Insights

January 17, 2024

2023 SBER Year-End Symposium

SR Inc held its Sustainable Business & Enterprise Roundtable (SBER) Year-End Executive Symposium on December 5th, 2023, both in-person at the Dupont Circle Hotel in D.C. and virtually. A special acknowledgement goes to our SR Inc 2023 Award Recipients:

• SBER Outstanding Corporate Leader of 2023: Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc
• SBER Outstanding Executive of 2023: Debra Pulpi, Manager of Corporate EHS & North America Facilities at Teradyne, Inc
• SBER Most Improved Corporate Leader of 2023: PTC

The first portion, moderated by SR Inc CEO Jim Boyle, was focused on Sustainability Strategy Leadership. Key takeaways from this discussion include:

1. Even in a retrenching ICT industry & a correcting post-Covid Life Sciences industry, top SBER leaders as determined by SR Inc’s proprietary member diagnostic process have increased their investment in “corporate sustainability” budgets >25% over 2022, as reflected in the 2023 SBER Awards.
2. The European Union’s CSRD has inaugurated the needed era of mandatory ESG reporting, but there remains an unsustainably flawed current recommended approach to high-temperature scenario planning.
3. The “Declaration For Purchaser Caused EACs” provides SBER Member-Clients and other industry leaders with an opportunity to reify their buying best practice into a “Fair Labor”-like tag that the global market can reward and scale.
4. Purchaser Caused EACs are a “Yes And” development which respect the need for “Unbundled RECs” from existing projects but enable policymakers to ID & require “PC EACs” to match the new demand of green hydrogen, etc.
5. P-RECs present a promising opportunity to leverage corporate environmental procurement to invest in peace in a world increasingly savaged by war, which is always more exacerbated by human-caused climate breakdown.
6. SBER’s shared-cost industry leadership service is hiring at all levels & investing in digitalization through 2024 to enable Member-Clients to develop the world’s best & most needed answers for enterprise decarbonization.

Following the first portion of our Year-End Executive Symposium, the second portion of the event focused on the culmination of SR Inc’s client service experience and year-long research on decarbonization through two different lenses: the details of SR Inc’s 10-step process for developing a decarbonization roadmap, and industry-specific approaches to Scope 3 decarbonization.

During this session, SR Inc’s Research & Consulting team discussed a number of key steps in creating a decarbonization roadmap, including visualizing your company’s footprint and emissions sources and geographies, identifying granular, year-on-year actions for Scopes 1 & 2 mitigation, and creating milestones for your Scope 3 decarbonization strategy with your value chain. The team then presented on the Scope 3 strategies most relevant to technology and life science sector companies, specifically highlighting approaches for mitigating Purchased Goods & Services (Category 1) and Use of Sold Product (Category 11).

In-person and virtual participants then heard from Thermo Fisher’s Global Senior Manager of Supplier Climate Engagement, Kristen Chambers, on the company’s innovative supplier engagement strategy to align resources, build capacity, and track & report in driving towards Scope 3 decarbonization.

Key findings highlighted during this session and discussion include:

1. Global decarbonization roadmapping helps sustainability teams plan and implement year-on-year strategies and establish the basis for interdepartmental cooperation on these strategies to help meet climate goals.
2. Decarbonization roadmaps provide “line-of-sight” visibility to senior management to set or advance climate goals, or for those companies who already have strong renewable energy and SBT-aligned or -approved goals, the roadmap layouts a detailed plan for achieving those goals, including financial implications, by year.
3. Experienced Member-Clients recommend making sure a proper governance structure is in place to drive climate action and ensure the decision-making structure is clear, pressure testing the assumptions in the roadmap, managing expectations, under-promising on timing, and then trying to over-deliver.
4. Supplier engagement programs should be founded on segment-specific strategies tailored to reflect and support supplier-specific historical and projected emission reduction progress.
5. Value-chain (including either or both customers and suppliers) aggregated renewable energy procurements help accelerate companies’ global environmental impact by concurrently achieving Scope 2 & 3 emission reductions while creating new utility scale capacity.
6. Member-Client Thermo Fisher Scientific has developed a supplier playbook, which will build the company’s capacity to support suppliers as they work to establish and progress their own decarbonization strategies. 

In addition to the topic of decarbonization, the symposium also delved into SR Inc’s newly developed guidance on mandatory sustainability reporting. A special thank you goes out to our Member-Client speakers for their excellent reflections on mandatory reporting: Carrie Christopher, Senior Director of ESG & Sustainability at Splunk; Avintha Moodaly, Associate Director of Environmental Management at Kyndryl; & Dr. Saskia Schwartz, Lead Counsel and Director of ESG Programs at Akamai Technologies. During the discussion, the speakers shared their experiences and advice with attendees relating to preparing processes for mandatory reporting, communicating across the organization about upcoming reporting needs, selecting and evaluating reporting and data management software, and more.

Highlights from the mandatory sustainability reporting discussion include:

1. 2023 brought significant changes to the sustainability reporting space, with adopted and revised standards from the EU, IFRS and ISSB, as well as the California legislature.
2. These standards share common foundations on the Task Force for Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), but vary in some key characteristics and their application timelines.
3. Following 2023’s significant sustainability reporting framework changes, Member-Clients with a working understanding of their key reporting mandates must accelerate their organizations’ mandatory reporting response and process in 2024 and 2025.
4. Many service providers are developing offerings to support companies’ preparation for CSRD and other mandatory reporting frameworks, and Member-Client teams should anticipate procuring a suite of service offerings in the coming years.
5. Key features of favored offerings include integrated materiality and data management capabilities, as well as automation and integration with other data sources.
6. During the mandatory reporting interactive session, executives from leading companies shared that they are already underway with weekly or other periodic cross-functional working groups to develop data governance practices that will underpin the move to mandatory reporting, regardless of the frameworks to which the company is exposed.
7. The findings from the Mandatory Reporting interactive session will factor into SR Inc’s 2024 actionable guidance for mandatory reporting response.

The Year-End Symposium presentation and best-practice Member Advisories from both portions of the event can be found in the SR Inc Digital Library, accessible exclusively to Member-Client executives. Also in our Digital Library, Member-Clients will find the newly developed SR Inc Member Briefing: Responding to Mandatory Reporting, which compiles our work from 2023 on CSRD and the accompanying ESRS; the IFRS S1 and S2 Sustainability Standards, the Proposed SEC Climate Disclosure Rule, and the California corporate disclosure bills. In addition to giving Member-Clients the need-to-know information and criteria from these frameworks, the Briefing features a mock compliance timeline, Member-Client case studies, and six Executive-Level Recommendations for Mandatory Reporting Response to help executives plan their 2024 actions and early response to mandatory reporting pressures.

Please contact info@sustainround.com to learn more about gaining access to the full extent of the SR Inc Digital Library through membership.