Stabilize the Climate

Clean Mobility

All forms of transportation across the value chain transition to low- and zero-emission vehicles, fuels and modes, and companies provide employees equitable access to zero-emissions transportation options, as well as remote work arrangements.

Companies commit to achieving 100% electrification of light-duty ground transportation and logistics fleets by 2030, medium-duty ground transportation and logistics fleets by 2035 and heavy-duty ground transportation and logistics fleets by 2040. Companies align all transportation of goods, services and people across the value chain with a 1.5 ºC science-based GHG emissions target through the development of a clean mobility plan. Specifically, clean mobility plans will include: 
 

  • Strategies and measures to improve efficiency and transition to low and zero-emission transportation modes for owned, operated and contracted transportation and logistics fleets

  • Programs to reduce vehicle miles traveled per employee via support for public transit, micromobility, pooling and remote working arrangements

  • As appropriate, invest in infrastructure to enable the development of and transition to clean transportation, including the installation of charging stations for both customers and employees at all corporate and retail sites

  • Consideration of transportation emissions when siting facilities and offices

Companies demonstrate progress toward achieving 100% electrification of light-duty ground transportation and logistics fleets by 2030, medium-duty fleets by 2035 and heavy-duty fleets by 2040 and are aligning all transportation within the context of the most recent science through the implementation of a clean mobility plan. Specifically, companies will:
 

  • Require upstream and downstream logistics partners to have a clean mobility plan in place, enabling those partners to move towards 100% electrification of ground transportation and low or zero-emission transportation for all other fleets and vehicles

  • Increase efficiency across transportation and logistics fleets through the use of new technologies, business models and fleet management techniques and begin to shift to low and zero-emission fleets and vehicles and other low emission modes

  • Strengthen programs and incentives to minimize vehicle miles traveled per employee

  • Plan for the retirement of all owned, operated and contracted internal combustion engine vehicles by 2040

  • As appropriate, increase installation of charging stations to meet 100% charging demand of both customers and employees at all corporate and retail sites  

  • Require all new siting decisions to weigh the impact of transportation-related emissions 

Companies have achieved 100% electrification of light-duty ground transportation and logistics fleets and are on track for medium-duty and heavy-duty ground transportation fleets to reach 100% electrification by 2035 and 2040, respectively. Companies only work with contracted logistics partners that use low and zero-emissions vehicles and have made a modal shift to low and zero-emission transportation. Companies have reduced vehicle miles travelled per employee and demonstrated increased investment in infrastructure and scalable technologies to support the clean mobility transition. All transportation of goods, services and people across the value chain support GHG emission reductions aligned with the most recent science and are on a path to net-zero GHG emissions before 2040.

Clean Mobility Access

The transportation sector is responsible for 24% of global GHG emissions and is the largest contributor to urban air pollution, which causes an estimated 4.2 million premature deaths per year. Decarbonizing transportation is possible—and solutions are available today. Improving access to clean transportation and bringing these solutions to scale in a way that is just and equitable will require not just the leadership of those in the transportation sector, but also effort from leaders across multiple sectors and a diversity of stakeholder groups. Companies should consider the role they play in the transition to a clean mobility future and use their demand for transportation services to support low and zero-emission vehicles, fuels and alternative modes of transportation. Through partnership and multi-stakeholder collaboration, companies can collectively leverage purchase power, as well as influence policy at the local, state and federal levels. 

Collaboratives, such as Ceres' Corporate Electric Vehicle Alliance, offer companies a platform to share information, identify challenges and potential solutions and leverage aggregate corporate demand to spur and expand: (1) production of new and and diverse electric vehicle models, (2) electric vehicle market growth and economies of scale, (3) adoption of supportive policies and the removal of policy barriers and (4) peer-to-peer learning with regard to industry best practices.

Getting Started

This section of the Ceres Roadmap 2030 identifies the foundational steps companies can take to begin implementing the actions needed to stabilize the climate.
 

