Your CLIMATE News: best practices to decarbonize, exclusive CHOICE events and insights into our CLIMATE team!
THE CLIMATE CHOICE says thank you for a special 2022!
What a year for climate champions! We all faced major new challenges in 2022 – especially companies that were particularly hard hit by the energy crisis and supply chain bottlenecks. Despite everything, you, the CLIMATE community, have continued to work with us to drive the transformation to a low-carbon economy. There have been many positive highlights and developments for which we at THE CLIMATE CHOICE want to say thank you. Let’s take a look at how 2022 allowed us to boost climate transformation all around the globe!
Kicking off the year with strong, new partners
Our year began with a firework of climate action. We were able to start working with many new major and influential customers for the Climate Intelligence Platform, including, as two special highlights, the corporate projects with the mobile phone provider o2 Telefónica and the baby food manufacturer HiPP. We kicked off inspiring collaborations to elevate the transparency of emissions along their supply chains by using our platform.
HiPP was able to successfully identify climate-related risks and potentials of five suppliers with the help of our software tool. HiPP’s Head of Sustainability Management Dr. Johannes Knubben reflects: “The software tool from THE CLIMATE CHOICE enables us to implement a scalable and reliable process to increase the climate-relevant transparency of our supply chain.”
Our next goal is to extend the software-driven climate data collection initially to other partners and ultimately to HiPP’s supply chain. Through an integration of THE CLIMATE CHOICE software tool into HiPP’s sustainability and procurement strategy, the full potential of climate-relevant supplier management is to be exploited.
Our corporate project with o2 Telefónica also successfully identified climate-related risks and potentials of the selected suppliers. The company is now able to develop a transparent, scalable process for collecting comparable data on the climate maturity of suppliers.
In the next step, we will integrate our platform into the procurement dashboard of o2 Telefónica. The climate-relevant data collection for the decarbonization of Scope 3 will be extended to around 1,000 suppliers.
CLIMATE TRANSFORMATION Summit 2022
The climate action kept on flowing and reached a new peak at our #CTS2022. For the third year in a row, we brought together international climate leaders and procurement experts for our two-day 100% online Climate Transformation Summit.
We welcomed 64 speakers, who interacted with over 1,000 attendees from 59 different countries. Attendees had the chance to participate in 12 limited workshops together with our Partners from B.A.U.M. e.V., First Climate, BearingPoint, AXA Climate School, Enviria, Fairantwortung gAG, Katjes Fassin GmbH & Co. KG, Regionique, IBM, Make-IT Alliance, Telefónica Germany, EcoVadis, Alice Schmidt, ESG Portfolio Management, Sustainable Procurement Pledge Germany, Development and Climate Alliance Foundation and WWF Germany. THE CLIMATE CHOICE says thank you!
More good news: We just announced the date for #CTS2023! We cannot wait to welcome you on May 11 & 12 2023 for two days full of climate action! Our focus this year: Making it happen – the decarbonization of supply chains! Together with you and leading experts, we will find out how we can impement CO₂ reduction along the value chain.
You can’t wait to secure your spot?
Get your Super Early-Bird ticket now!
You want to be a speaker, workshop host or partner?
Let’s get in touch.
Launching CLIMATE Readiness Check
The most important insight we gained from the discussions at the #CTS2022 was that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular still find it very difficult to get a quick start in climate transformation because they often do not have sufficient know-how and/or resources. In response to this challenge, we worked over the summer on a new solution offering.
The result: In October, we launched our digital and freely available Climate Readiness Check in partnership with 10 leading sustainability organizations. Among those B.A.U.M. e.V., Bundesverband Nachhaltige Wirtschaft e.V. (BNW), Stiftung Allianz für Klima und Entwicklung, Jaro Institut für Nachhaltigkeit und Digitalisierung e.V., and the Deutscher Mittelstands-Bund (DMB).
The Climate Readiness Check offers SMEs an easy entry point into their climate transformation: through knowledge and insights into their own climate maturity, benchmarks, suggestions for improvement, and access to a B2B climate data platform.
Our Launch was a full success! We are beyond happy to see so many companies kicking off their climate transformation with our Climate Readiness Check! We can’t wait to see who will join us in 2023!
Kickstarter Program 2022
In addition to the projects we developed ourselves, this year we were also part of pioneering external initiatives. Among them, one highlight: In August, we were selected from more than 2.000 applicants for the Climate Lab and Kickstart Innovation scale-up program in the finance and insurance track! Kickstart is one of the largest European Innovation Platforms. Each year they chose a select number of the best international startups to participate in a 10-week program.
We were honored to work in the program with corporates – such as Swisscom, Credit Suisse, AXA, Sanitas, Post Finance, La Mobilière, Coop, CSS, SATW – from the DACH region, who strive to reduce climate risks and emissions in value chains.
Thanks for the EU ‘Best Digital Solution’ Award
The cherry on top of 2022 was winning the “Best Digital Solution” award from the European Commission. The award recognizes the development of our software platform for the collection of climate-relevant data from suppliers and attributes it great impact potential for the greening and digitalization of European industry.
