One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Insights From The Verdantix Climate Change Consulting Buyers Guide 2024

One Size Doesn't Fit All: Insights From The Verdantix Climate Change Consulting Buyers Guide 2024

The climate change consulting market has evolved significantly over the past two years. Providers traditionally focused on providing strategy-related services, notably for TCFD- and SBTi-aligned target-setting. In 2024, long-term target-setting is no longer in vogue, and organizations are increasingly examining how best to finance and implement climate transition strategies (see below). The 2024 Verdantix buyer's guide on climate change consulting finds that buyers must:

• Build a portfolio of consulting partners.
  No one climate change consulting provider can deliver best-in-class services across a full spectrum of projects, particularly those requiring specific industry or asset-level expertise, such as financing interventions. Instead, organizations should prioritize the development of a roster of partners for strategy, technical and implementation initiatives. This involves quantifying each provider's specific capabilities, areas of overlap and capacity for joint project delivery; in practice, buyers will need to work with organizations from a variety of backgrounds to ensure successful project delivery. Consulting firms have recognized this requirement and have begun to develop formalized partnership strategies, such as KPMG and Johnson Controls, to streamline procurement processes for buyers.
  
  
• Engage with existing consulting partners at the operational level for climate change initiatives.
  Operational leaders - in functions such as procurement, energy management and facilities - are ultimately responsible for delivering climate change initiatives. As such, senior executives in charge of overall climate transition strategies should consider working with providers who are already engaged with these functions, to ease project delivery. This is particularly relevant for projects focused on operational transformation. In the built environment sector, providers who already deliver business-critical processes, such as energy procurement and utility management, may be a best-fit choice for strategy projects, due to extant working relationships with boots-on-the-ground teams.
  
  
• Understand that provider offerings vary widely across geographies.
  Climate change consulting capabilities are heavily reliant on specific people's expertise. For global service providers, not every regional partnership or office will have the same strength of talent as another, nor access to the same partnership network. Although providers have made efforts to close these gaps - either by building cross-regional centres of excellence and alignment structures, or through targeted regional acquisitions - the relative immaturity of the market means that inconsistencies still occur. Buyers must therefore conduct careful due diligence when selecting providers and cut through marketing noise to understand the true capability of providers across specific geographies.
  
  

For more information, check out the full report here, and stay tuned for our upcoming Green Quadrant: Climate Change Consulting 2025.