What is the impact of climate change on your customers and how can you address it?

In my opinion, Personalised Carbon Footprint Tracking could be a game-changer for both businesses and customers. By offering an app or a feature within existing customer platforms that allows individuals to track their own carbon footprints based on their purchases or behaviours, companies can make sustainability personal and actionable. For example, if you run a supermarket, the app could show customers the environmental impact of their weekly shop, from food miles to packaging waste. This not only educates the customer but also encourages more sustainable choices. Such a feature would not only serve to build brand loyalty but also align the business and consumer goals towards a more sustainable future.

As a pump engineer in the water sector, I couldn't agree more with the notion that climate change presents both challenges and opportunities for businesses. Climate change directly affects water resources and infrastructure, making it essential for professionals like me to innovate and adapt. We play a crucial role in ensuring sustainable water management and supporting various industries and customer segments in their efforts to thrive amid changing environmental conditions. By staying informed and developing innovative solutions, we can contribute to a more sustainable future while also creating new business opportunities in the process.

In my opinion, when looking at meeting customer needs, one should be careful not to pin the responsibility of climate change onto them. Meanings, this issue is of course a much wider industry sector issue that needs to be tackled at supply chain level. For customers, its about building a positive culture around environmental choices, and making those choices easily available. I believe there is also a need to help customers overcome environmental anxiety and help them feel empowered by their choices and/ resilient solutions.

Know your customers - ensure you have proper information about your customer (segment, industry, purchasing patterns, geographical areas, age group, gender, etc) to make the right data-driven decisions.

Em empresas de varejo de alimentos, as mudanças climáticas, poderão levar a extinção de alguns tipos de alimentos. As insegurança hídrica decorrente das mudanças climáticas afetam o abastecimento humano e também a produção de alimentos.

Understanding the impact of climate change on various customer segments and industries is essential. Each sector faces distinct challenges. For instance, agriculture and tourism are more exposed to physical risks, while energy and manufacturing grapple with transition risks. Tailoring solutions to cater to these specific challenges and preferences of customer segments like millennials or social entrepreneurs is a strategic move.

It starts by rethinking your offerings, such as using renewable energy in production or incorporating recycled materials into your packaging. It's about showing your customers that you're proactive, not just in your words but in your actions. It's about anticipating the evolving needs of customers in a world affected by climate change. By integrating the principles of the circular economy—designing out waste, keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems—you're providing a way for customers to be part of a sustainable and healthier future.

Customer-Centric Innovation Team: Establish a dedicated innovation team that prioritizes customer needs and preferences when developing new products and services. Market Trend Awareness: Stay vigilant about evolving market trends, especially those related to climate change and sustainability. Conformity with Trends: Ensure that the organization's products and services align with the latest sustainability trends and standards to minimize negative impacts on the climate. Safeguarding Sustainability: The innovation team should focus on sustainability in product design and development, striving to create solutions that positively contribute to addressing climate change challenges.

While not every customer may be sensitive to sustainability, businesses have a responsibility to bring sustainable products on the market. This applies especially to large companies who have the means and budget to innovate and find more sustainable materials and processes. It is the responsibility of Apple, Samsung, Google, Amazon (just to name a few) to take immediate action and show customers that great products can be sustainable too 🌿

The risk of being accused of "green washing" is high. You need to be honest, you need to be sincere, and you definitely need to be able to back up your claims with real world data. Even then you will be challenged, weather you respond to them will come down to your individual circumstances, but you should be prepared for it.

Most sustainability efforts by corporations are greenwashing. My definition of sustainable is that it actually heals ecosystems and communities, not just slows down the rate of destruction. Rarely have I seen an effort that actually heals. Are you actually using zero carbon? or just reducing use per capita? Are the forests where you are working actually building biomass and becoming more diverse? You get the picture. If what you are doing actually heals ecosystems and communities then it is not greenwashing. Remember you live on a planet in which ecosystems are crashing and failing. Just slowing down the rate of destruction will never be sustainable.

