistic scenarios; selecting the right scenarios for your organisation; and transparently reporting the results.

Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook

Not all climate scenarios are plausible. The Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook provides a systematic assessment of the the plausibility of a climate future in which the Paris Agreement temperature goals are achieved. It applies a plausibility framework that analyzes ten dominant social drivers of decarbonization and six select physical processes of public interest. In so doing, this resource provides key findings and data that can help you to better understand the credibility of decarbonisation opportunities and outcomes, and to better prioritise the allocation of effort and resources for addressing climate change.

TPI Sectoral Decarbonisation Pathways

The Transition Pathway Initiative has created sectoral decarbonisation pathways to help investors assess whether companies in the energy, transport, and industrials sectors are delivering the emissions reductions demanded by climate science within a suitable time period. The pathways are based on scenarios from the International Energy Agency’s (IEA), and will help you to see whether the goals of companies in these sectors are aligned with the actions required and to benchmark accordingly.

Scenarios for Assessing Climate-Related Risks: New Short-Term Scenario Narratives

This report - and the accompanying visualisation tool - were created by UNEP Financial Initiative's Risk Centre to bridge the gap in short-term scenarios that explore near-term climate-related risks, economic volatility, and potential systemic vulnerabilities. They identify short-term scenario narratives that can help financial institutions and others understand the implications and drivers of a range of short-term macroeconomic, transition, and physical shocks, such as geopolitical tension, greenflation, climate migration, and extreme weather. These resources will be especially beneficial for asset managers, insurers, bankers, and investors, but would also benefit enterprise risk and sustainability teams.

Science Based Targets

Building on the momentum of the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN) is a collaboration of 45+ global non-profits and mission-driven organizations working together to develop guidance to set science-based targets for all of Earth’s systems. Science Based Targets has created a five-step target-setting framework that helps you to assess; interpret and prioritise; measure, set, and disclose; act upon; and track your science-based goals. They have also created sector-specific guidance and target monitoring for companies and financial institutions.

At present, Science Based Targets helps companies to develop their goals based on the latest science: SBTi specifically focuses on GHG emission reduction goals, and SBTN specifically focuses on nature positive goals, with target-setting guidance for land, biodiversity, and freshwater. Their respective websites provide comprehensive resources, cases, and support for taking credible action.

Greenhouse Gas Protocol

This is the global standard for measuring GHG emissions. The protocol was developed by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and includes sector specific guidance and calculation tools.

The Net-Zero Standard

The Science Based Targets initiative’s (SBTi) Corporate Net-Zero Standard includes the guidance, criteria, and recommendations companies need to set science-based net-zero targets consistent with limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C. The framework consists of four parts: 1) setting near-term interim science-based targets for rapid, deep emissions cuts, 2) setting long-term science-based targets that align with reaching net-zero at the global or sector level by 2050 or sooner, 3) neutralizing residual emissions, and 4) taking action to mitigate emissions beyond the value chain. This resource also includes specific sector guidance for setting science based targets, as well as guidance for updating and communicating targets. It should be noted that SBTi has reduced their restrictions related to acceptable carbon removal practices, including offsetting, but the document highlights that only the final 5-10% of emissions may be neutralized this way in order to qualify as net-zero. It should also be noted that SBTi is now undertaking a major revision, which will result in V2.0 of the Corporate Net-Zero Standard. Until then, businesses seeking to set SBTi-aligned net-zero targets should use the current Corporate Net-Zero Standard V1.2.

The Evolution of Corporate Climate Commitments: The Role of Carbon Credits in Achieving Net Zero, Carbon Neutrality, and SBTi Targets

New and increasingly sophisticated carbon reduction targets have emerged as organizations look to aggressively reduce their emissions. This resource from 3Degrees will help you to understand the difference between three increasingly commonly climate-related targets: carbon neutrality, science-based targets, and net zero emissions. The guide also highlights solutions for addressing unabated or residual emissions.

The World Roadmap to Net Zero by 2050

The IEA's World Roadmap to Net Zero by 2050 is essential reading for businesses directly and indirectly involved in the energy industry. This guidance will help you to understand what is needed from companies, governments, investors, and citizens to fully decarbonise the energy sector and set emissions in line with the 1.5° C target. The guide outlines what a cost-effective and economically productive pathway could look like, and explores key uncertainties, such as the roles that bioenergy, carbon capture, and behavioural changes will play in reaching net zero.

Integrity Matters: Net zero commitments by non-state entities – A briefing for board directors

This UN report sets out five key principles and ten key recommendations that can help board members to develop and implement credible and comprehensive net-zero commitments. This resource provides a holistic set of meaningful actions that companies can take, as well as key questions directors should ask.

Engaging Supply Chains on the Decarbonization Journey: A Guide to Developing and Achieving Scope 3 Supplier Engagement Targets

This guide by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) will help address your value chain sustainability impacts by setting supplier engagement targets. It explains how to select suppliers, set and implement targets, and track progress. The guidance will be most useful to sustainability and supply chain management teams that are exploring or already working to reduce their organization’s Scope 3 emissions. 

Achieving global climate goals by 2050: Pathways to a 1.5° C Future

This report from the ClimateWorks Foundation can help you better understand the distribution and scale of climate mitigation opportunities. Based on scenario modelling, it highlights priority areas across eight geographies and eleven sectors. This resource will be most useful to sustainability practitioners and business leaders interested in the broader context of the transition to net-zero by 2050.

Net Zero Stocktake 2024

This comprehensive report from Net Zero Tracker can help you to better understand the status and trends of net zero target setting across countries, subnational governments and companies. It features insights into the progress of whole-economy net zero target-setting and the overall performance of more than 4,000 entities on key elements of net zero intent and integrity, including all states and regions in largest 25-emitting countries in the world, all cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants, and the largest 2,000 publicly listed companies in the world. These insights will be most useful to sustainability practitioners seeking to benchmark their performance against industry peers and to learn more about the progress gap in the locations where they and their value chain members operate.

