Climate Counts launched its Climate Counts Company Scorecard thanked us for launching the score-in June 2007 to major media attention and has since rated 93 compa- card and said our scores and ranks
nies in 12 consumer sectors (with more to be added later this spring) have helped to elevate the climate
on their climate action and progress against a set of 22 criteria organ- issue to the boardroom,” said Turner.
ized into four categories. They include: Media of all kinds, from People to the
1. Review: Has the company taken inventory of its emissions? Harvard Business Review and the Wall
2. Reduce: Is the company setting emissions reduction goals and ac- Street Journal, began reporting the
tually achieving reductions? scores. Consumers got involved,
3. Report: Is the company reporting its progress openly and trans- downloading and sharing scores, and
parently? using the internet and social network-
4. Policy: Is the company lending its support to public policy that ing to comment and reward action or
supports climate action? inaction.
The organiza- Awareness Leads to Action. Scores
tion’s research also began to improve year after year,
team consulted even as new industry sectors and com-publicly avail- panies were added. In the first com-able informa- parison year, 84 percent of the
tion to build its companies were rated in 2007 im-company pro- proved their scores in 2008. Google,
files and had for example, improved from 17 to 55,
the results inde- Sara Lee increased from 2 to 13, and
pendently veri- Samsung was up 18 points to 51. A
fied. Relying subsidiary of one electronics company
only on public strategically engaged its suppliers to
record rein- use the Climate Counts scorecard to
forced the im- rate their own businesses. Stonyfield
portance of Farm received a 63 in year one, not
transparency, the third major category of reporting progress with the highest score in its category, but
openness. To further drive consumer dialogue and increase business was highly motivated to improve its
incentive to act and inform customers about their actions, Climate score in year two and did top its cate-Counts started with large companies that have high visibility and gory with a 78.
high levels of daily consumer interaction. The goal, however, is to Overall Trends in Corporate Sus-
rate companies of all sizes and in a variety of sectors. tainability. Turner says the bench-
Other approaches to rating and certifying companies are available marking collection from the first set
through organizations like Carbon Trust, a UK-based nonprofit that of scored companies uncovered a few
introduced The Carbon Trust Standard last year. It is also an enter- major themes. Companies are doing
prise-wide standard that builds on the GHG Protocol Corporate Stan- best on reviewing and measuring
dard (referred to above) and the ISO 14064-1:2006 protocol. Most where they are, and worst on reduc-ratings, however, tend to
Climate Counts Benchmarking Trends
focus on products rather
(based on all the companies rated so far)
than enterprise-wide efforts.
Corporate Sustainability Strengths (areas where the majority of companies scored high):
Increasing Awareness.
• Creating standard protocols for inventories
The scorecard received a
• Measuring all Kyoto-specified gases
predictably high level of
• Doing ongoing inventory measurement
scrutiny, but it withstood
the credibility test, was embraced widely, and is leading to more action,
according to Wood Turner,
executive director, Climate
•
Counts. “Many corporate
sustainability officers
Corporate Sustainability Weaknesses (areas where most companies scored low):
• 77 percent of companies had zero reductions either accounted for or achieved
• 82 percent of companies said they have done nothing to require or give preference to
a supplier who takes climate action.
82 percent measured “intensity per dollar” rather than absolute reductions, which
spreads the carbon footprint over a per-unit-sold basis instead of reducing overall
emissions.