✓ Engage Role Players

To capture the full breadth and depth of risks and opportunities in stabilizing the climate, companies should consider the role of various business units across the value chain and regularly engage with business unit leaders to analyze the intersection between climate risks and opportunities and their processes.  Upstream, climate-related opportunities may take the form of sourcing decisions or the redesign of a product to reduce GHG emissions or deforestation.  Downstream, these opportunities may take the form of changing how products and services are delivered or even consumer and customer marketing.  Engaging business unit leaders will uncover better solutions and make the process of establishing workforce accountability easier.  Concurrently, business unit leaders and senior management need to establish fluid lines of communication and disseminate key risks and opportunities into clear messaging that will engage board members. Complementary board oversight and accountability from the top down will support the integration of sustainability priorities across the business, informing strategic and annual planning and ensuring the proper allocation of resources for achieving stated goals. 
 

✓ Connect the Dots 

To take meaningful action in stabilizing the climate, companies must first accept that climate risk is a financial risk in both the short-term and long-term. To properly address climate risk, companies should analyze and measure the extent in which the company’s activities produce greenhouse gas emissions, across all scopes. There may be aspects of the company’s GHG footprint that are difficult to quantify. It is important to identify gaps in measurement and set the goal of increasing accuracy and completeness over time. Where appropriate, companies can temporarily use informed estimates to fill gaps until better measurement processes are created.
 

✓ Establish Policies

Once the challenge is defined, companies should establish enterprise-wide policies that support the intention to phase out activities that negatively impact the climate, including production of GHG emissions and deforestation.  Based on the company's business model and structure, the depth and complexity of these policies will vary; however, the policies should first be implemented in areas of the value chain that have the largest absolute impact.  These policies should be revised and strengthened on a regular basis as more information is gathered. Strong climate-related policies will help guide and inform corporate decision-making.  It is critical that companies analyze the interconnectedness, potential consequences and tradeoffs of policies to  minimize the risk of any adverse impacts to people, communities and resources elsewhere. 
 

✓ Build a Management System Designed for Evolution

Once policies and procedures are designed to address climate-related risks and opportunities, performance must be measured as part of a comprehensive management system to ensure that processes are driving towards intended outcomes and that management has the data available to make informed decisions.  Companies should develop processes and tools as part of their management systems to monitor the performance and effectiveness of business units as well as develop sector-relevant key performance indicators to enable alignment between commitments, operations, relationships and investments.  As part of a complete management system, companies should create processes to address non-compliance and make efforts to address the root causes of the issues identified.
 

✓ Perform Scenario Analysis

To determine where climate-related impact is the greatest, companies should perform a climate scenario analysis and assess risk across their value chains to identify where and under what conditions the company is most exposed to physical and transition climate risks. The climate scenario analysis should extend across multiple time horizons out to 2050 and cover multiple temperature rise scenarios, including but not limited to: business as usual, 2 ºC, and 1.5 ºC. Companies should also be cognizant of the different pathways leading to a given temperature increase. A 2 ºC scenario in particular could be the result of a smooth or disruptive transition, which may present different sets of risks and opportunities. To provide stakeholders with decision-useful information, scenarios should be based on reputable inputs and models, with additional customization where necessary. Methodology details and assumptions should be publicly disclosed.

Disclosing Progress

Disclosure establishes accountability, provides a foundation for engagement and serves as a platform for demonstrating priorities, process and progress. See the Transparency and Disclosure section of Ceres Roadmap 2030 on how to make all of your disclosures complete, credible and decision-useful.

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards and the Sustainable Accounting Standards Board (SASB) are two disclosure tools widely recognized as standards for guiding comparable sustainability disclosure. Disclosure related to corporate efforts to stabilize the climate should also be guided by three additional disclosure resources that help to strengthen corporate disclosure and meet the expectations of stakeholders, in particular investors: the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), the CDP Climate Change Questionnaire (CDP-CC) and the CDP Forests Questionnaire (CDP-F).

