The Getting Going report provides a toolkit to drive real-world progress on corporate climate action. It highlights that to get going, businesses must lead with strategy, not measurement, and that focusing on how a company contributes to the transition, rather than with emissions outcomes, is essential for orchestrating the big shifts we need.
The Getting Going report, created in collaboration with Oliver Wyman, follows on from last year's report Getting Real, which provided a blueprint for a commercially smart climate transition.
Getting Going identifies a framework of four core enablers that make corporate action on climate happen:
Attention
Attention across the organisation, at all management levels.
Organisations should frame the case for climate action in commercial and business terms. They should consider how to align incentives to reinforce rather than conflict with climate efforts. One way to achieve this is to promote education and create a network of champions that can help set direction and increase engagement.
Vision
Vision to set goals and priorities and give shape to an otherwise disparate and tactical agenda.
Businesses must identify when to be a pioneer, and innovate, and when to learn from others. It's also about engaging in and influencing groups that span the ecosystem, beyond the company.
Operation
The vision needs to be embedded in the reality of operation.
Create a ‘glide path’ to break down vision into manageable, actionable steps while keeping the end goal in sight. It's about fostering creativity and a ‘fail-fast’ mentality.
Accountability
The organisation must align people’s accountability – overall, not specifically for climate – to support and incentivise the actions required.
Companies should balance the expectations of transparency and efficiency of standards with the organisation’s individual operating model and choice of impactful targets. To help with this, set out shared but clear roles and responsibilities across the organisation.
Latest article
Why climate action demands strategy as well as measurement published on the World Economic Forum.
Co-authored by Mike Peirce, Executive Director of Systems Change, Climate Group, and Simon Glynn, Partner and Co-lead of Climate and Sustainability, Oliver Wyman