The past couple of years have seen substantial growth in BEI’s membership, networks and offering across Climate Change mitigation and adaptation. We have a host of relevant events and working groups, including a focus on climate risk, climate finance, nature-based solutions and climate adaptation, and almost every month we are seeing new organisations join BEI to network and collaborate with likeminded experts and potential partners.
Some of the upcoming programme highlights this year include the launch of two new member publications - a Nature-Based Solutions guide aimed at municipal-level policy makers, and a positioning paper on Climate Finance, in the run up to COP28. Our ‘Intersections with Climate Change’ event series has now kicked off, with the first event earlier this week focusing on the intersection of Climate Change programming with Gender, Equity & Social Inclusion, and we are looking forward to our next sessions tackling intersections with Health, Education, and Conflict. Meanwhile, the Climate Change working group has moved to in-person meetings every two months, with the next meeting coming up on 24th May.
This month, we are delighted to welcome three new members with fascinating offerings across the climate change agenda - and I thought I would take the opportunity to provide some background on their interests and experience.
Phyla Earth
Phyla Earth focuses on investing in the restoration of degraded ecosystems and promoting biodiversity through nature-based solutions. Their teams have been working for over 25 years to identify and propagate elite varieties of the pongamia tree, to realise their full potential.
For over a thousand years the pongamia tree has been an integral part of agriculture in India, providing fodder for livestock, fertiliser and natural pesticides for crops, oil for lamps, power for industry and healing biocompounds used in traditional medicines. The challenge to commercialisation has always been that fewer than 1% of pongamia trees in the wild produce commercially viable yields.
Pongamia trees possess all the features that plant breeders are seeking for a more sustainable agriculture in the most challenging of environments. They remove carbon from the atmosphere and build healthy soils, and promote biodiversity, supporting bees and honey production, livestock grazing and fodder supply. Pongamia trees do not need inorganic fertilisers and can grow in soils affected by salinity and pollution from mining. As such, they have great potential for soil restoration through revenue-generating projects.
Phyla brings the range and depth of capabilities and expertise required to successfully transform degraded and desertifying landscapes into vibrant, viable and profitable community powered economies. Their team of artists, ecologists, engineers and practitioners of systems transformation have deep connections to financial markets and the diversity of expertise to tackle the challenges ahead.
Climate Sense
Climate Sense uses a systematic approach to identify, align and implement company specific solutions to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Their team combines climate change adaptation expertise with a proprietary climate-adaptation capacity mapping platform to support organisations to adapt and thrive in the face of a complex, climate-uncertain future. They help their clients turn climate information into prioritised action and navigate the complex internal and external challenges that can impact an organisation's decision and ability to adapt to long term risks.
Their approach combines a deep understanding of human coaching with climate adaptation expertise that is rooted in academic research and decades of implementation. This human oriented approach is supported by their proprietary decision and organisational capacity mapping technology which supports them to map the most efficient and effective course of action. They support any organisation or system to safeguard and build a strategy that sees their organisation, employees and operations thrive.
Climate Sense’s proprietary and powerful Adaptation Capacity Diagnosis & Development (CaDD) tool rapidly assesses at scale an organisation's capacity to effectively and efficiently implement a climate adaptation strategy. It enables projects and organisations to continuously identify the systemic challenges affecting them, then to plot the most effective and efficient path to address these challenges. It is auditable and repeatable over time. CaDD offers leaders both leverage, evidence and metrics to take their climate adaptation plans forward. It also measures their effectiveness in facilitating organisational change and building greater resilience with partners, supply chains and stakeholders.
CDP Worldwide
CDP Worldwide is a not-for-profit that runs the global disclosure system for investors, companies, cities, states and regions to manage their environmental impacts. Over the past 20 years they have created a system that has resulted in unparalleled engagement on environmental issues worldwide.
CDP has been putting critical environmental data at the heart of business decisions since 2002. They believe that improving corporate awareness through measurement and disclosure is essential to the effective management of carbon and climate change risk. They request information on climate risks and low carbon opportunities from the world’s largest companies on behalf of 746 institutional investor signatories with a combined US$136 trillion in assets and 280+ major purchasers with over US$6.4 trillion in procurement spend.
Nearly 20,000 organisations around the world disclosed data through CDP in 2022, including more than 18,700 companies worth half of global market capitalization, and over 1,100 cities, states and regions. Fully TCFD aligned, CDP holds the largest environmental database in the world, and CDP scores are widely used to drive investment and procurement decisions towards a zero carbon, sustainable and resilient economy.
CDP is a founding member of the Science Based Targets initiative, We Mean Business Coalition, The Investor Agenda and the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative.
Should you wish to connect with these new members, please reach out to me directly on ab@britishexpertise.org.
Alexandra Barnes
Director, Infrastructure and Climate Resilience