The MSCI Net-Zero Tracker

This periodic report from MSCI can help you understand the progress of large companies on mitigating climate risk. It monitors listed companies around the world and their alignment with the 1.5 °C warming threshold. It highlights leaders and laggards on corporate climate disclosures, and includes a review of both financed emissions and the economic opportunities associated with the climate transition, such as clean tech and climate investment. These insights will be most useful to sustainability practitioners seeking to benchmark their performance, highlight opportunities, and point out the remaining ambition gap in their organisation.

Climate Action 100+ Resource Hub

This resource hub from InfluenceMap’s Climate Action 100+ (CA100+) initiative can help you better understand corporate climate policy engagement. The site features a series of tools that show which organisations are contributing to - or hindering - climate policy. These include the CA100+ Company Rankings and Industry Association Rankings, with rankings determined by alignment with the Paris Agreement; Corporate Disclosure scorecards, which assesses the accuracy and credibility of corporate sustainability reporting; and Shareholder Resolutions, featuring real world investor briefings created by InfluenceMap to support shareholder voting decisions on corporate climate policy.

This set of tools was designed for investors, but they will be useful to anyone interested in benchmarking and ensuring consistency between their business’ commitments and actions on climate change.

Climate Action 100+ Net Zero Benchmark

Climate Action 100+ is an investor-led initiative led by AIGCC, Ceres, IGCC, IIGCC, and PRI, and it can help you understand the performance of the world’s largest GHG emitters toward a net zero transition. Bringing together research from the Transition Pathway Initiative, Carbon Tracker, InfluenceMap, and Rocky Mountain Institute, the Net Zero Benchmark provides an assessment of company emissions reductions, climate governance, and climate-related disclosures. It features a searchable database of over 150 company assessments, sharing key findings since 2021. This evaluation and benchmarking tool is designed for investors but will also be useful to sustainability practitioners.

Addressing Scope 3: A Start Here Guide

A guide for leaders of companies of all sizes to understand the basics of Scope 3 emissions and how companies should begin to take credible action. The guidance is anchored in the real-world experience of companies that are already navigating this journey.

Degree of Urgency: Accelerating Actions to Keep 1.5°C on the Table

This report from the Energy Transitions Commissions (ETC) assesses progress since COP26 and outlines the priority areas for accelerated action at - and beyond - COP27. The report provides a good summary of the achievements of COP26, the status of our climate budget, the credibility and quality of global climate-related commitments, and the steps required to close the 'gap' in climate-related ambition, implementation, and financing within both sectors and countries. This resource is a good starting point for executives, boards, and junior sustainability change agents that want to get up to speed on the priority areas for accelerated progress on climate action.

Accounting for Natural Climate Solutions Guidance

Natural climate solutions have been recognised as key levers in mitigating the negative impacts of climate change, with ~12% of global impacts from GHG emissions coming from land use and land-use changes (LULUC). To support you in calculating, accounting for, and reporting on LULUC-generated GHG emissions, the Accounting for Natural Climate Solutions Guidance from Quantis delivers a robust methodology to embed land-related emissions in corporate and product footprints, which can be used for setting science-based climate targets. Additionally, the supporting Annex document provides detailed information on the scope of the proposed methodology, including technical instructions, context, debated challenges, and limitations, as well as references.

Climate Action Pathways

First launched in 2019 by the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Climate Action Pathways set out sectoral visions for achieving a 1.5° C resilient world in 2050. Pathways are a living document, and will provide you with an up-to-date road map of the interim actions and key impacts needed by 2021, 2025, 2030 and 2040 to achieve the 2050 vision.

The Pathways are divided into executive summaries and action tables that cover thematic areas linked to climate change, such as energy, industry, land use, transport, and water, as well as cross-cutting themes like resilience. The summaries provide a vision of the future, summarising the needs - and milestones - for system transformation and progress to date, whereas the action tables highlight specific time-bound actions that businesses (and other relevant stakeholders) can take to deliver on 2050 vision.

Sink or swim: How Indigenous and community lands can make or break nationally determined contributions

This paper, authored by researchers from World Resources Institute and Climate Focus, examines the role of Indigenous peoples and local communities' (IPLC) lands as carbon sinks and the impact they can have in support of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) towards reducing global emissions. It explains the contributions of IPLC lands to reducing climate change; their current role in countries' current NDCs; key policy and governance gaps to achieving greater mitigation potential from IPLC lands; and recommendations for governments and international donors. This paper can help you to better understand the positive impact you can have in reducing emissions by supporting national projects that protect and grow IPLC lands.

Climate Solutions at Work

This guide from Drawdown Labs was created to "democratize" climate action by helping all employees concerned about climate change to take concrete action in the workplace. It identifies ways for employees to assess whether or not their company is taking adequate steps to address climate change; examines job functions that have untapped potential for driving action; explains how one can work with their colleagues to amplify and hasten impact; and uses the Drawdown-Aligned Business Framework to highlight key leverage points and specific actions that all business must utilize and deliver upon. This is a good introduction for any employee who is interested in and motivated to support climate action, but whose title and accountabilities may not be immediately and obviously relevant.

The Carbon Bankroll 2.0: From Awareness to Action

Building on the groundbreaking Carbon Bankroll 1.0 report, this report from Topo Finance explores the substantial climate impact of companies' banking and investment practices. It explains how - for many large businesses - corporate cash and investments are generating more emissions than all operations and supply chain activities combined; illuminates the central role that banking plays in determining our climate future; and provides valuable insights and step-by-step guidance for turning this awareness into action.