The TCFD is emerging as the de-facto framework for guiding climate-related disclosure and is widely supported by the investment community. The TCFD recommendations require disclosure across four key areas: Governance, Strategy, Risk Management and Metric and Targets. Investor preference for the TCFD framework is guided by the insights provided into how climate-related risk and opportunities are integrated and managed across the business and how companies are planning for the future.  Companies can also benefit from the process involved with aligning disclosures to the TCFD recommendations (e.g. the lessons learned from conducting a scenario analysis and comprehensively disclosing company wide climate-related impacts). 

Many companies are improving their TCFD disclosures by engaging investors and stakeholders as part of the process. The strongest TCFD disclosures will also have the complete support and buy-in of the board and C-suite executives and other key parts of the organization, such as Investor Relations, Finance and Risk Management.  There is no prescribed frequency for how often a TCFD disclosure should be updated. However, companies should consider the impact of significant business decisions, global events and availability of data as triggers for making updates and enhancements.

Companies and investors recognize CDP disclosures for their comprehensiveness and detailed information. More than 8,000 companies disclose to CDP, while over 500 investors with assets totaling more than $100 trillion request data from CDP.  Both the CDP Climate Change Questionnaire and Forest Questionnaire come in two versions: a minimum version and a full version that includes sector-specific questions.  Either version can be used to calculate a company’s CDP score. The questionnaires allow companies to provide structured details pertaining to how they are addressing and managing climate change and forest impacts.  The questionnaire and scoring process is performed annually, giving stakeholders the opportunity to monitor climate change and forest commitment progress on a regular basis.

The CDP-CC recently mapped specific sections of the questionnaire to the TCFD recommendations and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This makes reporting across multiple frameworks easier, while also creating space for companies to provide more granular details with respect to projects, initiatives, goals and metrics across GHG emissions scopes and the company’s value chain.  

The CDP-F recently mapped specific sections of the questionnaire to the Accountability Framework (a supply chain framework focused on land use and rights issues) and the SDGs, again helping users understand how information disclosed through CDP can be mapped to other standards. 

Since few companies are able to disclose quantitative progress towards eliminating deforestation, it is difficult for investors to understand, analyze and mitigate risk across their portfolios.  Companies should make every effort to disclose the following metrics:
 

  • Percent of a commodity that is traceable - Percentage of a sourced commodity that a company can trace to the product’s origin or to a point at which the company can assure compliance with its policies
  • Percent of suppliers in compliance - Percentage of their total suppliers that comply with their no-deforestation policies. They should also update these numbers to reflect recent suspensions due to non-compliance
  • Percent of commodity in compliance - How much of the total supply of a commodity is in compliance with company policies and standards. This is particularly important when a company sources most of a commodity from just a few suppliers


Additional Disclosure Resources

Ceres: Disclose What Matters - Analyzes the sustainability disclosures of the world's largest companies and can help companies bridge the gap and provide executable, relevant information to investors.

TCFD Good Practice Handbook - Identifies good practices in implementing the TCFD recommendations. The examples are drawn from across the G20 to cover multiple jurisdictions and a diversity of practices in making the 11 TCFD recommended disclosures across the four core elements of governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets. 

TCFD Knowledge Hub - Provides resources needed to understand and implement the TCFD recommendations.

WBCSD’s TCFD Preparer Forum - The TCFD Preparer Forums bring leading companies together to discuss disclosure practices and the work needed to enhance disclosure effectiveness and implement the TCFD recommendations. In the Forums, members will identify examples of good practice, develop disclosure roadmaps and seek investor perspectives on TCFD disclosures, including how market participants use the information.

