Climate Counts Helps Raise Consumer Awareness
Green Consumers Want Aggressive Corporate Action on Climate Change
Jun 13, 2009
There's an ever-growing trend towards consumers wanting to support only those corporations making an effort to reduce their impact on the environment. The Climate Counts not-for-profit organization applies a scorecard system to each company they evaluate and makes the results available on their Web site, ClimateCounts.org. This information, updated annually, is designed to give consumers enough information about companies all over the world that they do business with to make educated choices and to motivate businesses to take action to fight climate change.
A company's Climate Counts scorecard results enable consumers to see how serious a company is about stopping climate change as well as compare the company to other competitors. The Web site offers consumers a review of the company's scores, as well as providing the complete scorecard in .pdf format for download.
Climate Counts Rating System
According to ClimateCounts.org, companies worldwide are rated as:
Stuck – indicating the company is not yet taking any meaningful action on climate change
Starting – indicating the company is in the early stages of addressing climate change
Striding – indicating the company still has work to do, but is beginning to "hit their stride"
The scorecard has 100 possible points and includes 22 criteria that determine how a company is doing. The scorecard is sectioned into four areas and subtotals from these areas are what is provided in the company's scoring review.
Review Section Measures Climate Footprint
The Review section of the scorecard measures a company's climate footprint, asking questions such as whether the company has completed GHG emissions inventory, and whether they use rough calculations or standard protocol when measuring and accounting for emissions.
Reduce Section Measures Attempts at Global Warming Reduction
The Reduce section of the scorecard is the largest, measuring how a company has reduced their impact on global warming. This section asks questions such as if the company has top-level support for climate change action, whether the company requires their suppliers to take climate change action, and does the company give preference to suppliers that do.
Policy and Report Sections Focus on Public Policy and Reporting on Emissions
The Policy and Report sections each contain only two questions. The Policy section focuses on whether the company supports or opposes public policy requiring mandatory climate change action by businesses and has the company done anything to undermine climate change action? Negative points are awarded depending on the depth of opposition by the company. The Report section focuses on whether the company is publicly reporting on emissions and how clearly that reporting is provided.
By providing this information, Climate Counts encourages a higher level of public awareness and allows consumers to support companies that take climate change seriously and avoid those that do not. Climate Count is funded by Stonyfield Farm, Inc., an organic yogurt company that got its start as an organic farming school. Stonyfield Farm does its share to help reduce global warming by offsetting all the C02 emissions from their facility energy use and generating some of their own renewable energy used to make their yogurt by using a solar array on the roof of their plant.
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