As more businesses make public commitments to ambitious climate action, the behind-the-scenes reality is sobering: only one in six of the world’s largest companies are on track to meet net zero emissions by 2050. While various challenges contribute to this shortfall, one key issue is how businesses approach their climate strategies. Too often, organizations adopt a reactive, compliance-driven approach when they should be proactively positioning themselves for success in a low-carbon economy.
A significant contributor to this challenge is the overwhelming burden placed on sustainability teams. Many ESG professionals spend seven to eight months annually preparing disclosures for different regulatory frameworks, leaving little capacity for strategic decarbonization planning or risk mitigation.
To drive meaningful progress, companies must integrate climate action with climate reporting—viewing both as interconnected priorities rather than separate, competing tasks. Organizations that take a holistic, programmatic approach will streamline compliance, improve risk resilience, and create long-term business value.
In this article, we explore how organizations can break free from the cycle of data management and develop a future-proof climate program.
The Climate Disclosure Landscape
Mounting demands, higher stakes.
If you handle your company’s climate work, you may feel like you’re being buried by an avalanche of climate reporting mandates, frameworks, and demands. These include the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), California’s SB 253 and SB 261, UK’s Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR), the ESG Data Convergence Initiative (EDCI), the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), Ecovadis, or CDP, to name a few.
While these policies and standards are beginning to coalesce around shared principles, they still demand a lot of legwork — each requiring teams to slice and dice their information in different ways. To keep up, highly skilled climate staff are spending precious hours gathering and managing data from internal departments, suppliers, and other partners. This can be incredibly time-consuming; it typically takes 6-9 months to prepare for disclosure to CDP, for example. And most sustainability professionals are in this because they’re passionate about the environment — not data management.
If we hope to make real progress on climate, this cycle needs to end.
A Mindset Shift
From siloed deliverables to big-picture, programmatic thinking.
The problem boils down to this: too many companies are approaching their climate planning tactically and in silos. Without support, lean climate teams (often a team of one) are forced to react to the reporting deadline right in front of them, rather than developing a long-term business strategy that will position them as leaders — and winners — in the low-carbon economy of the future.
With a big-picture, programmatic approach, you’ll design a climate program that addresses every one of your climate-related business outcomes. You’re not just responding to the next reporting deadline, you’re preparing for all reporting. You’re not only setting an emissions target, you’re understanding how you’ll get there — and why. You’re not simply calculating your carbon footprint, you’re identifying climate risks and opportunities so you can create and protect business value.
These needs are interdependent, and a handful of core capabilities will allow teams to meet them all — not just once, but year after year. For transformational outcomes, companies need integrated, connected, repeatable solutions. That’s what a big-picture climate program is all about.
For example, with a tactical mindset, your carbon accounting will be narrowly focused on measuring energy use so you can fill out your annual CSRD report. When you shift to a programmatic mindset you start thinking more broadly about how you can use carbon accounting to satisfy a variety of purposes that drive business value — not just reporting under CSRD, but planning emissions reductions, enacting operational efficiencies, and identifying and responding to risks.
After all, regulations like the CSRD have emerged for a reason – they weren’t designed to make sustainability staff miserable (though it may sometimes seem that way). They are a response to the real financial risks presented by the climate crisis. Once organizations begin to approach their climate disclosures not as a box to check, but as a strategic part of the business, they’ll be able to make more informed decisions about how to allocate resources, cut emissions, and tackle climate risks.
“It’s one thing to measure your emissions and set a climate target. It’s an entirely different thing to build a business strategy around those realities.” - Emma Sweby, Persefoni Head of Climate Solutions
A Climate Program That Future-Proofs Your Company
Foundations, capabilities, and communication.
Building a strong climate program is all about future-proofing. Right now, businesses are developing climate targets based on a vision for the year 2050. If these companies spend each of the next 25 years scrambling annually to figure out how to check the CSRD reporting box, they’re going to be in trouble. Instead, they need to cultivate in-house capabilities that will allow them to respond with confidence to whatever regulatory requirements are thrown at them — and to adapt to a shifting marketplace and a world that’s bringing increasingly frequent climate disasters, supply chain disruptions, and regulatory pressures.
6 Core Capabilities for an Effective Climate Program
Building an effective climate program requires more than just tracking emissions—it demands a holistic, integrated approach that ensures accuracy, drives meaningful action, and aligns with evolving regulations. These six core capabilities form the foundation of a resilient, data-driven climate strategy that enables organizations to measure, manage, and accelerate their transition to a low-carbon future.
1. Carbon Accounting
This is the bedrock of a strong climate program. To meet current and future disclosure requirements, you’ll want a system in place to reliably track assurance-ready scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions with room to grow and adapt alongside your ambitions. Organizations must build and embed the processes and controls necessary for scalable and reliable carbon accounting. These systems should be as robust as those used for financial disclosure.
2. Target Setting and Tracking
How you create and track your emissions targets will play an important role in the success of your program. Progress against your target is a key KPI and measure of your impact. It relies on reliable measurement data, scenario modeling, a solid understanding of business growth ambitions, and ultimately, a strong internal commitment from the top of the organization. Many organizations will need initial support as they work to establish ambitious, achievable targets — and, if they choose to use the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), get those targets certified.
3. Decarbonization Planning and Action
One of the biggest challenges you’ll encounter is developing a concrete action plan for meeting your targets. Your decarbonization plan should be data-driven, iterative, and informed by key stakeholders. Stakeholders will likely come to the table with different priorities, and decarbonization plans should carefully balance strategic, operational, and financial considerations.
