ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE SERVICES

Are you effectively leveraging your environmental performance data to outcompete competitors, inform key stakeholders, and effectively communicate with capital markets? Does your project or corporate strategy embed environmental performance and sustainability at its core? Are your leaders, policies, incentives and operational procedures aligned, coherent, and sufficiently ambitious to succeed in an ESG-driven financial world?
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Environmental excellence, due diligence, and asset-level verification

With concerns over corporate transparency and shared value rising, Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) integration mainstreaming, and pressures on natural capital ever-increasing, embedding environmental performance and sustainability at the core of corporate strategy is becoming key to creating an enduring competitive advantage.

When carefully and diligently disclosed to capital markets, doing so creates value, unlocks access to capital, and results in increased profitability.

Environmental excellence, due diligence, and asset-level verification.

With concerns over corporate transparency and shared value rising, Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) integration mainstreaming, and pressures on natural capital ever-increasing, embedding environmental performance and sustainability at the core of corporate strategy is becoming key to creating an enduring competitive advantage.

When carefully and diligently disclosed to capital markets, doing so creates value, unlocks access to capital, and results in increased profitability.

Building a culture of environmental excellence

For start-ups and mature enterprises alike, embarking on the path of environmental excellence creates sustainable value and can form an enduring competitive advantage.

A culture of environmental excellence becomes a competitive advantage when strategic practices, rather than common ones, are implemented – this is a key differentiator. It is when these practices are imbued throughout the organization, when leadership is courageous and supportive, and when innovation continuously feeds into strategy development that the advantage becomes truly enduring.

Strategic and corporate alignment, coherence in actions, and ambition are foundational to developing a culture of environmental excellence and high performance. Whether at the project or corporate level, leadership, strategy, processes, measurement, verification, and continuous improvement are essential to succeeding at creating this culture.

What is a culture of environmental excellence?

A culture of environmental excellence is one that embeds key environmental and sustainable practices at the core of business strategy. Succeeding at doing so is achieved by:

  • Reviewing and analyzing corporate purpose, vision, mission, values, strategy, and tactics,
  • measuring vertical and horizontal alignment, coherence, and ambition within the corporation and throughout the value chain,
  • engaging with internal and external stakeholders to bring to light what may be material to the company,
  • identifying gaps and opportunities for improvement,
  • setting ambitious environmental goals and sustainability targets, and developing means and methods for achieving them,
  • raising internal awareness by delivering focused and meaningful training,
  • developing guidance and embedding processes founded on leading-edge environmental and sustainable practices,
  • monitoring performance using insightful business analytics (embedding our data-driven method to performance management),
  • managing change, both cultural and operational, and
  • implementing repeated cycles of analysis and continuous improvement.

Over time, when combined with strong, purpose-based leadership, performance analytics, and reinforcing incentives, a culture of environmental excellence becomes largely self-optimizing.

How do we help clients and partners build an enduring competitive advantage?

With more than 17 years experience measuring, auditing, and advising on how to sustain superior environmental performance at the asset-level (in capital projects and throughout operations), Clearsum advisors have seen firsthand what it takes to build a culture of environmental excellence.

A data-driven, evidence-based method

The Clearsum Method for Building a Culture of Environmental Excellence is developed based on academic and industry research, in-depth understanding of business sustainability management principles, leading-edge environmental management science, and business analytics. It incorporates our extensive knowledge of how third-party ESG rating agencies track, monitor, and rate company performance. 

By design, it is built to improve and leverage corporate environmental practices, and deeply embed these into strategy using key frameworks.

Discrete outcomes: an enduring competitive advantage

Through its Building a Culture of Environmental Excellence service, Clearsum helps you move from strategy to tactics by acting at the governance, management and operational levels. At this step of the journey towards building your Climate-Ready Business Foundation, the focus is on integration and implementation.

By shedding light on cultural gaps and identifying opportunities for improvement, and by setting ambitious, science-driven targets, our method is built to drive improvements. Most notably, these improvements will help better the Environmental (‘E’) score of your company’s ESG ratings, which in turn can help attract sustainability-driven investors.

Whether engaged as advisors to accompany your team from start to end, or simply to advise on parts of the process, we help boards, c-suite executives, and upper-level management deeply embed environmental excellence into corporate strategy, throughout operations and capital projects alike.

We help you build an enduring competitive advantage.