Resources

With respect to clean mobility there are many programs, resources and materials available to help guide companies.  Below is a list of some key resources:

Corporate Electric Vehicle Alliance - The Corporate Electric Vehicle Alliance, led by Ceres, is a collaborative group of companies focused on accelerating the transition to electric vehicles (EVs). It supports companies in making and achieving bold commitments to fleet electrification. The Alliance works to identify current EV market and policy challenges and their potential solutions and loosely aggregates corporate demand for EVs to expand the business case for production of a more diverse array of EV models.

EV100 - A global campaign led by The Climate Group and supported by Ceres as a North American regional engagement partner, that brings together companies to make commitments to fleet electrification, workplace and retail charging infrastructure deployment and other EV-related goals, to be met by 2030.

The Road to Fleet Electrification: Eight ways utilities, regulators and policymakers can enable fleet operators to electrify commercial transportation and reduce carbon emissions - This report was co-authored by the California Trucking Association and Ceres and was funded by Amazon. It identifies the challenges fleet operators face when working to electrify vehicle fleets and the actions that can be taken by utilities and policymakers to make fleet electrification easier, faster, more affordable and better for the environment. 

EPA Smartway Transportation - EPA’s SmartWay program helps companies advance supply chain sustainability by measuring, benchmarking and improving freight transportation efficiency.

WBCSD: Transforming Urban Mobility (TuM) Program - The (TuM) project brings business and cities together to implement system-level and integrated initiatives to steer urban mobility systems transformation towards a safer, cleaner, more accessible and more efficient future.

Companies in Action

IKEA pledges to zero out emissions from home deliveries.The climate crisis demands we decarbonize transportation--the highest-emitting sector in the U.S--and electric vehicles are an essential component of this transition. Bolstered by a strong commitment to tackle emissions from deliveries, the Swedish furniture giant plans to use electric vehicles for all of its in-home furniture deliveries by 2025. The company has already achieved the goal in Shanghai ahead of schedule and is working to meet its target in other cities, including Amsterdam, Los Angeles, New York and Paris by the end of 2020. To reach this goal, given the company does not own its fleet, IKEA is supporting transportation partners in their development of new electric van and truck technologies and is also investing in charging infrastructure. A pioneering signatory to The Climate Group's EV100 pledge and the Corporate Electric Vehicle Alliance (CEVA) launched by Ceres, IKEA continues to advocate for the power of collaboration and the role of supportive policies that will catalyze the uptake of electric fleets across sectors globally.

Clif Bar & Company commits to electrifying its entire fleet by 2030 and supporting employees in making the shift to a cleaner commute. With companies controlling more than half the vehicles on the road in the U.S. today, they have a significant role to play in leading the transition to electric vehicles. A member of the Corporate Electric Vehicle Alliance (CEVA) and EV100, California-based food company Clif Bar has committed to electrifying its fleet and installing EV charging stations in all its facilities by 2030. Looking to support employees who are eager to participate in climate solutions, Clif Bar launched the Cool Commute Program, an initiative that provides financial incentives for employees to purchase fuel-efficient hybrid and electric vehicles, along with commuter bicycles. Through this program, the company’s employees have purchased nearly 600 fuel-efficient and electric cars.

Amazon commits to make all its shipments with net-zero carbon emissions. In 2019, as part of The Climate Pledge, Amazon launched Shipment Zero, an initiative to make every Amazon shipment with net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, with the interim goal of having half of all shipments achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. As part of the initiative, Amazon ordered 100,000 custom electric delivery vans from EV start-up Rivian, which will start delivering the fleet in 2021. It expects to have all 100,000 vehicles on the road by 2030. While investing in new fleet technologies is a strong component of the strategy, Amazon is also working on complementary tactics to reach its goal, including maximizing the efficiency in its current vehicles, optimizing delivery logistics and using alternative delivery methods where feasible. Recognizing that meeting these goals will require innovation and collaboration, Amazon joined the Corporate Electric Vehicle Alliance (CEVA) to help accelerate the transition to low-carbon and net-zero transportation options at scale.

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