Climate

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.

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 organizations, businesses, and other stakeholders have a responsibility to “scale up efforts” to ensure a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment for all.

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.

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.

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.

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; 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 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.

The Social Foundation: 'A Safe and Just Place for Humanity'

Kate Raworth's “Doughnut” model is a key framework for understanding sustainability context. Building on the planetary boundaries framework as a 'ceiling', it adds social foundations as a 'floor' and underlines the need to operate in the space between. The social foundation is made up of 11 boundaries that draw attention to communities needing access to basic resources to fulfill their human needs. This access needs to be achieved in a way that does not place undue stress on the earth's resources. The framework is based on the premise that we should be striving to build and maintain social foundations while staying within planetary boundaries.

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.

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.

The Climate Change Playbook

The Climate Change Playbook has 22 interactive games, or short exercises, you can use to help people in your organisation build their capacity for systems thinking and understand important facts and aspects of climate change. The instructions for each game also include a guided debrief and discussion questions.

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.

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.

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.

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 Climate Game: Can you reach net zero by 2050?

Can you - as the new global minister for future generations - find the right balance of decisions to cut emissions and keep global warming to <1.5°C? Based on published scientific research and modelling by the International Energy Agency, this interactive game from the Financial Times puts you in the hot seat, presenting you with three rounds of decision-making (covering the years 2022 to 2050) that highlight the depth and breadth of intersecting choices and challenges that we must account for when considering how best to reduce and reverse the impacts of the climate crisis.

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.

State of the Global Climate 2022

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.

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.

State of Climate Action 2022

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.

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.

10 New Insights in Climate Science 2021

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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.

Climate Change and Climate Risk Oversight: A Guide for Corporate Leaders and Directors

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.

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) has 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 promotes “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 work of the TCFD has culminated in 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Science Based Targets

Specifically focused on GHG emission reduction goals, the Science Based Targets initiative helps companies to develop their GHG emission goals based on the latest climate science. This website offers resources, cases, and support to develop a science-based carbon goal.

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.

A Standard for Net Zero

A wave of companies are committing to “net zero," but what does being a net zero business mean in practice? The Science Based Targets initiative has released their definition and framework for reaching net zero, and it includes allowances for up to 10% of a company's emissions profile to be removed as offsets. If you are looking for clear and appropriate criteria for "net zero" best practices that will advance you beyond this, this resource from Watershed explains how net zero differentiates from "carbon neutral" and will help you to understand the actions that are required for your company to become a genuine "net zero company."

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.

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.

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.

Carbon pricing: Seven things to consider when establishing a carbon pricing program

This article is useful for organisations establishing a carbon pricing program. It answers specific, common questions and provides practical advice that will help you to align your carbon pricing program with the motivations, goals, structure, and culture of your organisation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Murder Offsets

We need to dramatically reduce emissions to get to true net-zero globally, but businesses are paying for the right to do wrong through carbon offsets. This quick read from the Climate Ad Project will help you to understand how offsets are abused as part of net-zero pledges to project a good public image while avoiding meaningful emissions reductions.

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 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.

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.

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: The Climate Impact and Untapped Power of Corporate Cash

This groundbreaking report by the Climate Safe Lending Network (CSLN), The Outdoor Policy Outfit (TOPO), and BankFWD highlights the substantial climate impact of companies' banking practices, and explains how - for many large businesses - corporate cash and investments are generating more emissions than all operations and supply chain activities combined. This resource explains how cash can be linked to corporate climate efforts, and can help you to understand what steps your company can take towards decarbonising your financial supply chain and portfolio.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Framework for Project Development in the Renewable Energy Sector

Is your business considering sponsoring a renewable energy project? If so, this guide will help provide a contextual framework as well as a systematic, repeatable process for understanding and navigating early-stage project development. Although professional project developers may find the concepts herein as intuitive, this document provides a thorough catalog of fundamental steps and definitions.