During the Analyze phase, we work with our clients to address the following key questions:
- What are the company’s critical sustainability challenges?
- Where does the company stand relative to competitors and stakeholder expectations?
- What are the company’s gaps and opportunities?
Conducting a corporate sustainability "checkup"
Using our comprehensive and rigorous analytical approach, Esty Environmental Partners will identify our client’s key environmental impacts, assess stakeholders, and benchmark the company against competitors and sustainability leaders. At the conclusion of the diagnostic assessment—which, depending on what’s needed, can range from high-level issue spotting to in-depth quantitative analyses—clients gain a clear understanding of both the challenges and the upside potential.Assessing corporate environmental impacts
We offer impact assessments based on the client’s need: covering the company’s full value chain or focusing more specifically on the impacts of particular products and services (for example, through a Life Cycle Assessment).- Using our AUDIO (Aspects-Upstream-Downstream-Issues-Opportunities) issue-spotting framework, we can rapidly trace the environmental footprint of the business and identify and prioritize the company’s environmental challenges. The AUDIO framework (often used at the start of a client engagement) looks at business activities a company controls to ensure that clients appreciate and consider the full range of environmental challenges and opportunities.
- Our Value Chain Analysis takes a more in-depth look at a company’s environmental impacts. Working with the client, we typically begin by mapping the value chain—including the upstream supply chain and the downstream customer use and end-of-life disposal of products. Once completed, we quantify and prioritize the company’s environmental impacts.
- Through Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) and othe product-level impacts analyses, we dive below the company level to assess the environmental impacts of specific products or services. These analyses provide a detailed view of a product’s environmental footprint and help identify opportunities for re-design and innovation to reduce its impacts. Product-level analyses can also provide insight into the relative contribution of specific products to a company’s overall footprint.
Benchmarking against industry competitors and environmental leaders
One quick way to identify potential gaps and opportunities is to evaluate where a company stands relative to competitors and environmental leaders. Using the Esty Sustainability Scorecard™, we can assess corporate environmental management and performance relative to peer companies.Understanding and engaging stakeholders, including customers and employees
Companies face ever-growing demand for explanation and justification of their environmental performance. Eco-focused stakeholders now include capital markets, customers/consumers, communities, employees, environmental organizations, insurance companies, and opinion leaders. Esty Environmental Partners works with companies to identify, map, understand, and manage the full range of stakeholders through application of our stakeholder-mapping and engagement frameworks.Analyze
Strategize
Mobilize
Optimize
