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Collaborating for Value Chain Decarbonisation

With the urgent need to reduce global emissions, rapid decarbonisation of our economy is essential, and the key is collaboration across the value chain. Our guide provides practical advice and examples to help companies support their supply chain partners to decarbonise.

You'll find advice on how companies are prompting, influencing, supporting, and investing in their value chain and resources and ideas for how to support six key decarbonisation pathways: renewable energy adoption; energy efficiency and conservation; logistics; materials stewardship and waste; lower-impact agriculture and land-use; and carbon removal.

The Dawn of Systems Leadership

What are the core capabilities needed to enable meaningful cross-sector collaboration? In this article from SSIR, Peter Senge and his co-authors help explain how to develop these competencies by sharing stories of leaders who have made a difference in navigating complex systems.

Unlocking the Power of Partnerships

This report aims to highlight the potential strength of effective cross-sector partnerships in delivering against broader societal sustainability goals. KPMG have supplemented their own experiences with one-to-one interviews and research to put forward a framework of eight factors that should be considered when creating, operating, and sustaining collaborative partnerships.

Business Led ESG Collaboration: How-to Guide for Business

This guide was created to help you understand and act upon opportunities for collaboration on key sustainability issues. It introduces and unpacks five phases and eleven steps towards implementing a successful ESG collaboration, and highlights critical success factors and barriers. This guide acts as a road map for leaders and sustainability change agents, and is a good starting point for companies that are exploring the business case and practical process for collaboration.

Although this guide was created for Canadian business audiences, the lessons are applicable across all regions and industries, as well as for non-profit organisations and governments.

Collaborating with the Competition

One of the best ways for businesses to obtain external sustainability knowledge is to collaborate with their competitors. Collaboration helps businesses advance their own sustainability initiatives while increasing their capacity to tackle industry-wide challenges. This article breaks down the concept of competitor collaboration and explains how sustainability leaders, executives, and NGO professionals can work together to overcome complex industry-wide problems. It also addresses some of the challenges that can arise from collaborating with the competition, including how much information you should share and how to implement collective decisions within your own organisation.

Radical Collaboration to Accelerate Climate Action

This accessible guidebook highlights seven practices for effective, cooperative, and inclusive collaboration (as well as seven pitfalls to avoid). This is a good priming document for ensuring that team leaders and members involved in collaborative efforts share the same process vision.

Although this guidebook is centered on climate action, the practices and recommendations are applicable to collaboration on any sustainability-related issue.

Sustainability Through Partnerships

This report offers a comprehensive summary of how collaboration is key to unlocking sustainability. The report starts with the premise that no single organisation or sector has the knowledge or resources to "go it alone," and explores the nature and characteristics of different types of multi-sector partnerships before offering a model for the creation of cross-sector partnerships. The report ends with a series of focused recommendations and good practice for different groups (Business, NGOs, Government, and Communities) engaging in partnerships.

Blueprint for Responsible Policy Engagement on Climate Change

Despite the clarity and availability of scientific research, policy action on climate change has fallen short of what is needed. This resource from Ceres can help you to establish systems that address climate change as a systemic risk and integrate this understanding into your company's direct and indirect lobbying on climate policies. Designed primarily for the governance and legal departments of companies, this Blueprint builds on existing resources and provides concrete recommendations for 1) assessing the impacts of climate change to your company, 2) systematising decision-making on climate change across the company, and 3) acting to align lobbying with public, science-based climate policies. Many of the guiding principles here can also be applied to other social and environmental issues that impact your company.

Systems Change Lab

This open-source data platform monitors global progress across major social and environmental systems and identifies transformational shifts needed to protect both people and the planet. The platform uses an interactive visual to highlight progress against climate, biodiversity, and equity targets (among others) and identifies the key forces that are driving positive and negative impacts on each topic. The platform identifies indicators that can show where change momentum is growing and waning, and features a dashboard that shows how systems connect and highlights where coordinated action is most needed. This tool is a good entry point for junior change agents, executives, and other professionals who want to build their understanding of interrelated natural and social systems and the trajectory of actions affecting them.