Helping small and medium size businesses decarbonise

This is a critically important initiative as all businesses need to take responsibility for their role in generating the climate and planetary health crises. We need to mobilise the whole system towards achieving our nation’s net zero goals, therefore, urgent and immediate collaborative action by governments, industry associations and business and community leaders is required to decarbonise the economy and regenerate Country and planetary health. 

The decarbonisation of supply chains is proving to not only be inherently complex, but costly and challenging for small and medium size businesses.

We fully appreciate that for SMEs to decarbonise can be challenging as they are ultimately time and resource poor, presenting major barriers as to how we can best incentivise and support them to decarbonise and fully disclose their emissions which we know, in turn, will essentially help large organisations with their transition to scope 3. While we know that SMEs can pivot faster due to their innovative capacity and operation scale, they experience unique pressures that hinder their decarbonisation journey, ultimately impacting entire supply chains. We know that hindrances may include:

• resource-constrained (i.e., not in a position to afford consultants or outsourced evaluation and reporting) and time-poor 
• unable to access capital and finance to trial and bring to market new products, services 
• protocols, contracts, procurement agreements, product specifications that do not incentivise decarbonisation, climate adaptation, etc. 
• pressures to respond to volatile risks (e.g., floods, inflation, covid, supply chain disruptions, labour shortage) and operational and commercial viability (e.g., skills deficits, wage pressure, fuel prices, investment allocated to upgrades).

The purpose of this survey is to help UTS and large organisations understand what we, as a collective, can do to break down the barriers such as cost, time, priorities, and short-term pressures and help small and medium size businesses decarbonise by providing accessible, affordable and easy-to-use tools, as well as incentives, and encouraging the implementation of decarbonisation strategies.

We aim to achieve this by identifying, mapping and segmenting all the critical user categories (start-ups, small and medium size businesses) based on sectors to identify generic decarbonisation and climate positive strategies, then mapping and categorising the available tools and resources currently in the market for assessing and improving sustainability and climate action goals. Once we have collected the sufficient data, we will be sharing with you some tools to trial, free-of-charge.

Complete the SME Decarbonisation survey here

 Please note that all information gathered by UTS, a public institution, will be kept completely confidential to protect any commercial sensitivities.

We hope that you will join us on this journey as we seek to support small and medium size businesses and reach our nation’s net zeros goals by 2050.