Sustainable Business
Many companies are seeking to green their operations to improve efficiency, respond to customer and regulatory pressures, and address environmental problems. For over ten years,
CEA has helped a wide range of firms in the industrial, service, and consumer sectors to measure and minimize their environmental impact, reduce costs, and develop strategies for top-line growth.
CEA has in-depth experience designing greening strategies, developing business plans, conducting baseline environmental assessments,
and structuring investments for companies and nonprofits.
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SPECIFIC SERVICE OFFERINGS
Developing Sustainable Business Strategies: When a client faces a new business opportunity or environmental challenge, CEA critically assesses
the situation and designs short- and long-term plans for achieving the client's goals. CEA identifies the principal drivers of the problem,
assesses the competitive landscape, develops a comprehensive strategy, and creates an implementation plan.
Climate Strategy and Program Design: As the regulatory landscape evolves, a credible climate initiative can allow a company to respond with agility
and speed to changing conditions. In addition, a proactive stance can generate goodwill among consumers and confer competitive advantages, especially
for first movers in an industry. To achieve these benefits, however, improvements must be real, validated, and clearly communicated. CEA helps clients
navigate this landscape by analyzing greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories, recommending cost-effective GHG reduction opportunities, designing high-credibility
GHG offset portfolios, and communicating benefits to stakeholders.
Environmental Footprint and Reduction Strategies: CEA assists clients in calculating their current environmental impacts and spending.
This data is converted into GHG emissions, resource consumption, waste generation and other baseline metrics. Using this information, CEA then helps develop recommendations
for reducing environmental impacts based on cost/benefit analyses of opportunities.
Documenting Results for the Public: Once a sustainable practice or climate strategy is in place, businesses must track implementation and report the results to
interested stakeholders. CEA helps clients identify appropriate performance metrics, measure progress, and document results.
Greening the Supply Chain: In today's increasingly outsourced markets, leading companies are looking beyond their own operations to
consider the environmental and social performance of their vendors. As a start, CEA helps clients develop green purchasing policies and assess the environmental performance
of suppliers. Longer-term opportunities lie in our work evaluating and redesigning supply-chain relationships to align incentives, improve performance, and boost compliance.
Conservation Finance and Facilitating Investments: CEA works with a broad range of private, philanthropic, and public investors to finance conservation initiatives,
using such tools as venture capital, program-related investments, and endowment funds. CEA is unique in its capacity to syndicate biodiversity conservation investments
across a range of capital providers. Working in partnership with foundations, multilateral organizations, and market-rate investors, CEA can access a wide spectrum of
capital, including grant funding, concessional finance and private investments.
Practice leader: Jill Kauffman Johnson
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