Aligning Corporate Value Chains to Global Climate Goals

This comprehensive paper from the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) can help you to understanding the challenges and opportunities with Scope 3 target setting. It explains the importance of Scope 3 target setting, outlines the challenges in setting and implementing Scope 3 targets, and assesses current Scope 3 target setting practices. It also explores the role of certification in addressing value chain emissions and provides a five-step approach for operationalising the proposed framework for managing value chain emissions towards net-zero transformation.

8 Steps to Enhance GHG Reporting: A Roadmap for Finance and Accounting Professionals

This guide by the International Federation of Accountant (IFAC) and We Mean Business Coalitions (WMBC) can help ensure your organisation’s GHG accounting is timely, robust, and reliable. It covers eight practical steps your CFO and finance team can take to collect, manage, and disclose GHG data according to the latest international standards.

Guidance on Avoided Emissions: Helping business drive innovations and scale solutions towards Net Zero

There is a growing recognition of the need to scale climate solutions (e.g., products, services, technologies) in order to produce necessary system-wide change. In response, private sector sustainability claims are surging. Unfortunately, many of these claims are not credible. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and a host of multi-stakeholder collaborators have created this guide to help you to credibly account for avoided GHG emission stemming from your climate change-related solutions. The guide outlines a rigorous methodology for assessing these avoided emissions so that strategic decisions related to climate investments are better informed. It covers five areas: defining avoided emissions; leveraging avoided emissions; ensuring the contribution is legitimate; assessing avoided emissions; and reporting avoided emissions. These insights will be most useful to sustainability professionals, but will also have implications for other departments including finance, development, and communications.

Assessing the Benefits and Costs of Nature-Based Solutions for Climate Resilience: A Guideline for Project Developers

This report from the World Bank aims to help you make the case for investments in Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) for climate resilience. It provides a decision framework to cost-effectively quantify the benefits and costs of NBS. The frameworks includes a common set of six analytical steps and four guiding principles to help you value the benefits of NBS related to disaster risk, food production, tourism, recreation, biodiversity, health, and water quality. It also provides eight case studies to illustrate how these assessments works in practice. The framework will be useful to a number of departments that may be involved in developing NBS projects including sustainability, finance, strategy, R&D, and operations.

The Climate Drive

This platform by WBCSD features a number of tools that can support your organisation’s net zero transition. These include an Action Library that features tangible, high-impact actions and recommendations from peers, such as green energy options for your operations and ways to make use of Power Purchasing Agreements. There is also an online Readiness Check that helps you assess your current goals, policies, and practices relating to decarbonisation, and a Net Zero Guidebook designed to help you build and leverage your net zero knowledge. This set of practical resources will be most useful to sustainability teams coordinating decarbonisation plans and to the operations departments seeking decarbonisation solutions to implement.

The Ocean as a Solution to Climate Change: Updated Opportunities for Action

This detailed report, produced by the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy (Ocean Panel), can help change agents understand the range of available and scalable ocean-based climate solutions. It highlights current and emerging opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in ocean-based sectors, including ocean-based renewable energy, food, carbon capture and storage, and more. It also outlines how the technology and infrastructure needed to implement these solutions can be financed within the unique context of each ocean-based sector.

The Low Carbon Lifestyles Wheel: Behaviors, Barriers, and Benefits

This paper from Futerra, BEworks, and WBCSD can help you promote the adoption of lower-carbon lifestyles. It is based on an “Action Wheel” framework that presents four categories of individual-level action: transportation, housing, diet, and purchases. Each category is broken down into outcomes, such as “Live car-free” or “Local Food”. Each of these outcomes is then further divided into specific actions. The paper also provides guidance on addressing the many potential barriers to each action. This practical tool will be useful to anyone seeking to foster sustainability-related behaviour change among employees.

Blue Ambition Loop: Achieving Ambitious 2030 Ocean-Climate Action

This brief produced by the UN High-Level Climate Champions group can help raise your awareness of ocean-based climate solutions and the role of businesses and other non-state actors in applying them. It provides a snapshot of commitments and actions being taken on six topics: ocean ecosystems conservation, marine transport, ocean energy, ocean food, ocean tourism, and ocean finance. This resource will be most useful to sustainability and supply chain practitioners.

The “No-Excuse” Opportunities to Tackle Scope 3 Emissions in Manufacturing and Value Chains

This white paper from the World Economic Forum provides a practical road map that can help you to accelerate your Scope 3 emissions reduction efforts. Published as part of the Industry Net Zero Accelerator Initiative, it explains the "what, why, how" of Scope 3 emissions; highlights key challenges to acceleration Scope 3 decarbonisation; and highlights twelve "no-excuse" opportunities for tackling these emissions across four action levels: the company level, the value chain, industrial systems, and broader society. These opportunities address both the Scope 3 calculation and abatement aspects and are complemented by 18 real-world case studies from early movers.

The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal: A global, independent scientific assessment of Carbon Dioxide Removal

This comprehensive report is a global assessment of the state of progress of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and the gap we need to close to sustainably limit temperature increase in line with with the Paris Agreement. It explains what CDR is and why it is necessary for; explains patterns in investment, innovation, and expansion within the field of CDR; provides Paris-consistent CDR scenarios; explores key topics such as monitoring, reporting, and verification; and more. This report will be particularly beneficial to sustainability professionals and senior leaders who are exploring CDR of the voluntary carbon market.

The Core Carbon Principles

The Core Carbon Principles (CCPs) are a global benchmark that provide a credible and rigorous means of identifying high-integrity carbon credits. The CCPs were created by the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) to help standardise the quality of carbon credits sold on the voluntary market, and were developed through global cooperation from hundreds of key stakeholders and organisations throughout the voluntary carbon market. These 10 principles can help your company to better assess the quality of carbon credits and to ensure that your purchases are having real and verifiable impact on the climate.

