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Business sustainability has shifted from a mere talking point among executives to actionable to-do’s in offices.
A past measure of “green business” was how fast executives could pontificate intelligently about sustainability matters. Alas, that has changed.
These days, customers, employees, investors, and other investors want to know, specifically, what you’re doing to create a greener business. You only need to look at the activist investors pursuing bold green changes in today’s corporate sphere to appreciate the urgency.
To help you along the way, here are 10 questions you should be prepared to answer at some point along your sustainability journey as an organization.
This is the question most executives and other stakeholders are asking. Don’t be surprised if this question is accompanied by another more academic one, namely, “what exactly is a carbon footprint anyway?”
Top tip: Check out the Carbon Fund‘s carbon calculator or use the one offered by the Marrion Institute.
Difficulty Rating: Simple
Cost Rating: Free if using online packages – costs associated with professional evaluations
This question tends to follow very quickly from the first since products and services are the bread and butter of any company. The likely consequence will focus on how a company can determine if its products are green. Issues that will need further unpacking and may help you develop your answer include:
Top tip: Understanding the environmental costs of your products will require a thorough analysis undertaken by a professional.
Difficulty Rating: This activity requires a lot of in-depth analysis
Cost Rating: Costs associated with professional evaluations

This is the question that you can expect once your company has made a commitment to enhance sustainability.
It is also the most complex since the answer can literally involve every part of an enterprise and its supply chain. This is also a question that involves both short and long-term program development, project management, and strategy.
Top tip: Check out what leading companies in your industry are doing to learn how your company can design and implement programs for environmental improvement.
Difficulty Rating: May require a bit of extra effort – professional advice may be required
Cost Rating: Costs associated with professional evaluations

This is another question that signals a sustainability journey is maturing since the conversation is expanding beyond the key managers and executives.
Attaining a figure is also challenging in many organizations, particularly larger ones, as mindsets and behaviors towards sustainability take time to filter down to all employees.
Your answer should look at how much your employees know about the environmental impacts associated with your products and services and the ways in which your company is offsetting these.
Top tip: Devise a questionnaire and interview as many employees as possible to gauge an overall impression of environmental awareness in your company.
Difficulty Rating: Simple – may prove to be a complex exercise depending on company size
Cost Rating: Free – costs associated with professional evaluations
The old adage of “what gets measured, gets managed” is a good place to start. There are some values that might be trickier to measure, such as return on investment (ROI). This looks at how much you have saved through sustainability investments.
Top tip: By calculating your company’s ROI, you can see how much money is being saved by implementing sustainable actions.
Difficulty Rating: Simple – may prove to be a complex exercise depending on company size
Cost Rating: Costs associated with professional evaluations
This simple question has many implications and also requires a lot of data collection, analyses and planning. Aspects to consider are:
Top tip: Setting targets and goals should be a top priority and evaluated over time to ensure that these are still the right objectives.
Difficulty Rating: Simple – may prove to be a complex exercise depending on company size
Cost Rating: Free – costs associated with professional evaluations
This goes to the heart of a business, and the answers are sometimes not easy to find.
It’s unsurprising, given that innovation is usually the result of a process and can be encouraged and nurtured. This comes without a guarantee of success, but resources, a commitment of time, and financial and human capital are a good starting point.
Top tip: By researching techniques to limit the environmental impacts of products and services, you may come across innovative ways to improve overall sustainability.
Difficulty Rating: Simple – may prove to be a complex exercise depending on company size
Cost Rating: Free – costs associated with professional evaluations

A point of reference is always important for directors to properly understand green issues, and most companies tend to look to competitors, customers and similar for benchmarks.
Thanks to the internet and the growing trend towards corporate reporting, this task of comparison has become much easier.
Top tip: Check out competitors’ web pages, annual reports, and online media to assess their levels of sustainability.
Difficulty Rating: Simple
Cost Rating: Free
By partnering with sustainability NGOs, environmental companies, or even government departments, you create a platform for idea sharing, joint ventures, and exciting pilot projects.
It is vital that collaborative efforts are made between your organization and another that has similar environmental values to ensure the success of the venture. One of the major financial benefits includes government subsidies, grants, and the potential to save costs.
Top tip: Speak to your local business council about finding organizations that you could potentially partner with.
Difficulty Rating: Simple
Cost Rating: Free

