Take Action on Climate Change | 5 Things a Small Business Owner Can Do

With so many climate change stories in the news these days, what's an owner of a medium-size or small business to do? There's a lot of talk about what governments and large, global companies are doing to climate-ready their businesses, but fewer tips for smaller businesses.

Owners of smaller businesses face similar risks (and may also have opportunities) from climate-related impacts:

• physical hazards such as increased temperatures, storm events or sea level rise; 
• regulatory changes such as voluntary or mandatory CO2 emissions reporting or green building standards; and
• market changes including energy and other resource cost increases, new provisions to "green" your lease terms, or shifts in workforce and consumer valuation of sustainability practices.

While the scale of these risks is certainly smaller in terms of overall costs/revenue/GDP, the relative risk to each business can be significant,  even making the difference between thriving or going under.  

Here are 5 things any business owner or leader can do to take action on climate change and make their business more resilient. 

1. Know your climate impacts: How much energy do you use to run your business?​ How much do you pay for your energy? How climate-intensive are your other business purchases and operations?
2. Assess your climate risks: How might climate-related physical, regulatory or market changes impact your supply chain, employees, sales, delivery and other business operations?
3. Make a plan to reduce the impacts and mitigate the risks: Tackle the low-hanging fruit first before moving onto the bigger challenges. Increase energy efficiency, integrate more climate-friendly supplies and process improvements, and explore using  cleaner energy sources.
4. Measure your climate emissions reductions and cost savings: Be sure to measure both the environmental reductions and associated costs and savings. Allocate some of the costs savings for longer-term investments to make your business more sustainable and climate adaptive.
5. Communicate with your employees, customers, investors, vendors and community about #1-4. It's important to talk with all your key stakeholders about what you're doing (and why) to make your business more resilient. 

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Thank you for reading this blog post. Here at Corporate Sustainability Advisors LLC blog and on LinkedIn, I regularly write about organizational, community, and personal sustainability. If you would like to read my future posts then please subscribe via the adjacent link. Also, feel free to connect via Twitter and Facebook.