The ICVCM has also created a guidebook that features a summary for decision-makers, which presents their assessment framework; their recommended assessment procedure; and an overview of the CCPs and their implementation through the assessment framework.

Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting (revised 2024)

The Oxford Principles can help improve the emissions reduction outcomes of your carbon offsetting strategy. The Principles focus on four main elements for credible net-zero aligned offsetting:

• Cut emissions, ensure the environmental integrity of credits used to achieve net zero, and regularly revise your offsetting strategy as best practice evolves

• Transition to carbon removal offsetting for any residual emissions by the global net zero target date

• Shift to removals with durable storage (low risk of reversal) to compensate any residual emissions by the net zero target date

• Support the development of innovative and integrated approaches to achieving net zero

It also defines key terms and targets and explains types of projects available in today's carbon markets.

Claims Code of Practice: Building integrity in voluntary carbon markets

Recent questions about the credibility of voluntary carbon credits threatens their potential to fill financing gaps for climate mitigation. In response, the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity initiative (VCMI) has worked with existing standard-setters to create a code of practice that brings clarity to what a high quality credit looks like.

The Claims Code can help businesses make credible use of carbon credits in their climate commitments. The Code provides a practical, detailed, 4-step process: 1) Comply with the Foundational Criteria, 2) select a VCMI Claim to make, 3) meet the required carbon credit use and quality thresholds, and 4) obtain third-party assurance following the VCMI Monitoring, Reporting & Assurance (MRA) Framework. The guidance will be most useful to sustainability teams or anyone involved in purchasing credits from the voluntary carbon markets.

Reforming the voluntary carbon market

This white paper from Compensate is a good starting point for better understanding the voluntary carbon market and the steps required to achieve greater impact with carbon capture projects. It explains the current state of the market and highlights the most common flaws in carbon capture projects. It also introduces Compensate's project evaluation criteria, and explains how to apply it in practice.

The Role of Natural Climate Solutions in Corporate Climate Commitments: A Brief for Investors

Nature-based carbon offsets - also known as natural climate solutions (NCS) - can be an effective part of a company's mitigation efforts. However, it can be difficult to know where to begin, or how to exercise due diligence to ensure that the solutions you support are credible. This brief provides introductory guidance for institutional investors on the use of NCS in corporate climate strategies. It can help you to better understand the role of natural NCS for pursuing net-zero emissions, and how to better evaluate the quality of nature-based carbon credits.

A Practical Guide to Insetting

Insetting refers to a company offsetting its emissions through projects that avoid, reduce, or sequester carbon within its own value chain. It is an opportunity for businesses to link emissions and carbon sequestration to their sourcing landscapes. This guide from the International Platform for Insetting shares insights and provides recommendations that will help you to transform your supply chain for a resilient, regenerative, net zero carbon future that values and protects nature. The guide was created specifically for insetting practitioners and stakeholders that want to learn more about the concept, and it highlights lessons and opportunities for realising the full potential of insetting.

A buyer's guide to high-accountability MRV

Carbon180 has created a simple matrix to highlight the difference between high-accountability and low-accountability actions related to measuring, monitoring, reporting, and verifying (MMRV) the results of carbon removal projects. This is a good starting point for senior leaders that are exploring carbon offsetting as part of their organisation's mitigation strategy and want to build accountability and trust with carbon removal project developers.

A Buyer's Guide to Natural Climate Solutions Carbon Credits

This guide produced by the Natural Climate Solutions Alliance, WBCSD, and BCG is designed to help companies select and procure high-quality carbon credits on the voluntary carbon market. It focuses specifically on natural climate solution (NCS) credits, which are intended to support carbon reduction while also providing co-benefits for communities and biodiversity. Going step-by-step, the guide outlines how to integrate NCS carbon credits into your climate strategy. This includes setting procurement criteria, finding sources, purchasing, and reporting credible claims. The guidance will be most useful to sustainability and procurement teams.

How to Kick-Start the Carbon Removal Market: Shopify’s Playbook

Shopify spent the past year exploring and growing the carbon removal market, and they created this playbook to share their journey and learning outcomes. This guide provides experiential insights, tangible steps, tools, and templates that will help you to fund the right types of climate solutions; be flexible with purchases to maximise impact; and identify the most promising carbon removal companies. If your company wants to contribute to a net zero future through carbon removal but is leery of costly mistakes, we recommend this as early essential reading.

Carbon removal and avoidance: a buyer’s guide

This concise guide from Watershed (a carbon credit marketplace) can help you to identify credits that have meaningful impact. It begins by explaining the nuanced yet important difference between carbon avoidance and carbon removal. It then outlines the key features of high-quality avoidance projects, and describes two main categories of carbon removal: “nature-based solutions” and “permanent carbon removal solutions." This guide may be useful as a quick introduction to offsetting for sustainability and finance departments that are looking to purchase offsets of the first time.

How to choose carbon offsets that actually cut emissions

This article from MIT Sloan will help you to understand whether or not the carbon offsets you purchase are actually cutting emissions. It outlines a simple four point framework that assesses if the offset is Additional, Verifiable, Immediate, and Durable (AVID+). Each point must be met for an offset to be credible. When these minimum requirements are met, offset purchasers should also look for projects with additional societal benefits (the “plus” of AVID+). This framework will be most useful to sustainability teams and anyone else involved in purchasing carbon offsets.

Insetting and Scope 3 climate action: applying and accounting for Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) in land sector value chains

This brief from WBCSD can help you to better understand the emerging practice of insetting is and why it is especially important in land sector value chains. The paper defines insetting; outlines how the GHG Protocol’s draft guidance is accounting for insets; and describes the business case for insetting and the need to harmonise insetting definitions and accounting. The guidance will be most useful to sustainability practitioners and supply chain managers working in agriculture and forestry, or in other industries with significant land use.

