Kick the Habit: A UN Guide to Climate Neutrality

as a company to your shareholders, as a public administration to your citizens etc.). This can help to show up any gaps or problems – or any opportunities for those trying to emulate you – and it will make your efforts more credible. You now also need to analyse the risks and opportunities related to GHG emissions, by looking at what others have learned and done. This will in- clude information on benchmarking and determining sources of risk and opportunity. Evaluating what other people have done, perhaps at other lev- els, provides additional insights and allows us to see where we stand in regard to others. The Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB) is a consortium of seven business and environmental organizations formed to jointly advocate a gen- erally accepted framework for corporations to report climate change risks and opportunities, carbon footprints, and carbon reduction strategies and their implications for shareholder value. By aligning their basic requests for information, CDSB members aim to go beyond best practice and to make it standard practice for companies to report climate change-related infor- mation in their Annual Reports and for this to extend into related analysis by the investment research community. CDSB was convened at the 2007 annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in response to increasing calls for action from corporations and financial markets to address global warming and the associated growth of climate change information collec- tion and reporting initiatives. Analyse what the Kyoto Protocol has or has not achieved in reducing the GHG emissions of industrialized countries, and in trying to persuade other nations to join emissions reduction efforts. See what success various coun- tries have had with legislation designed to reduce urban traffic congestion, or to curb fuel consumption, or to decarbonise their economies. Learn from others’ triumphs and disasters. And make sure they are able to learn from yours: the more proficient you are at reducing your GHG emissions, the more competitive advantage you can claim. The UN Environment Programme has launched the Climate Neutral Net- work (CN Net), an initiative designed to help companies, cities and coun- tries make radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and exchange their experiences in this process.

THE CYCLE – COUNT AND ANALYSE KICK THE HABIT 73