Climate, Nature & Resources

The accelerating climate and nature crises present profound challenges for businesses, governments and civil society.

Rising global temperatures, biodiversity loss and resource depletion are reshaping markets, policies and supply chains. This makes sustainability a core business imperative. Organisations must not only understand their environmental impacts, but take decisive action to mitigate risks, build resilience – and transition to sustainable operating models.

Our Climate, Nature & Resources business unit brings together industry-leading sustainability expertise to offer trusted advice to a broad range of private sector, government and NGO clients. We help organisations understand their impacts and risks, create a coherent strategy and translate ambitious plans into actions.

Alex Hetherington

Head of Climate Nature and Resources

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Closely linked: Climate, nature and resource use

It can be tempting to think of climate change, nature and biodiversity, and resource use in separate spheres. In reality, they are intricately connected.

Climate change impacts nature and biodiversity, and is driven to a large degree by absolute resource use.

Nature can provide solutions for climate mitigation and adaptation, and inspires circular economy approaches.

Circular economy is a strategy to change impacts on climate and nature.

What solutions and expertise do we offer?

We combine extensive experience with strong technical expertise on climate change, nature and biodiversity, resource use and the circular economy to provide strategic advice and support.

Where strategy work identifies a need for taking action on forest-risk commodities, or needs to be translated into on-the-ground action, we can connect clients to specialist colleagues in our Commodity Supply Chains and Agriculture & Landscapes teams.

Impact & risk assessment

Nature risks and impact assessment e.g. for TNFD
Corporate GHG footprinting, including FLAG calculations
Supplier data integration
Climate and nature value chain hotspot identification
Product footprinting and Life Cycle Assessments
Climate risk analytics, including GIS risk mapping, scenario analysis for TCFD
Resource flow analysis
Assurance and verification support

Strategy & roadmaps

Sustainability health checks
Competitor reviews and benchmarking
Target development e.g. SBTi and SBTN
Decarbonisation roadmap development
Climate transition planning
Nature strategy development
Double materiality assessments, including for CSRD reporting
Alternative business model opportunity assessments
Sustainable material use strategy – e.g. packaging reviews

Implementation

Corporate policy development and implementation
Capacity building and training
Impact and risk KPI monitoring and reporting
Eco-design support
Trial design, implementation and impact monitoring

Sectoral & systems transformation

Industry association ESG strategy, target development and programme support
Systems research and analysis
Sustainability thought leadership and communications
Facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations for systems change
Environmental research for policy advocacy

Our specialisms

Assessing risks, impacts & dependencies

An objective analysis of an organisation’s impacts, risks, dependencies and opportunities is the foundation of a credible corporate sustainability strategy. The 3Keel team is experienced at applying a range of tools and frameworks – such as corporate greenhouse gas accounting, climate and nature risk analyses, Life Cycle Assessment and resource flow analysis. We also specialise in Forest, Land and Agriculture (FLAG) emissions accounting for the SBTi.Our analyses are underpinned by high-quality data through partnerships with innovative software solutions including Mondra, AdAstra and Ecotransit. We also hold licenses to industry-leading sustainability databases such as Ecoinvent. To increase the credibility and relevance of our analyses, we are experienced at engaging directly with suppliers to gather more specific impact and risk data.

Building robust climate, nature & circularity strategies

3Keel undertakes end-to-end strategy development or can deploy specific tools to feed into client planning.Strategy engagements commonly include peer benchmarking, decarbonisation roadmap development, materiality assessments and the development of internal communications such as board papers.The strategy development process also features analysis or modelling specific to the area of focus – for example, decarbonisation roadmap development for climate strategies, resource flow analysis for circularity strategies, and nature impact assessment for nature strategies.Where needed, our strategy work aligns with current and emerging voluntary and regulatory frameworks, including the CSDDD (Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive), CSRD, TCFD, TNFD and SBTi.

Moving from strategy to implementation

With the right evidence and strategy in place, 3Keel supports organisations as they move into implementation and embedding change.In practical terms, this often means applying approaches such as running eco-design and product innovation processes, developing policies, supporting supplier engagement, and helping with capacity building and training.We also provide valuable ad-hoc strategic and technical support for clients on their sustainability journey.