Mind the Gap: How Carbon Dioxide Removals Must Complement Deep Decarbonisation to Keep 1.5°C Alive

This briefing paper from the Energy Transitions Commision (ETC) will help you to understand that carbon removals must play a role in climate change mitigation strategies in addition to rapid decarbonisation, starting today.

The paper provides a comprehensive description of how ambitious development of cardon dioxide removal (CDR) solutions - combined with ambitious decarbonisation - could prevent 'overshoot' of the 1.5°C carbon budget by 2050. It covers climate targets and the implications for carbon budgets; emissions reduction scenarios and the size of the overshoot gap; types of CDR and their feasible scale by 2050; the risks involved for each type of CDR and how to manage them; an examination of who should pay for removals, and how; and the actions needed in the 2020s to ensure subsequent removals occur at the necessary pace and scale.

Mapped: The impacts of carbon-offset projects around the world

This tool created by Carbon Brief maps out the locations of carbon offset projects that have created negative impacts. It can help you to understand how these negative impacts manifest, the locations where they are most likely to occur, and their prevalence. The map also highlights the tendency for offset measurements to be overestimated. This resource provides important insights for community relations teams, sustainability teams, and for anyone involved in procuring offsets.

Being Positive about Negative Emissions: Incorporating carbon removals into net zero strategies

Earth is expected to surpass the 1.5 °C degree warming threshold within a decade. Scaling up greenhouse gas (GHG) removals are one approach to mitigate this global risk. This report written by the Coalition for Negative Emissions provides an overview of emerging GHG removal industries and how your business can play a role scaling them. It argues for the importance of GHG removals in limiting global warming and outlines key processes for removing emissions from the atmosphere. It then explains why GHG removal is essential for hard-to-abate emissions, and outlines why corporate net zero plans should include GHG removals.

Voluntary Carbon Markets: Potential, Pitfalls, and the Path Forward

This guide can help you develop a grounded understanding of the controversial topic of carbon credits and their role in mitigating the climate crisis. Developed by the Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG), an independent NGO whose members include leading earth system scientists such as Johan Rockstrom and Mark Maslin, the report examines the current state of Voluntary Carbon Markets (VCMs), exploring how carbon credits are used and why they have suffered a loss of confidence. The report is then divided into five numbered sections: the first, “Market basics," explains how VCMs work and their theoretical power to shift money directly to where it is most needed, and sections two through five break down the specific issues and challenges with VCMs. The final section also provides recommendations for ensuring that scientific rigour and transparency are built into VCMs so that their potential can be realised in the future. This resource offers a clear, comprehensive, and balanced view of carbon credit usage that will benefit a broad range of sustainability professionals, and especially those involved in purchasing carbon credits or developing carbon removal projects.

State of the Voluntary Carbon Market 2024

This report from Ecosystem Marketplace can give you an overview of the global voluntary carbon market from a carbon market industry perspective. Using interviews and other data collected from project developers and credit resellers, it reviews market activity for the past year, such as trends in supply and demand across regions and credit types. It also looks ahead to important developments shaping the future of the voluntary carbon market. This resource will be especially beneficial to sustainability practitioners, and anyone involved in purchasing carbon credits.

State of the Voluntary Carbon Market: 2024

This concise report from Carbon Direct can help you to better understand key trends and developments in the voluntary carbon market and the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) market. This resource will be especially beneficial to carbon credit purchasers, carbon project developers, and policymakers.

The Climate Action Protocol: Navigate the Complexity To Make Confident Climate Claims

This resource from Climate Impact Partners can help you to navigate the growing range of frameworks and guidance on climate action claims. The protocol compares Climate Impact Partners’ CarbonNeutral certification; ISO’s 14068 Carbon Neutral Standard; ISO’s Net Zero Guidance; SBTi’s Net Zero Standard; and VCMI’s Carbon Integrity Claim. It also provides tools to compare and contrast requirements in order to make the right choice for your business. This resource is a good starting point for sustainability professionals that want to build a better understanding of these initiatives.

Nature-based Solutions for corporate climate targets

This guide by the IUCN can help you understand what Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are and how they contribute to net zero and nature positive goals. It has three sections that cover the role of NbS in climate change mitigation, corporate climate strategies, and achieving societal net zero. It is also features illustrative graphics. This guide will be most useful as an overview or introduction to NbS for sustainability professionals and others.

Carbon Offsets Are More Popular than Ever, and That’s a Problem

The demand for carbon offsets has never been greater, and their legitimacy as an effective tool for stopping climate change has never been more tenuous. This is the first entry in a three-part series that explains carbon offsets and their viability as a credible solution for reducing emissions. In this instalment, we unpack carbon offsets and carbon credits and explain why the market for carbon offsets is growing.

Buyer, Beware: How to Navigate the Carbon Offset Market

This is the second entry in a three-part series about carbon offsets and their viability as a credible solution for reducing emissions. In this instalment, we look at the most common issues with carbon offsets (with a focus on nature-based offsets) and highlight key considerations and actions you can take to better ensure that your offset investments are effective and credible.

Enter, Insetting: Supporting Carbon Reduction in Your Value Chain

In the third and final instalment of our blog series on carbon offsets, we offer an alternative to offsetting: insetting your emissions within your own value chain. We highlight how carbon insetting can help you reduce your carbon emissions profile while also supporting your value chain members and advancing climate justice.

Guidelines for High Integrity Use of Carbon Credits

80% of the world’s largest companies have not yet set climate targets, and most that have targets are off track. As a result, there is a widening gap between the 1.5°C pathway and climate action. This guide by the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) argues that voluntary carbon market (VCM) investment is essential to keeping companies’ targets on track and closing the emissions gap. The guide provides six guidelines designed to help you make carbon credits part of a decarbonisation strategy: 1) demonstrate alignment with the Paris agreement; 2) quantify and disclose emissions; 3) establish a net zero pathway; 4) use carbon credits in addition to emissions reductions; 5) vet credit integrity; and 6) disclose the use of credits. This resource will be most useful to sustainability practitioners and strategy teams.

