- Introduce a cycle to work scheme
- Insulate your buildings
- Minimise the waste from your products and packaging
- Switch to LED bulbs
- Adjust heating and cooling system timings, temperatures and rooms
- Install a smart meter
- Talk to your suppliers
- Electrify your vehicle fleet
- Install your own renewable electricity or heating
- Find advice for your sector
- Offset the carbon you can’t reduce
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has produced a toolkit for small and medium sized businesses to support the Business Climate Leaders campaign.
The Business Climate Leaders campaign is the latest phase of the government’s UK-wide Together For Our Planet campaign, which is encouraging everyone, including small businesses, to cut carbon emissions and help the UK get to net zero by 2050.
Signing up to the official SME Climate Commitment means small businesses will get access to resources and promotional materials to publicise their pledge, so they can show prospective customers evidence of their climate credentials. They will also be included on the UK Business Climate Hub’s list of businesses who have signed up and have the chance to feature in the campaign.
The SME Climate Hub is a pioneering global initiative that aims to create a tipping point for mainstreaming climate action and building business resilience.
SMEs represent 90% of business globally, employing 2 billion people. We are here to support millions of SMEs as they commit to halve greenhouse gas emissions before 2030, and race to net-zero emissions before 2050. Our pragmatic approach aims to remove the obstacles SMEs face as they take climate action — whether curbing emissions in their own business or getting green solutions to market — and help them unlock valuable incentives.
The SME Climate Hub is an initiative of the International Chamber of Commerce, the Exponential Roadmap Initiative, the We Mean Business coalition and the United Nations Race to Zero campaign.
This partnership is an exercise in radical collaboration that opens the doors for SMEs to join the United Nations Race to Zero campaign — an international campaign that brings together an unprecedented coalition of real economy actors and 120 governments committed to achieve net-zero emissions by no later than 2050. In collaboration with the Net Zero team at Oxford University we aim to curate tools and resources to specifically address the needs of the SME community.
In November 2021, the UK is hosting the UN climate change conference (COP26) in Glasgow to ask world leaders to work together to deliver urgent global climate action. Ahead of this, we are encouraging as many small and medium-sized businesses as possible to become climate leaders by taking the first steps on their journey to net zero and making the SME Climate Commitment.