On behalf of the European Commission’s DG GROW, Deputy Director General Hubert Gambs emphasized: “Digital solutions are not only useful to be competitive and provide better value to European customers. They are also key to making our economy greener and European businesses more resilient to future shocks.”
We are so grateful and can’t wait to enable more businesses in boosting their climate transformation!
Many, many thanks for driving our Mission together!
Our mission at THE CLIMATE CHOICE is transforming every company into a climate champion and enabling businesses to make procurement decisions that are aligned with the 1.5-degree-goal! We have summarized our mission for you in this short video.
We are very grateful to work with inspiring companies – and that media is increasingly sharing our mission. THE CLIMATE CHOICE says thank you Süddeutsche Zeitung, t3n, Berliner Morgenpost, Gründerszene and many more, for featuring our platform and allowing us to gain more visibility on our mission!
Our Wrap up, 2022!
Let’s wrap it up before we go back to wrapping presents. 2022 was a complicated year for the world. We learned that the energy transition is a major driver for the overall climate transformation. We literally saw that it is interlinked with peace and has a positive impact on people, planet and profit. At the THE CLIMATE CHOICE we are therefore honoured that we were able to work on one piece of the puzzle – bringing us towards a regenerative future. These are our 5 highlights:
- Started working with major new customers, including HiPP and o2 Telefónica
- Held our 3rd 100 % digital CLIMATE TRANSFORMATION Summit with 64 speakers and 1.000 participants from 59 countries
- Launched our new Climate Readiness Check, accessible for companies of all sizes for free to kick off their climate transformation
- Won the EU ‘Best Digital Solution’ award of the Get Digital Initiative from the European Commission and the European DIGITAL SME Alliance
- Süddeutsche Zeitung, Gründerszene, t3n, Berliner Morgenpost, Beschaffung aktuell and many more shared our work
Our biggest ‘THANK YOU’ goes to you, Climate Champion! If you are reading this, you are dedicating your valuable time to make this climate transformation a positive one. Whether you are Sustainability Manager, Procurement Expert, or Tech Champion: You are on a mission to strive together with us for an economy that allows the world to stay below 1.5 degree. Let’s start the new year with the same energy and even more climate action. Cheers to 2023!
Your #TeamClimate
THE CLIMATE CHOICE
Prioritizing Climate Transparency in the Technology sector
Interview partner: Karli Cumber is responsible for any marketing, social media communications, and sustainability related activates for Footprint Technologies. The Berlin start-up develops an AI based technology that enables users to always find the perfect fit for selected apparel during online shopping. In this way, Footprint Technologies provides online retailers with a solution to reduce the high number of returned products, and thus saving CO2 and costs.
In an interview with THE CLIMATE CHOICE, Karli shares Footprint Techologies’ challenges and progress in implementing their own climate transformation and how the Climate Readiness Check has helped them.
Can you briefly introduce yourselves to our CLIMATE Community?
At Footprint, our greatest climate goal is to reduce the amount of CO2 emissions related to returns and reshipments in the footwear industry. Our challenge is to reduce negative environmental effects caused by the processes of shoe returns, specifically due to improper fit. We have started in the children’s shoe segment and this year we are starting to make our way into the adult shoe segmentation. Our services offer a foot measurement technology, which is intended to find the correct-size fitting shoe based on the exact dimension of the shoes’ manufacturing. In 2021, we published our first ‘Sustainability Report’ for the company, where we discussed our climate commitments and partnerships such as with The Climate Choice, as well as reevaluate our current practices. This includes our internal climate code of conduct, to best support our overall climate mission.
What are the biggest climate-related challenges you face in your daily lives?
As we are mostly working digitally, also remotely, we don’t necessary encounter too many climate related challenges on a daily basis, such as transport or paper printing/usage. But because we are a green-minded company, in our Sustainability Report we summarize the day-to-day activities which support our climate mission. Some of these include our energy consumption of our software, mobility, team learning, and event participation. Overall, we make it a priority to choose more environmentally friendly options when available, and create a welcoming space for learning and open dialogue within our team. Additionally, we provide opportunities and encourage the team to learn about sustainable options, for them to pursue a sustainable lifestyle outside of work.
Together we carried out the Climate Readiness Check. What was your motivation?
Our motivation to conduct the Climate Readiness Check was to get insights on where our company currently stands at with our climate efforts and to increase our score as a company.
What were the most important lessons you learned?
From the results of our Climate Readiness Check, we learned that we are extremely transparent when it comes to our climate efforts. While this factor may seem obvious for a company that specializes in technical solutions, we find that our transparency is something that can serve as a model throughout our industry. Other than that, we also took note of the areas for improvement as we continue to look forward. We have learned, there are many different areas that are necessary to be considered during a Climate-Scoring.
What are the best practices that you would like to pass on to other organizations?
We would encourage other organizations to prioritize transparency and enable positive climate thinking. We recognize that it is important to consider the environment in our work solutions and moreover to implement this commitment as an integral part of our values. We want to drive forward change in our industry and encourage future partners or collaborators to think the same way. As technology has the favorable quality of constantly being ready to adapt, also our climate actions should be adaptable.
You want to know more about the Climate Readiness Check? Do not hesitate if you want to learn how our software service is enabling you to take the next steps forward. Contact us for more information.