The notion that sustainability extends well beyond the company’s boundaries is often difficult for some executives to understand.
Develop ways to gather feedback from people external to the company, such as clients, investors, and interested parties. This could be through dedicated email and phone services, company newsletters, suggestion boxes, online media and information forums.
Top tip: Schedule discussions or meetings at least once a year so as to gather information on what external parties think of your company.
Difficulty Rating: Simple – may require a bit of extra effort
Cost Rating: Free – costs associated with professional services
The questions posed will be focused on your business operations, and answers will require sustainability staff to explore data gathering, planning, strategy and analyses, target setting, and engagement with employees and external parties.
Even though all of this information will be collected, you can be sure that some new challenging questions will emerge, keeping you on your toes.
Net-zero. A term on which the climate hopes of a planet are hung. A term that presents a lot of practical challenges. A term that raises a lot of questions. In this blog we aim to answer to the most important ones.
Net-zero pledges have been set by countries, cities and businesses as the deadline of halving global emissions by 2030 and limiting global warming to 1.5oC looms. Pledges have increased but rapid and urgent climate action is still needed if we are to be in with a chance of achieving net-zero by 2050.
There is such a thing as net-zero. However, the challenge with net-zero was the lack of an internationally recognised definition until the recent release of the SBTi’s Net-Zero Standard. Essentially, net-zero is a state where no incremental greenhouse gasses are added into the atmosphere. This means achieving a balance between carbon emissions and carbon removals through a combination of emissions reduction and carbon sequestration.
According to the Net-Zero Standard it is crucial that we aim for net-zero by 2050 at the latest. This gives us a 50% chance of limiting global warming to relatively safe levels. So, it really is a very real and urgent goal for all of us that is supported by science.
If we look beyond the buzzword, what science is telling us is that we must limit global warming to 1.5oC if we are to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. In real terms that means we need to reduce emissions by 7.6% every year between 2020 to 2030 if we are to achieve it whilst also increasing natural carbons sinks. This is no small task but should be fundamental to any definition of net-zero.
In October 2021, the Science-based Target initiative (SBTi) launched the first Net-Zero Standard for corporations, outlining a clear blueprint for businesses to set credible net-zero targets aligned with the latest science.
Net-zero requires rapid decarbonisation and, therefore, we would recommend that companies set near-term and long-term science-based targets for emissions reduction in line with this latest standard. This will ensure that your business is on a reduction pathway aligned to limit global warming to 1.5oC, which science tells us is necessary if we are to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.
Obtaining net-zero requires a 90-95% reduction in your emissions (in line with science) and any carbon credits used to account for the remaining 5-10% of emissions should be from verified projects that sequester carbon from the atmosphere.
Having these targets in place means businesses can demonstrate a credible commitment to reducing emissions as part of their net-zero strategy.
There will undoubtedly be many challenges along the journey but here are some of the major blockers to getting your net-zero strategy off the ground.
Obviously COVID-19 has meant some enormous challenges to businesses (not to mention individuals) and has been an urgent priority to factor in which inevitably will have some impact on some companies’ plans for sustainability.
We’ve seen a huge increase in pressure around climate change in the last couple of years and with the post-Covid imperative to build back better or have a green recovery, more companies are seeing this as a necessity.
COVID-19 has provided a unique opportunity to re-think our ways of working. It has also demonstrated that collective action is possible, science matters and should be taken seriously and that governments can and should act rapidly to lead. How we continue to handle the recovery from COVID-19 will be crucial to our ability to achieve net-zero.
Ultimately, this will depend on the company or sector as each one is unique.
For example, if it is an airline, then investment in fleet changes (electric and hybrid plane technology) and sustainable fuels are necessary. This means investing in technologies that are not necessarily commercially viable at this time but crucial for reaching net-zero, minimising global heating, and for the future resilience of the airline industry.
Perhaps the most radical changes required for all energy intensive industries is to invest heavily in innovation and have a more future-focussed approach to business.
The circular economy has enormous potential to reduce our emissions and should be integral to the net-zero agenda.
Obviously, we do need to be careful when making changes to address the circular economy that we are not shifting the emissions burden elsewhere, but the idea behind circular thinking is to ensure that there are no leakages in the system, and this also should include emissions as well as waste.
We would recommend conducting Life Cycle Assessment (LCAs) on your products and services or even thinking about an Organisational Life Cycle Assessment (OLCA) i.e. one that doesn’t just look at one product in isolation but many if your company has them. In so doing it is possible to understand the various impacts of our activities through the life cycle, perform comparative analysis of different choices so we can make informed better ones, and find opportunities to innovate.
We would also recommend that this process isn’t a one-time activity but regularly updated to activate a cycle of continual improvement and ensure all sustainability priorities are aligned.
Scope 3 emissions could look quite different for each organisation.
The first and most important thing is to identify the hotspot areas in your Scope 3. There may be aspects of your Scope 3 that are particularly challenging and out of your control. If they are of smaller materiality, then it is ok to move them to the lower priority list.
We’d recommend focusing on the largest areas of your emissions as well as what is important to you and your stakeholders, then you can understand which areas to focus your energies on and which levers to pull.
For more detailed information on tackling Scope 3 and a supplier engagement case study, you can access our Factsheet which includes our six step methodology to taking action on your Scope 3 emissions.
Net-zero will require rapid decarbonisation and, therefore, companies should look to set a science-based target for emissions reduction as part of a net-zero strategy. Having these targets in place mean businesses can demonstrate a credible commitment to reducing emissions as part of their net-zero strategy.
Unfortunately, we are not going to all be net-zero tomorrow and eliminating all emissions is going to be difficult, particularly in the short term. We can however demonstrate that we are taking every action possible today to take responsibility for our impacts. By supporting carbon offsetting projects with multiple co-benefits that protect and restore precious carbon sinks, we can help to build renewable infrastructure and support communities.
This is where offsetting can play a vital role in the transition to net-zero. In line with the new Net-Zero Standard businesses are required to achieve full emissions reductions of 90-95% of emissions and offset the remaining 5-10% via projects that sequester carbon from the atmosphere. In addition, while progressing towards achieving this, companies are encouraged to invest in carbon offsetting projects that avoid or reduce emissions outside their value chain.
First and foremost, make a public commitment to net-zero, following best practice. It is important to communicate your net-zero targets in a transparent way with clear details on your objectives and targets. The more of us that do, the more we can start to collectively activate change and make the global goal achievable. It will also continue to send a message to governments that this is an important priority for business, and we need their collaboration.
Get involved in consultations on climate change within your sector to make your voice heard. Ensure that governments get to hear about the considerations for your sector when it comes to targeting net-zero and reducing emissions and how important it is to you.
We are already starting to see pledges from companies for carbon positivity (or negativity depending on the preference in terminology). While no commitment can be too ambitious when it comes to climate change, we advise against using terms in your claims that have not been standardised. Following the SBTi Net-Zero Standard, net-zero is now a globally recognised framework for business and should be the long-term goal of your organisation to ensure climate commitments are credible, robust and in line with the latest science.
If you have any further net-zero FAQs, or require more information on how companies can achieve net-zero and even go beyond, you might find our A to Zero Factsheet useful or our blog post on how to become a net-zero business.
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