Criteria for High-Quality Carbon Dioxide Removal

This report by Carbon Direct and Microsoft can help you understand what high-quality carbon dioxide removal (CDR) project criteria look like. The report presents a common set of shared principles that are intended to help characterise high-quality CDR projects and provides specific criteria for eight different types of CDR, including forestation, soil carbon, enhanced rock weathering, and direct air capture. Each section covers social criteria; environmental criteria; additionality; measurement; durability; and leakage. This resource will be most useful to sustainability and procurement practitioners engaged in procuring CDR.

Natural Climate Solutions for the Voluntary Carbon Market: An Investor Guide for Companies and Financial Institutions

This guide from ERM, WBCSD, and the Forest Investor Club provides insights that can help you to better identify and invest in natural climate solution (NCS) projects. It highlights the questions that investors should ask; common challenges they may face; and examples of best practice across key stages in the NCS investment process, including planning for investment, due diligence integrity evaluations, data collection, and disclosure.

Global Carbon Markets Hub

This public database of carbon market information can help you better understand voluntary carbon market trends and make more informed decisions. Created by Ecosystem Marketplace (EM) to increase market transparency, the database features four sections available to unregistered users. The ‘Home’ and ‘Categories’ sections provide data on carbon credit volume and price data across time, geographies, and countries. The ‘EM Taxonomy’ section offers an overview of the many types of carbon credit projects, grouping them into eight broad categories, each featuring a number of project sub-categories. Lastly, the ‘Projects’ section contains a list of 20,000+ carbon credit projects from over 100 countries. This listings include information on project name, category, country, third-party standard, and in some cases the quantity of credits issued and retired. This resource will be useful to those involved in purchasing carbon credits, including sustainability, procurement, and finance teams.

How Climate Resilient is Your Company? Meeting a Rising Business Imperative

This guidebook from Marsh & McLennan will help acquaint you with the intersection of resilience and climate adaptation. The document provides key definitions; identifies five major groups placing pressure on companies to assess, define, and enact strategies that enhance climate resilience; and provides a 3-step approach to assessing your company's climate resilience.

Understanding physical climate risks and opportunities

This guidance from the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change collates good practice for step-by-step physical risk assessment, and will help investors to better understand physical climate risks and opportunities and how they can integrate this knowledge into their investment processes. The guidance helps investors understand physical climate risks and how they are measured. This guidance also provides investors with practical advice on how they can begin to assess, analyze, measure, and manage the risks and opportunities presented by physical climate hazards. Written specifically with investors in mind, the guidance can be used without prior climate expertise.

The 2023 Climate Risk Landscape

This report from the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) was created to help financial institutions better understand the landscape of climate risk tools. Climate risk tools can play an important role in helping sustainability change agents, procurement specialists, and business leaders to understand climate risks and opportunities, and to inform business strategy. This report explores key trends in physical risk and transition risk tools, and provides detailed analysis on dozens of individual tools.

Climate Risk and Response: Physical Hazards and Socioeconomic Impacts

Climate risk is complex: impacts will grow in frequency and severity, cascading in non-linear and life-threatening ways. Although the scale and pace of climate change impacts will differ depending on location, one constant is that regional "livability" will eventually become compromised. This report from McKinsey Global Institute catalogs some of these unanticipated consequences, and will help you to grow your understanding of the risks looming between 2020 - 2050. The report explores common and prominent characteristics of physical climate risk, the non-linear nature of socioeconomic impacts, and their knock-on effects.

Climate Risk Assessment for Ecosystem-based Adaptation: A guidebook for planners and practitioners

This guide is a good starting point if your organisation is looking to preserve at-risk natural spaces from climate change impacts. The guide focuses on ecosystem-based adaptation, which involves the use of biodiversity and ecosystem services to help communities adapt to the negative effects of climate change and to reduce their risk to environmental hazards. This handbooks will help you to perform sound assessments of climate risks for social-ecological systems, and provides guidance on how to systematically consider ecosystems and their services as both a driver of risk (when function is reduced) and as an opportunity for risk reduction and adaptation. This document introduces key concepts and methodological steps relevant for ecosystem-based adaptation; identifies potential adaptation measures; and explains how to perform related planning and use risk assessments for monitoring and evaluation.

Climate Adaptation Competency Framework

This comprehensive guide illustrates the depth and breadth of competencies required to manage and prepare for the impacts of climate change . It details the core competencies and behaviours that are most valuable for individuals, managers, and teams to possess and refine for leading, supporting, delivering, and implementing climate adaptation plans, strategies, policies, programs, and projects. The guide offers a practical, systematic tool to guide and embed capacity and capability development that may be particularly beneficial to executives, practitioners, and human resource professionals.

Adapting from the Ground Up: Enabling Small Businesses in Developing Countries to Adapt to Climate Change

Micro and small businesses (MSEs) are the core of developing ecnomies, and a crucial link in the value chains for medium and large businesses, and yet they are often overlooked on climate change adaptation efforts. This report from WRI offers specific policy interventions for policymakers, climate finance providers, and large corporations to engage MSEs and enable them to build their own resilience. This report will help you to understand the drivers of investment in adaptation, the barriers, and specific interventions your business can make to support MSEs.

