Activator Summit 2023

Sessions

• Transforming Your Organisation
• Financing Sustainable Change
• Taking Responsibility for Your Impact
• Enabling a Circular Scope 3
• Risk and Opportunity of Nature
• Compliance as the Catalyst
• Communicating Your Impact

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June 2023: Virtual Summit

Watch recordings of the June 2023 Virtual Activator Summit.

Transforming Your Organisation For Success

Rising to the challenges of sustainability, the climate crisis, and social exclusion will ultimately require top-to-bottom transformation across businesses and value chains. Leadership will need to be prepared to navigate challenges from nature dependencies, climate risk, circularity and digitisation to engaging stakeholders and making the investment case for longer-term security and returns.

Watch Anthesis Chief Enterprise Officer Dean Sanders, and CEOs Stuart McLachlan and Chantelle Ludski as they look at what sustainable transformation looks like for organisations. They explored the solutions available to support businesses to move beyond mandatory requirements, enabling them to reduce risk, build resilience and outperform in their sector.

Financing Sustainable Change

Sustainable change requires investment capital. That’s whether making operational changes to existing organisations to fundamentally reduce impacts or investing in the businesses and infrastructure of the future, that will drive the transition to a sustainable, low carbon economy. Governments understand this and are creating regulations designed to ensure capital flows to the truly sustainable projects and enterprises; investors are responding by redirecting capital.

This session explored:

• Options for businesses seeking to raise capital to fund sustainable change
• How superior ESG performance will allow businesses to access finance
• The current and forthcoming regulations and labels defining what is a sustainable investment

Taking Full Responsibility for Your Impact Now

To reach global net zero targets, organisations must avoid and reduce their negative climate impact as much as possible by 2030. But this is not enough. As agreed in the latest IPCC reports and the last two climate agreements, to take full responsibility for emissions while on the journey to net zero, business leaders must invest in certified, verified projects that compensate for the emissions they are producing now while restoring climate and nature.

In this session, we guided attendees through the importance of offsetting as a must have instrument in any net zero transition. We looked at examples of viable projects and how large, multi-national companies have used offsetting in a way that is permanent, meaningful and in keeping with their targets as well as their company culture and values.

Enabling a Circular Scope 3 – The Value of Reducing Your Product Carbon Footprint

For many companies, Scope 3 emissions account for around 90% of their total carbon footprint. A major source of Scope 3 emissions relate to the products we sell: the materials used in those products, how the product is made, how it’s used by our customers, and what happens when our customers are done with our products. Often customers, whether B2B or consumers, are asking for products with lower carbon footprints. With strategic intent, meeting customer demand for lower product carbon footprints can materially lower the Scope 3 footprint as well.

The need for transformative change and circular solutions in this area is increasingly urgent – so in the fourth webinar in our Activator Summit series, our Anthesis experts examined real-world examples of circular transformation, exploring:

• The relationship of your organisation’s product carbon footprint (PCF) to its Scope 3 footprint;
• How a portfolio approach can drive large scale impact for you and your customers, and
• How to accelerate transformation.

Managing the Business Risk and Opportunity of Nature

Every business relies on nature for resources and ecosystem services such as water, food, fibre, minerals, pollination of crops, water filtration and climate regulation, both in their own operations and supply chains, and for their employees and customers. But nature is at a tipping point. The natural resources and ecosystem services – that we all rely on and that powers our global economy – are under massive strain. Without transformative changes in the way we do business, nature-negative trends such as global declines in species populations as well as losses in efficiency and efficacy of ecosystem service provision are expected to increase even faster. Under current scenarios, over half of the world’s total GDP is at moderate or severe risk due to nature loss.

Nature is fundamental to solving the multiple crises we face: 37% of climate change mitigation needed to stay within 1.5 degrees of global warming can be provided by nature. The silently progressing water crises, unequally distributed impacts of climate change and Covid-19 have shown how interconnected the multiple crises are, with climate change and nature loss both exacerbating inequality. Integrated solutions are needed.

The role of business is critical to delivering a nature positive world by 2030. Building on existing commitments and actions related to nature, businesses should aim to halt and reverse negative impacts on nature and then aim for their positive impacts to outweigh their negative ones in similar types of ecosystems.

Join Anthesis for a conversation with Chief Risk and Chief Financial Officers on how organisations can begin to put nature’s value on the balance sheet when making decisions. Also, get a first glimpse of the Self-Assessment and Toolkit, which Anthesis has been developing with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD).

Compliance as the Catalyst for Achieving Sustainable Performance

Incoming regulatory requirements are driving more companies than ever to evaluate and report on their sustainability impact. This will give stakeholders, including investors, customers, employees and suppliers, unprecedented access to information on an organisation’s impact and how they are moving the dial on sustainability.

This session explored how business leaders can lead their organisation beyond regulatory sustainability compliance to proactively address the current and future needs of the market, our environment, and society. Participants will learn about the connection between sustainability regulation, compliance, and societal needs and the necessity of setting their own bar for compliance to address their key climate risks and vulnerabilities while meeting evolving stakeholder demands. Using key theories and examples of organisations that are already seeing the benefits of going beyond compliance, attendees will be equipped with the knowledge and tools to create a strong sustainability strategy that supports their organisational objectives.

The session covered:

• An overview of the evolving landscape of corporate sustainability regulations, including CSRD, SEC and TNFD
• The business case for going beyond compliance
• How business leaders can assess their environmental and social impact and set ambitious goals to address them

Communicating Your Impact: Balancing Accountability With Aspiration

An increase in regulation and stakeholder pressure means that companies are now under intense pressure and increased scrutiny when it comes to their communication. The risks for businesses include accusations of Greenwashing, climate litigation and reduction of consumer trust.

The session explored the challenging sustainability communications landscape that companies now face and how company leaders should communicate on sustainability. We looked at the need for companies to balance accountability, through evidence-based communication, with aspirational storytelling as they seek to communicate in this new world.