Environmental due diligence for financials and corporates

As environmental performance in the corporate world increases and the reliance on ESG data by the financial sector grows, the need for greater transparency, accountability, and responsibility, as well as due diligence at the asset level, also rises.

In this context, environmental due diligence and asset-level verification gives corporations, financial institutions and asset managers the hard proof they need to ascertain the continuous environmental performance of their operations, loans and investments. We achieve this how? By confirming alignment with the environmental objectives considered at final investment decision (FID) and disclosures made to capital markets.

With sector-specific expertise in natural resources, energy, transportation infrastructure, and extractives, Clearsum advisors provide a clear lens on environmental performance at key points in time, and shed light on existing and growing risk exposure needing mitigation in the short, moderate, and longer term. Simply put, our deep environmental due diligence approach reduces investment risk.

The Clearsum expertise.

Our asset-level experience is deep and built from the ground up. It is founded on years advising regulators and agencies on the requirements of independent, third-party and due diligence processes, and ascertaining compliance on the largest renewable, clean and transition energy projects in Western Canada. It is also founded on years of monitoring and auditing heavy civil, transportation, infrastructure, forestry and mining projects. Combined with our expertise in strategy, sustainability, policy, law, and environmental management, this gives us a unique perspective that sheds light on how the energy, resource, transportation, and infrastructure sectors operate and perform.

At the project level, our depth of knowledge allows us to see more clearly what some of these industries’ key challenges are. It also gives us a direct lens into what an economic transition needs to integrate to satisfy future taxonomic frameworks leading to and supporting a low-carbon economy.

Applied to the financial sector, our capital project experience translates into greater comprehension of green and brownfield asset planning, construction, operational and commercial risks, greater transparency throughout project development, and greater assurance that the environmental requirements tied to legal and financial terms are met.

Our diligence reduces investment risk and brings to light the facts about construction and operational performance.

How we help clients and partners gain the confidence they need to engage with stakeholders?

A deep and common understanding

We begin by attentively listening and seeking to clearly understand the precise needs and objectives of our clients and partners. Whether their goal is to ascertain compliance with a specific risk management framework, to evaluate and confirm environmental performance of a company or project, or to thoroughly test the transparency and quality of disclosures of an investee, deepening our understanding of immediate and future needs informs our approach.

A client-centric, tailored approach

Once our understanding has crystalized, we integrate client insight, ESG knowledge and sector-specific expertise to carefully deliver tailored services.

Throughout client discovery meetings, we aim to build relationships of trust. We do this, in part, by transparently exposing the benefits of our method alongside the risks.

For example, we understand that conducting deep due diligence can be invasive for auditees, and that it can be challenging to host peering experts at an investee’s or other corporate facility. We appreciate these concerns and recognize our clients’ need to maintain positive and long-term relationships.

Collaboration and communication

At Clearsum, we hold collaboration and trust as core values.

We communicate early, succinctly, and regularly with our hosts, we provide our scope and plan, and we offer scheduling flexibility to accommodate day-to-day business needs. While our approach to environmental due diligence and asset-level verification is rigorous, it is nonetheless founded on developing respectful and understanding relationships with all of those we engage with. Affability, social and contextual sensitivity are key to how we engage.

One of our goals is to make a positive and lasting impression.

Discrete outcomes: a reduced investment risk

Environmental due diligence and asset-level verification gives corporations, financial institutions, and asset managers the assurance and hard proof needed to ascertain the continuous environmental performance of their operations, loans, and investments.

Designed to deeply understand and assess performance at the asset-level, the Clearsum method helps corporates realize the full potential of integration and implementation actions. It also helps institutions gain the confidence to engage with stakeholders and assure them that investments remain continuously and consistently aligned with their environmental expectations.

Whether retained to verify coherence and compliance with the terms of an environmental risk management framework, or to verify the ongoing environmental performance of an organization, we will help you increase transparency, go beyond compliance, and ultimately reduce your investment risk.

23
23%

of GDP/capita could be affected by climate change by 2100.

50
50%

more assets were managed in a dedicated ESG fund in 2019.

-0.39
-0.39%

of the net cost of capital is saved by having a high ESG score.

Four Services to Build a Climate-Ready Business Foundation

Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Planning
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Future Scenario Planning and Scenario Analysis
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Building a Culture of
Environmental Excellence
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Environmental Due Diligence for Financials and Corporates
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