Business Leaders Guide to Climate Adaptation and Resilience

This guide by WBCSD and others can help you to improve the resilience of your business against climate impacts. It explains the importance of climate adaptation; summarises the different roles business leaders have in implementing it; and outlines nine strategies for integrating climate adaptation and resilience into organisational strategy, governance, and operations. For each strategy the guide provides relevant tools, frameworks, and case studies. The final section features a series of maturity assessments tailored to business leaders that are designed to help identify next steps. The practical guidance offered will be most useful to business leaders, including the CEO, CFO, CSO, COO, and CRO.

Just Transition for Climate Adaptation: A Business Brief

This brief from the UN Global Compact can help you understand the importance of a just transition to climate adaptation. It emphasises the role of businesses in supporting a just transition by including workers, suppliers, and communities in their climate risk management and adaptation approach. It explains how adapting to climate risk in a just and equitable manner can mitigate systemic risks and avoid adverse political, economic, and social restructuring. It also features a range of recommendations for businesses seeking to advance a just transition for climate adaptation. This resource will be most useful to sustainability practitioners, enterprise risk teams, and supply chain management teams.

Accelerating Business Action on Climate Change Adaptation

This paper from PwC can help you to better understand climate adaptation and drive positive change within your organisation. It sets out the business case for climate adaptation, presents a three-pillar for action; and shares examples from organisations that have implemented these actions.

Taking Stock of Business Efforts to Adapt to Climate Change

This short report from PwC provides a stocktake on corporate climate adaptation that can help you to understand the status of these efforts and opportunities for businesses to scale up and sustain them. It explains the role of businesses in supporting adaptation efforts; current efforts by businesses on adaptation; the drivers and barriers to business action; and specific recommendations for action.

Private Sector Initiative (PSI) database

Does your business have a specific adaptation challenge it is trying to solve? If so, this repository of research, reports, and other documents may help you to find specific, sector- and activity-relevant solutions to unique climate change-related problems.

Getting Locally Led Adaptation Right: Examples from Around the World

Climate change is a global crisis with distinct local impacts, and yet adaptation projects are rarely locally led. This article from WRI highlights examples of local adaptation done right, and can help you to better understand the range of opportunities - and challenges - related to local adaptation efforts.

WRI has also produced eight principles for locally led adaptation to help guide the adaptation community, and a working paper that highlights 21 case studies of collaborative, locally led adaptation projects to inspire and inform change agents and leaders.

Climate change adaptation guidelines for ports

This document provides a structured framework for climate change risk and vulnerability assessments, and will help you establish context; identify, analyze, and evaluate current and future risks; and identify and prioritise adaptation options. Although written specifically for the marine industry, the framework and recommendations can be applied broadly. We will also evaluate and include climate adaptation resources relevant to other sectors as they emerge.

Just Transition and Renewable Energy: A Business Brief

This business brief from the United Nations Global Compact outlines how your business can support public Just Transition policies. The authors acknowledge that business has a key role to play in ensures that the transition to the low carbon economy is just. The brief provides ten recommendations for how business can support the transition through their policy advocacy. This guidance will be most useful to your Government Affairs or Public Policy team.

Fossil Fuels in Transition: Committing to the phase-down of all fossil fuels

This in-depth, scenario-based report from the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC) can help you understand what technologies and supporting policies are needed to decarbonise the global economy. It highlights the policies required to reduce fossil fuel demand; the role of different clean energy technologies in replacing fossil energy; and the role of carbon capture and removals. There is also a sectoral breakdown outlining where emissions reductions are most needed. This high-level overview of a global energy transition will be most useful to business leaders, strategy teams, and sustainability practitioners seeking to find out how their organisation fits in the global transition towards renewable energy development.

Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet

The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) is an alliance of philanthropy, local entrepreneurs, governments, and technology, policy, and financing partners that support a clean energy transition and ensuring universal energy access. They have produced a range of reports to support your understanding of key renewable energy topics, such as how the power system can be transformed in energy-poor countries and the job creation potential from a green power transition. Their flagship report, Powering People and the Planet, is a good resource for understanding the global challenge of ending energy poverty and the steps required to ensure a just energy transition.

The Clean Energy Buyers Institute (CEBI)

The Clean Energy Buyers Institute (CEBI) is a non-profit organisation that produces and curates resources that can help you understand innovative clean energy market solutions. Their resources include toolkits, explainers, and research on topics such as advancing grid decarbonisation and clean energy procurement. They have also curated a range of relevant resources. This platform will be most useful to Procurement, Operations, and Sustainability teams, or anyone responsible for energy purchasing.

Building Trust through an Equitable and Inclusive Energy Transition

This white paper from the World Economic Forum can help you understand why addressing the socioeconomic implications of the energy transition is essential for its viability. Divided into four parts, the paper outlines the complexities involved in advancing an equitable and inclusive energy transition; highlights the emerging signs of an unjust transition; identifies the underlying challenges of building trust and finding common ground between diverse stakeholders; and explores how regulations and effective capital mobilisation can enable workforce reskilling, distributed renewables development, and low-carbon innovation. These insights will be most useful to business leaders investing in the energy transition.

Strategies for Affordable and Fair Clean Energy Transitions

This comprehensive, evidence-based report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) offers a big-picture perspective on the costs, benefits, opportunities, and challenges of a rapid clean energy transition. The report explains how a clean energy future would be more affordable while also detailing the challenges that come with financing the transition at the level of government, households, and the private sector. It explores the policies needed to share the costs of the transition fairly, examines the risk of price shocks (drawing on historic examples and potential future risks), and provides guidance on how to safeguard against shocks that may compromise the affordability and fairness of the energy transition. These insights have important implications that will be most relevant to business leaders, strategy teams, and sustainability teams.

Tracking SDG7: The Energy Progress Report, 2023

This comprehensive progress report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and other agencies can help you understand where progress has been made and where it is off track to meet the 2030 goal of SDG 7. The first five chapters review progress trends across key indicators (energy access, energy efficiency, renewable energy, clean cooking, and financial flows toward clean energy); chapter six provides a progress forecast for 2030 based on IEA’s policy scenarios; and chapter seven explains the data collection and methodological challenges related to each of the indicators. This resource will be most useful to sustainability practitioners interested in a statistical overview of global trends in energy and their alignment with international climate and development goals.

