Climate Change Strategies for Detroit Small Businesses
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A Six-Step Approach for Small Businesses Now that you have a few ideas about how addressing climate change can pay off for your business, let’s look at a step-by-step approach to tackling climate change. For some small businesses, this approach might result in one or more written plan documents. Other businesses might choose a more informal approach, with only certain parts put into writing. The decision is mainly up to your company’s culture and its resources. Whatever the approach, here are the steps to begin designing and implementing a climate change strategy.
Step 1
IDENTIFY CLIMATE CHANGE RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES Hundreds of possible risks and opportunities are associated with climate change, even for a small business. So the first step in creating a climatechange-focused sustainability plan is to narrow down the possibilities and focus on those that are most important to your situation.
Sample Tasks: • Establish a team of inside stakeholders: operations people, supply managers, finance people and organizational leadership. • Have the team scan the list of risks and opportunities in the appendix to get a few preliminary ideas about which issues might apply. What are they looking for? Items on the list that are worth investigating because they’re more likely than not to be true. Try to get consensus, but don’t throw out ideas that not everyone agrees on. • Check the list you develop with some outside stakeholders if possible. Talk to some experts, nonprofits, customers, suppliers and/or industry representatives.
• See whether you can classify the issues into four buckets: a. not very important to our stakeholders, and not essential to our business b. important to our stakeholders, but not essential to our business c. not very important to our stakeholders, but essential to our business d. important to our stakeholders and essential to our businesses
Approximate Time to Complete: 30-60 days Deliverable: • a written document that identifies the issues you need to address, hopefully with a sense of where to start
CLIMATE CHANGE STRATEGIES FOR DETROIT SMALL BUSINESSES | AUGUST 2017
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