What Every Large Business Owes The Next Generation

Here's a number to start with. Your supply chain is producing on average 26 times more emissions than everything your business does directly. 26 times. Most boards have never seen that number, and in the next 18 months, that number is going to matter. New rules land in the UK and the EU that will make businesses report on it in detail under audit, and most large businesses are nowhere near ready. In the next 6 minutes, I'll show you what's coming, why most businesses have been quietly underreporting for years, and the 3 moves your leadership team should make this quarter to get ahead of it. Hi, if we haven't met, I'm Will Richardson. I've spent 25 years in sustainability consulting. I built and ran one of the UK's leading sustainability firms. I've worked with FTSE, NASDAQ, and XTRA listed businesses across food and beverage and media and marketing and advertising. And I've watched in real time the difference between companies who face this honestly and the ones who keep hoping it goes away. Let me show you what facing it honestly looks like. Why this actually matters commercially. Let me be honest about why this matters. I'm not going to pretend your customers are demanding climate action or your future hires only care about the planet. That's not the world we live in. Here's what actually is happening. Big buyers are asking about it. If you sell to large corporates, government contracts, or increasingly to mid-sized companies with their own reporting obligations, they now include sustainability data in their procurement process. You can't bid for the contract if you can't provide the numbers. Investors are pricing it in. Lenders are pricing it in. Insurers are pricing it in. Not because they care about polar bears, because climate risk is now financial risk, and the ones who can quantify it Get better rates. And the penalties are real. The EU can fine businesses up to 3% of global turnover for reporting failures. The UK's version is coming. So this isn't really about doing the right thing— one would hope you do— but it's about staying commercial. The businesses that get ahead of this in the next 12 months will win contracts, access better capital, and price themselves ahead of their competitors. in tenders. The ones that don't will spend the next few years catching up under pressure while their rivals quietly eat their market share. That's the honest business case. The clock is already ticking. 2 things happened this year that reshape the picture. In the UK, government finalized new sustainability reporting standards in February. Starting January 2027, around 515 UK-listed companies will be legally required to disclose their climate impact in detail. Scope 3, meaning your supply chain, becomes reportable from 2028. That timeline sounds generous. It isn't. You cannot go back and retrofit a reporting year. If your business is still figuring out its baseline when the deadline lands, the report you eventually publish will be full of gaps, and those gaps will be visible to your auditors, your investors, and any tender panel scoring you against a competitor. who actually did the work. In the EU, the rules changed in March. They now apply only to businesses over 1,000 employees and €450 million in turnover. That's a break for smaller businesses, but for the ones still caught, the penalties for getting it wrong hit 3% of global turnover, and the reporting standard, even simplified, runs to 320 individual data points. None of this is going away. Your supply chain is doing most of the damage. Back to the number I opened with. Your supply chain emissions are 26 times bigger than everything your business does directly. That means for every ton of carbon your own offices, vans, and operations produce, your suppliers are producing another 26 tons on your behalf. Most of it is sitting in businesses you've never audited properly. Recent research shows 79% of companies now claim to report across all 3 emission categories. That's progress, but the same research shows 79% of those companies Say their biggest problem is getting reliable data from their suppliers. So the honest reading is this: most large businesses are reporting confidently on a fraction of what they actually owe. That's what a lot of we're on our net zero journey statements actually mean when you read between the lines. So what to do this quarter? Three moves, all doable in the next 90 days. One, recheck who the new rules actually apply to. The rules changed this year. Last year's assessment is probably out of date. Get someone to. Look at it again. 2, focus your Scope 3 work on your biggest suppliers, not the easiest ones. Chase the suppliers where most of the money is going. That's where most of the emissions are. Everything else is a distraction from the real number. 3, put someone senior in charge of it by name, not the sustainability team. A single named person senior enough to command a budget whose personal performance is tied to whether this gets delivered. Bring it to the board quarterly. Do those 3 things, and by the time the deadlines actually land, you already have a credible audit-ready position. Skip them and you spend the next 18 months under deadline pressure doing the work that could have been done calmly this quarter while your competitors use their data to win the contracts and price you out of tenders. Drop me a comment. Does your business actually have a real defensible number for its Scope 3 emissions? Genuinely curious. Most leaders assume yes and find out otherwise the first time it gets audited. At 51 to Carbon Zero, we help FTSE NASDAQ, XTRA, and IBEX listed businesses turn sustainability from a reporting exercise into a business advantage. If you want to be a part of our network, drop me a comment or message me. And if you know an enterprise leader who should be hearing this, please put them in touch. I'll see you next week.