Just Transition Guide: Indigenous-led Pathways Toward Equitable Climate Solutions and Resiliency in the Climate Crisis

The global transition towards renewable energy is an important opportunity for Indigenous Communities to choose their own future. This resource from Sacred Earth Solar (SES) and others can help you understand how renewable energy projects can enable a Just Transition for Indigenous Communities. It explains the current challenges related to the Canadian energy and electricity systems and how they can be improved to support decentralised renewable energy projects. It showcases different pathways for developing community-based renewable energy systems such as solar, wind, small-scale hydro, and explains key considerations and learnings from communities that have already implemented them. This resource also explores other community solutions for a Just Transition, such as, food sovereignty, and reimagines how government policy can support these efforts. The lessons here will be most useful to sustainability and community relations teams whose organisations work with - or impact - Indigenous communities.

World Energy Outlook 2024

This annual report from the International Energy Agency can help you better understand trends in global energy use. Based on three long-term scenarios outlined, it explores how different energy futures might impact energy security, affordability, and sustainability. In all scenarios, human-caused emissions peak before 2030 and then decline at rates of 1%, 4%, and 15% per year. These trajectories lead to corresponding average temperature increases of 2.4 °C, 1.7 °C, and 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

It is important to note that these scenarios are based on many normative assumptions, and that warming is happening faster than expected; we have already exceeded 1.5 °C for more than a year. Further, these projections do not account for increasing natural emissions resulting from earth system destabilisation. That said, this report does offer useful macro-level considerations related to how geopolitical tensions, energy deployment, and electricity demand might affect the energy transition. While the full report is 398 pages long, we recommend strategy and sustainability practitioners review the executive summary.

Sustainable Power Policy Tracker

Banks have a major role to play in supporting power decarbonisation, either by directing financial flows to new sustainable power systems or ceasing financing of fossil fuel expansion and supporting phase-out. This tool can help you to better navigate the sustainable power policy landscape. Created to ensure the financial sector is adopting effective sustainable power policies to forcefully contribute to the 1.5°C climate goal, it tracks the commitments adopted by the top 60 banks worldwide regarding their support for sustainable power, including their targets for supporting sustainable power supply; for financing new sustainable power capacity; and for reporting on progress and other aspects.

Coal Policy Tracker

This tool can help you to better navigate the coal policy landscape. Created to ensure the financial sector is adopting effective coal policies to forcefully contribute to the 1.5°C climate goal, it assess over 500 institutes against seven criteria, including the exclusion of both new coal projects and the expansion of existing coal mines, plants, and infrastructure.

Oil & Gas Policy Tracker

This tool can help you to better navigate the oil and gas policy landscape. Created to ensure the financial sector is adopting effective oil and gas policies to forcefully contribute to the 1.5°C climate goal, it assess over 440 institutes against seven criteria, including the immediate exclusion of financial services dedicated to oil and gas projects as well as phase-out commitments.

Renewable energy certificates threaten the integrity of corporate science-based targets

This paper explains how the credibility of corporate science-based targets can be undermined by the use of renewable energy certificates (RECs). It outlines how the widespread use of RECs by companies have led to overestimates of mitigation impacts, and it argues that revised GHG accounting guidelines are needed to meet the 1.5 °C goal of the Paris agreement. The key findings of this paper will be most useful to sustainability practitioners, CSOs, and other executives involved in setting climate goals.

Site Renewables Right

This article by The Nature Conservancy introduces their Site Renewables Right Map. This interactive web map of the central United States combines more than 100 layers of engineering, land-use, and wildlife data to help you understand where wind and solar development will have a lower impact on wildlife. This information is intended to empower companies and communities to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy while protecting nature. This tool will be most useful to those involved in developing or procuring renewables energy, such as project development, engineering, procurement, and sustainability teams.

Building Benefit: Four steps to mitigate renewable energy’s environmental downsides

Although renewables are needed in growing numbers to meet climate goals, the environmental externalities associated with raw material extraction, manufacturing, and end-of-life disposal are likely to become more pronounced. This briefing from the ERM Institute identifies four steps that can limit the negative impacts of renewables growth on the environment and societies: opting for green production inputs and processes, introducing circular alternatives, minimising footprints, and considering wildlife from the start. The briefing identifies the benefits for taking action on each of these steps and provides practical solutions for achieving them.

Resourcing the Energy Transition: Principles to Guide Critical Energy Transition Minerals Towards Equity and Justice

The demand for critical minerals is set to nearly triple by 2030 as the world transitions from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Yet, without proper management, the demand for critical minerals threatens to perpetuate commodity dependence, exacerbate geopolitical tensions and environmental and social challenges, and undermine efforts towards the energy transition. This guide from the Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals can help you to do your part to ensure the just and equitable management of sustainable, responsible, and reliable value chains for critical energy transition minerals. It highlights seven voluntary guiding principles for grounding the renewables transition in justice and equity, building on existing norms, commitments, and legal obligations outlined in UN texts. It also provides a number of actionable recommendations to help you embed and maintain these guiding principles across critical energy transition mineral value chains.

Playbook of Solutions To Mobilize Clean Energy Investment in the Global South

This resource from the World Economic Forum can help you understand how to unlock clean energy investments in emerging economies. It shows how common challenges in the Global South - such as lack of credit ratings or capital market depth - can be overcome. These solutions are laid out in the three sections: policy measures, finance mechanisms, and de-risking tools. There is also a large set of accompanying case studies highlighting where and how these tools have been applied. This practical tool will be most useful to investors and corporate finance teams.