Effectively communicating the benefits of our sustainable products and services is key. Leveraging storytelling and real-life success stories is a powerful tool. Utilizing various communication channels, such as social media and webinars, allows us to reach a wider audience. Involving customers through feedback and co-creation fosters engagement.

Sustainability challenges are complex and interconnected, requiring collective efforts to find innovative solutions, share resources, and implement impactful initiatives. Collaboration fosters knowledge sharing, economies of scale, and the ability to address sustainability issues at a broader scale, making it the most important tool in advancing sustainable development.

At nearly every convening forum in the last year regarding Sustainability, Biodiversity, and even the Treaty of the High Seas, we heard global leaders say businesses, organizations, and governments cannot address interconnected and complex challenges alone. Only through innovative pre-competitive and cross-sector partnerships can we galvanize transformative change and innovative solutions, and this extends with urgency to climate adaptation and resilience. Our customers are clients already looking to engage in partnerships. Key considerations are going to be pursuits that are just and inclusive, include innovation and climate finance, center nature-based solutions, and advance the business case (quantifying data!) for corporate buy-in.

Las asociaciones en el ámbito del cambio climático deben ir más allá de las conexiones superficiales, buscando sinergias profundas y significativas. Implica colaborar no solo en la mejora de productos, sino en la creación de un impacto colectivo más amplio. Esto incluye compartir conocimientos y recursos, y trabajar en conjunto hacia metas comunes. Colaborar con una variedad de actores, desde startups innovadoras hasta organizaciones locales, puede aportar perspectivas diversas y soluciones más eficaces y holísticas. Estas colaboraciones deben basarse en la transparencia y el compromiso mutuo para ser efectivas y creíbles.

Robust measurement and transparent reporting demonstrate sustainability and climate impact. Start with a materiality assessment to focus on the most significant ESG issues. Track relevant indicators tied to climate goals across operations and the value chain. Use frameworks like GRI and SASB for guidance. Benchmark against historical baselines and peers. Report annually, validate through third party assurance. Share progress and setbacks transparently with stakeholders. Regular, rigorous measurement and reporting build trust and accountability on the sustainability journey.

Set concrete, measurable targets for your organization that are integrated into the overall performance and incentive model. This will ensure the right focus within the organization on developing, producing and selling sustainable products and services that help clients addressing their climate related challenges and opportunities.

The first step is to establish a commitment to carbon neutrality by 2030, setting a clear agenda that meets milestones with both technology and people. Establishing partnerships with cloud service providers, for example, will progressively transfer technology infrastructure to state-of-the-art data processing centres, boosting the supply of clean energy that reduces the indirect emissions associated with electricity generation produced by the company's operations. Maximising the use of resources and reducing consumption will improve the efficiency of the working model, allowing for example a focus on reducing the energy used in workplaces through teleworking, which helps to reduce employee commuting and reduce the indirect emissions.

Para enfrentar ou mitigar as mudanças climáticas: a descarbonização ou economia de baixo carbono e a economia circular são essenciais nesse cenário. Não dá para descarbonizar sem pensar na transição para a economia circular, que contribuiu também para regenerar o planeta.

There is still a disconnect for SMEs in particular, around creating business resilience to adapt and mitigate global challenges like climate change and the perceived cost. Sustainability professionals must be able to explain the business case using language easily understood by all management roles, while also communicating the urgency and magnitude.

A practical approach, to my mind, would involve systems thinking and systems practice from the very start. Only once the complexities of the situation and the ecosystems involved are seen and understood can anyone make real sense of what to do about the impact of climate change (or any other change for that matter). A good systems map will include all relevant stakeholders or agents, the relationships and flows between them, any negative and positive feedback loops, inputs, outputs, boundaries etc. This map enables us to zoom out out and see the entire supply chain or industry context, and then zoom in to the finer details that reveal where circularity could be introduced, waste minimised, risks mitigated, partnerships formed and the like.