4. Risk and Opportunity Management
True business impact comes from your ability to adequately identify and adapt to the risks and opportunities climate change brings. These include physical risks, like severe weather and disasters, as well as risks that arise from the transition to a low-carbon economy, like new regulations or loss of market share. To make informed decisions, you’ll need a realistic picture of the threats and areas of growth ahead of you; you’ll also need to thoroughly understand trends affecting your industry and peers.
5. Value Chain Engagement
Communication with your value chain is a key component of decarbonization planning, and should be a top priority. By helping build your suppliers’ long-term reporting capacity, you’ll set yourself up for more effective collaboration and action on your scope 3 emissions. A good first step is to set up systems that facilitate data exchange — you can share free carbon accounting software with your partners to streamline this process and ensure consistency.
6. Disclosure
To break free of the hamster wheel of reporting, you need to establish effective, repeatable compliance processes. Ideally, you’ll be able to gather and crunch your data once, and then use it for multiple disclosure frameworks. A programmatic mindset will also set you up for more efficient and successful reporting. It will be far easier to answer questions about your risk management and transition planning if you’ve been having strategic conversations throughout the organization all year than if you’re thinking about it for the first time as you’re filling in the blanks on the CDP questionnaire.
Steps for Strengthening Your Climate Program
Strengthening your climate program starts with a clear strategy, the right processes, and strong internal support to drive meaningful progress. Below, we outline key steps to help you build a more effective and resilient climate program.
1. Assess your current capabilities vs. what’s needed.
You should start with a solid understanding of the processes and measures you’ll need to reach your goals, then compare them with what you currently have in place. That will allow you to focus on filling in the gaps (and you’ll likely be able to address most of these gaps with the core capabilities described above).
2. Make sure your processes are forward-looking
Ask yourself if your processes and plans are preparing you for what’s coming in the future, or just a single reporting deadline. Make sure you’re not creating one-off solutions and tackling challenges in silos, but applying a systems lens. Concentrate on building foundations from which you can readily respond to different disclosure demands and climate pressures. This will allow you to stay nimble and invest in actions that will return the highest yields in terms of emissions reductions and climate resilience.
3. Engage stakeholders and build relationships
Responsibility for a company’s sustainability progress should be shared across all departments. To make meaningful gains, climate teams need to build relationships and embed sustainability as a team effort in multiple business units. They have to convince every level of the organization — especially the executive suite — of the business value of the climate program.
One of the problems with chasing disclosure deadlines from a short-term, tactical posture is that you lose the chance to earn buy-in from key people inside the company. After all, the actual work of decarbonization will ultimately be owned by functions outside the climate team. For example, if your electricity emissions are high, it won’t be hard to identify the steps needed to make reductions (like using different lightbulbs). But it’s probably the facilities manager — not the climate team — that holds the budget and the power to make these changes. If you’re only engaging that facilities manager once a year during the CSRD reporting cycle when you ask how much electricity was used, you’re missing the opportunity to create a long-term ally.
4. Take full advantage of technology
By now it’s probably clear that carbon accounting software is crucial as you attack the mammoth task of managing emissions data. Instead of entering information manually on spreadsheets, software allows you to automate calculations, handle large data sets with ease, eliminate errors, respond to multiple regulations, and prepare for assurance. But you should also make sure you’re taking full advantage of everything technology can do. Building your capabilities will allow you to go beyond simply calculating emissions and use your carbon accounting to respond effectively to climate risks and opportunities.
Leveraging Support to Create Your Climate Program
Working smarter, not harder.
Zeroing in on the foundations and steps above will save time and set the stage for a high-impact climate strategy. Regardless of how far along you are on your climate journey, you will likely need some outside help to build your program. It could be an extra set of hands to gather and upload data, a compliance expert who knows disclosure regulations inside and out, or a specialist who can help you engage your executive team and develop the business case for your climate strategy. Look for expert support that complements your foundational carbon accounting technology and cultivates self-reliance within your organization, by focusing on:
Education
Look for experts who want to build your internal capabilities. They should approach the task with curiosity, seek to understand your specific needs, and ultimately aim to hand the work over to you, not keep it indefinitely.
Common Language
An effective support team will help you establish a common language and build shared ownership among different stakeholders, including your IT, Finance, Procurement, and Operations teams.
Integrated Approach and Strategic Alignment
Experts should help you build programmatically instead of executing against siloed, one-off needs. All resources and initiatives should align with your company’s broader business strategy.
Skill Matching
Seek consultants who will help you capitalize on the skill sets and capabilities that already exist in your company.
Incremental Wins
Even with the right resources, building a climate program can be overwhelming. A good support team will help you keep momentum by breaking the work into logical, bite-size chunks with tangible, near-term benefits.
Growth Mindset
The climate landscape is changing rapidly, with new risks and opportunities arising every day. Look for a support team with a fast and flexible mindset to help you adapt to shifting priorities.
“Our mindset at Persefoni Consulting Group is ‘you’ve got this.’ We demystify the process and help businesses where they really need it so they can build confidence and ownership over their programs. Our goal isn’t to stay on as consultants.” - Emma Sweby, Persefoni Head of Climate Solutions
Looking Ahead
Sustainability demands are rising and the stakes are higher than ever. To respond, businesses need to work smarter, not harder. Instead of approaching climate from a reactive, tactical posture, organizations should look ahead and invest in the capabilities that will allow them to stay nimble and respond to ever-changing regulations, risks, and opportunities. That means freeing sustainability teams from the trap of relentless data management and reporting.
When these teams are bolstered by technology, resources, and expert support, they can concentrate on implementing high-impact solutions that deliver business value — and set their companies up to thrive in the low-carbon economy of the future.
Learn how Persefoni Consulting Group can help you manage disclosures and develop a strong climate program.
