Sustainability Award
COP26 demonstrated that there is huge corporate appetite for investing in decarbonisation and climate change projects – projects that are desperately needed to avert a climate catastrophe. The main obstacle to large-scale investment in green projects is concern about greenwashing – overstated, unverifiable, or just plain fraudulent claims about the performance of carbon reduction or removal initiatives. Investors want to be sure that their investment will have genuine impact and that any carbon credits generated are verifiable – both to protect their investments and their reputations – and won’t invest until they are.
Working with Ordnance Survey (OS) and Durham University, Deloitte has delivered a project that provides a practical, scalable solution that directly addresses the issue of greenwashing. Focusing on the UK’s peatlands, which have enormous potential to capture and permanently store atmospheric carbon (CO2), Deloitte has helped to develop a working suite of products that use enhanced data capture and analysis tools to reliably measure carbon capture, delivered through an internationally respected brand.
The project, which began as part of an innovation programme targeting new revenue streams for OS, brought together expertise in a wide range of disciplines to deliver products and a proposition for investors that, while focused on peatland restoration, could be tailored to any form of land use. It provides the basis for a robust, transparent, scalable model to expand finance for nature restoration and carbon removal and, by doing so, harness private capital to address climate change.
View the Deloitte profile in the MCA Members Directory.