Sectoral & systems transition

The climate and nature crises cannot be solved by a single organisation. 3Keel’s theory of change is to also work with policy makers, NGOs and industry associations on sectoral and system-level change.Our sectoral and systems transition work includes multi-stakeholder convening, sectoral pathway development and thought leadership research and communications.

Explore our work with British Fashion Council

Our leadership team

Alex Hetherington leads our Climate, Nature & Resources services, with support from the CNR leadership team and high-level expertise provided by 3Keel Director Richard Sheane.

The leadership team has many years’ experience working in corporate sustainability and offers industry-leading expertise on impact assessment and strategy development.

The team regularly contribute to national and global sustainability initiatives, such as the GHG Protocol, SBTi, SBTN and the UK Food Data Transparency Partnership.

Alex Hetherington

Head of Climate Nature and Resources

A chartered engineer and chartered environmentalist with an LCA-based PhD, Alex is a strong advocate for whole-systems thinking and has delivered myriad projects maximising resource efficiency. She believes strongly in evidence-based decisionmaking.

Richard Sheane

Director

One of 3Keel’s founding directors, Richard has been advising businesses, NGOs and public sector organisations on sustainability since 2005.

Alan Spray

Special Advisor

A longstanding sustainability consultant, Alan has extensive expertise with sustainability data and tools, helping clients make sense of and derive actionable insights from complicated and messy data.

Olwen Smith

Principal Consultant, Client Lead

With expertise in key elements of corporate climate strategy and previous experience at CDP and the SBTi, Olwen helps clients navigate science-based target setting, decarbonisation and environmental reporting.

Samra Mariam

Principal Consultant, Team Lead

An experienced sustainability consultant, Samra supports clients to better understand their climate and nature risks and impacts, and to develop robust sustainability strategies and transition plans to address them.

Josefin Malmberg

Senior Consultant, Team Lead

Combining experience of climate strategy with expertise in circular economy, Josefin helps clients understand the drivers of their impacts and assess opportunities for achieving system-level shifts towards sustainability.

Explore our work for Samworth Brothers

Why work with us?

Clients turn to our Climate, Nature & Resources business unit because we are:

Deep subject matter experts on climate and nature impact and risk – including agriculture and land sectors
Plugged into sectoral and policy initiatives. We can provide insights on key upcoming developments affecting corporate sustainability
Sustainability software and data specialists, comfortable with complex data extraction, processing and analysis in a variety of tools and platforms
Connected into the solutions space. In collaboration with our Commodities and Agriculture colleagues, we help clients move from strategy to implementation

With a team that has an exceptional track record of helping companies adapt to the realities of climate change and nature loss, we’ll not only provide you with expert, independent advice, but work with you to co-create robust strategies and actions that work on the ground.

Testimonials

See what others have to say

The 3Keel team have significantly accelerated our journey to drive down the carbon footprint of our entire value chain. Their baseline assessment was clear and easy to understand, and gave us some unexpected results on where to focus attention. Their subsequent well-informed support on developing a carbon reduction plan gives us clear direction for the next steps on our carbon journey.

Ruvan Mendis

Chief Operating OfficerGraze

The consultant team of 3Keel, Canopy and Mike Barry were outstanding. This was a challenging task, made even harder by the impacts of COVID, but their processes and final outputs secured the confidence and support of our members. Now the work starts to ensure we meet the net zero targets that have been set.

Peter Andrews

Head of Sustainability PolicyBritish Retail Consortium

3Keel know climate change inside out. They’ve solved some really difficult problems for us and are great at getting to the practical insights we need to start taking action. We rely on them to both challenge and guide us, and consider them a key partner.

Joe Hulme

Climate Change OfficerCo-op Group

A hands-on, expert consultancy, 3Keel has not only given Fuller’s a well-rounded understanding of our climate impact and risks, but supported us in developing credible targets and a robust action plan to achieve them. Knowing we’re on the right track is invaluable.

Oliver Rosevear

Director of SustainabilityFuller, Smith & Turner