According to the World Bank, SMEs play a significant role in most economies comprising roughly 90 percent of businesses and more than 50 percent of employment worldwide. It follows that SMEs can also play a major role in mitigating climate change by reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, thereby minimizing their carbon footprints.
Furthermore, larger businesses are increasingly expecting their supply chain partners, many of which are SMEs, to take action to combat climate change.
However, carbon footprint reduction requires financial outlays for upgrading and replacing infrastructure, equipment, and processes. Rational business owners will be reluctant to allocate the financial resources needed to reduce their carbon footprint unless they see clear financial benefits.
Fortunately, businesses that invest in reducing their carbon footprint can generate financial returns in several ways, such as lowering energy costs, improving production efficiencies, enhancing their reputation in the market, increasing worker productivity, and launching new climate-friendly products and services.
At the same time, SMEs must find ways to protect their assets and income streams against the damaging impacts of global warming, changing weather patterns, and extreme weather events, e.g., heatwaves, droughts, storms, and floods.
Therefore, businesses need to take a two-pronged approach for dealing with climate change:
Mitigation: reducing their carbon footprint to help stabilize the levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are causing global warming.
Adaptation: implementing resilience-building measures to eliminate or minimize current and expected climate change-driven adverse impacts on business performance while exploiting any viable market opportunities.
Business owners seeking guidance to help map out a plan for climate change mitigation and adaptation will encounter an overwhelming volume of information about climate change and what to do about it.
As a result, it can be challenging to get started. SMEs, in particular, do not have the same level of resources that their corporate cousins have to devote to learning about and dealing with climate change. We created the Climate Canvas with this challenge in mind.
The Climate Canvas is a tool businesses can use to efficiently develop a climate change mitigation and adaptation plan. We drew inspiration from the simplicity of the Business Model Canvas, a tool that has revolutionized business modeling and planning. Like the Business Model Canvas, the Climate Canvas is a one-page template with nine building blocks.
Climate Canvas was designed with small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in mind but it can be used by businesses of any size.
The nine building blocks capture the climate change threats a business faces, related supply chain and market risks, operational risks, commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, key metrics for measuring progress, appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures, and the relevant financial outlays and financial benefits.
To learn more, sign up for the Climate Canvas Guide and Web App at https://www.climatecanvas.io/
Comments
Post a Comment