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SUSTAINABILITY

Now is the time to take action

Sustainability challenges facing businesses

With less than 10 years to go to meet the United Nations sustainable development goals, now is the time for businesses to take action and prove they are part of the solution and not the problem.

We can help you overcome the challenges and unlock the potential of becoming a truly sustainable business.

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Dealing with the regulatory burden

The increasing regulatory burden is already affecting so many businesses (such as CSRD). Sourcing hundreds of data points across disparate systems and suppliers – with varying levels of data quality and completeness – is a major challenge, often relying on manual processes.

As businesses tackle these regulatory pressures, exemplified by the CSRD, many have still not defined a complete transition plan to achieve their sustainability goals.. A credible transition plan helps to future-proof the business – to be ready to deal with existential risks and capture growth opportunities in sustainability.

Whether voluntary or mandatory, regulation is important to driving momentum towards sustainability and building credibility with investors and stakeholders.

Moving on from side-of-desk sustainability

Sustainability requires value-chain-wide transformation over decades. Yet many businesses rely on small sustainability teams and side-of-desk efforts to deliver complex initiatives.

We don’t often see the transformation rigour used with other large change programmes in place for sustainability. Where governance does exist, itcan be ineffective in managing progress, business leaders are not accountable, projects aren’t funded or resourced sufficiently, and reporting remains manual. Given the scale of change required sustainability needs to move on from relying on goodwill to be managed with the rigour of a large transformation programme.

Effectively engaging with stakeholders

Real change that shifts the dial on scope 3 goals will only happen if businesses are able to influence their suppliers and consumers to adopt more sustainable sets of behaviours and solutions.

Many firms continue to have low confidence in their ability to influence suppliers and need to shift from buyer-supplier relationships to a more collaborative model.

When it comes to shifting consumer behaviour towards more sustainable, circular solutions, there is often a lack of alignment with P&L owners on how and when to do this.

Enabling cultural change

Sustainability is not embedded into culture or decision making processes at many organisations.

There is often misalignment between leaders on the ambition and level of change required. Organisations must work to embed sustainability into their everyday culture, enabling changes to be supported from all stakeholders.

Our Services

As an award-winning transformation consultancy, we understand what it takes to drive real transformation and keep up with the pace of change. By applying our core areas of expertise, we can help you become a fully sustainable business, demonstrate progress, satisfy ever-increasing stakeholder expectations and contribute to combatting the climate emergency.

Strategy
and readiness

 

Strategy and alignment: Understand the material sustainability impacts and ensure your strategy to mitigate and adapt is clear. Engage business leaders to reach alignment on the scale of change that’s required.

Transition plans and regulation readiness: Create a realistic plan for how your business will transform, in line with gold standards such as the Transition Plan Taskforce. Prepare to publish plans and metrics in line with CSRD, ISSB and other regulations.

Data transformation: Establish a robust data management capability, maintain data quality and provide a clear audit trail to track and report thousands of ESG data points and enable reporting on progress towards sustainability goals.

Mobilising
the transformation

 

Transformation operating model: Put rigour into your sustainability transformation by allocating clear accountabilities, establishing effective governance and resource structures, creating a clear roadmap and setting up internal MI and reporting.

Energise and mobilise: Engage people across your business to build excitement and commitment to deliver sustainability initiatives and mobilise transformation teams driving organisation-wide buy in.

Integration into processes: Define ways to build sustainability strategies and tracking into business as usual performance management and finance processes.

Driving action
and impact

 

People engagement and culture: Develop engagement programmes which build a culture of sustainability, shifting everyday behaviours and embedding sustainability into your employee value proposition to boost talent acquisition and retention.

Capability building: Develop training programmes to build knowledge and capabilities, establish strategic partnerships and implement supporting technologies.

Circularity: Collaborate with partners, customers and operational leaders to design and trial business models, proving the value of circular solutions.

Stakeholder engagement: Design and run collaboration programmes with key suppliers and stakeholders across the value chain to co-create sustainability solutions.

Our Credentials

We are privileged to be working with some of the largest and most influential organizations on sustainability. View some of our client stories here.

Designing a leading sustainability strategy

Working with a consumer goods company to design and implement its first sustainability strategy.

Successfully embedding sustainability

Embedding sustainability within a consumer company and across its brands.

Retail sustainability

Our Insights

Our team of experts regularly share their insights on sustainability issues across a range of sectors. You can read some of them here.

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Meet some of our team

Jen Nixon
Sustainability lead
Spiro Comitis
Client Director
Jonathan Carr
Client director
Sukh Plaha
Principal
Spiro Comitis
Client Director
Jen Nixon
Principal
Jonathan Carr
Dónal Flynn
Principal

If you would like to speak to Gate One about how we can support you with your sustainability journey, please contact Jen Nixon.