Businesses are increasingly recognizing their responsibility to balance the needs of both stakeholders — such as employees and frontline communities — and shareholders. However, translating this recognition into meaningful action has been challenging, with a proliferation of frameworks that leave companies to cherry-pick methodologies and avoid accountability. This has resulted in confusion around investment and policy decisions that need to take full cognizance of systemic risks.
Featured Publications
Offsetting & Insetting
In the race to net zero, we monitor the development of voluntary carbon markets and corporate offsetting and insetting schemes, evaluating both the risks and rewards for the climate, the environment, communities, Indigenous Peoples, as well as financial institutions.
CCSI analyzed why the anticipated increase of banking sector investment in the voluntary carbon market has failed to materialize. See our findings here, in a blog and webinar recording.
In Nature-Based Insetting: A Harmful Distraction from Corporate Decarbonization, CCSI outlined why any reliance on nature-based insetting projects should be treated with skepticism.
SDG-Aligned Sectors
Our research and guidance on aligning sectors like food and utilities with the SDGs explores the sustainability of operations and value chains, the potential for good corporate citizenship, and the benefits and impacts of products themselves.
Alongside partners, CCSI developed a framework to define SDG-aligned business practices in the food sector, focusing on products, operations, value chains, and good corporate citizenship. Learn more.
We have conducted a range of research and analysis concerning the coffee sector, including a look at: the economic viability and sustainability of coffee production, the impact of coffee company sourcing practices on coffee producer and farmworker well-being, and how to develop coffee sustainability plans for cooperatives and communities in coffee-producing regions.
CCSI and partners developed a conceptual framework to define SDG-aligned business practices in the energy sector, and in particular the utility sector.
Antitrust & Sustainability
We explore the intersection of antitrust law and sustainability, examining how companies can collaborate to achieve the SDGs, and when collaboration and market concentration issues can undermine consumers, workers, citizens, and democracy.
The recent politically driven manipulation of antitrust law and policy has had chilling effects on the engagement and mobilization of private actors to address climate and other sustainability-related challenges. CCSI, within the Climate Law & Finance Initiative, is working to bring clarity to the intersection of antitrust and sustainability.
Our publication Harms from Concentrated Industries: A Primer outlines some of the harms caused by market concentration, as well as industry-specific or thematic considerations in technology, agriculture, and trade.