Beyond Targets and Strategies: Seven Insights on How Climate Action Actually Creates Impact

1. The Value Chain in Practice: Where the Real Impact Happens
Many companies have made significant progress in their own operations, but the largest emissions—and the largest potential—are now often found in Scope 3 and the value chain. This is also where the biggest hurdles emerge: limited data, varying requirements and incentives for suppliers, and difficulties with follow-up at a reasonable pace.

At the same time, we see that even smaller actors can create influence, especially when they communicate a clear and consistent direction in their climate work.

Insight:
SBTi functions as a shared “language” in the value chain. It makes it easier to align on priorities, set clearer requirements, and ensure impact—without spending an unreasonable amount of time on follow-up. Several member companies have confirmed this: if more suppliers had SBTi targets, it would save significant time because the need for reviews and assessments would decrease.

One member company also noted that Swedish firms are often perceived as frontrunners, which helps ensure that even large suppliers listen when direction is communicated clearly and consistently.

2. From Planning to Real Progress: Where Behaviors and Mandates Decide the Outcome
Plans are not enough. Progress happens within the business: in procurement, product development, logistics, finance, and executive teams. In practice, this means behaviors must change—requiring leadership, transparency, and clear mandates.

Insight:
Organizations that actively integrate sustainability into core roles and processes, and that use change management methods, perform better over time. Climate work must support people in making the shift and be embedded in governance, culture, and communication—not sit as a side project. This requires a different focus than before.

3. New Partnerships Are Needed When the Market Isn’t ”Ready”
To reach their targets, most companies can’t rely solely on optimizing their own operations. Many must establish new types of partnerships—sometimes within the value chain, sometimes across it. One company’s waste may be another company’s raw material.

In areas where emissions reductions require new technology or new business models, there is often no mature market yet. Buyers and suppliers must therefore find each other and be willing to take risks together.

Insight:
Risks, costs, and learning must be shared. Swedish companies are often ahead and have solutions that are in global demand, but may need to communicate this more clearly. This was also a central message from guest speaker Mattias Frumerie, who highlighted collaboration and Sweden’s role as an international “matchmaker” for climate solutions, including within the UN’s COP process.

4. Staying Grounded When the World Shifts
Geopolitics, economic uncertainty, and increased scrutiny of climate efforts are creating a more challenging environment. At the same time, nature’s signals are becoming louder. Many organizations must balance acute geopolitical pressures with a growing need to manage underlying natural resource and climate‑related risks—risks that themselves can contribute to global instability.

In the forum, we have therefore often chosen a broader approach: linking climate action to resilience, risk reduction, and preparedness rather than to isolated climate benefits. The questions are deeply interconnected, with synergies at multiple levels.

Insight:
When companies place climate within the context of robustness and business‑critical risks, relevance and impact increase. This helps bring climate onto the executive agenda and strengthens the case for necessary investments.

We have also discussed the importance of knowing:

• what to prepare for,
• where agility is most beneficial, and
• where to build structural robustness,

so that resources are used wisely in an uncertain environment.

A guest speaker from the Swedish Defence University described this as finding the “right level” between preparing too much and too little—and instead building actionable capability where it matters most.

5. Long-Term Thinking in a Quarterly World
Many companies describe the challenge of getting long-term sustainability issues to compete in an environment dominated by short-term governance, ROI, and multiple priorities. Climate issues are, by definition, long-term, complex, and global—with many dependencies and both direct and indirect consequences.

Insight:
When boards and owners are involved, and sustainability is integrated into business strategy, risk management, and product development, climate becomes a natural part of value creation—not a side track.

6. A Growing Forest of Standards Increases the Need for Shared Interpretation
Many companies experience growing “regulation fatigue.” The SBTi, the GHG Protocol, sector standards, and EU requirements are evolving rapidly, influencing each other and requiring time to be understood—especially when companies must relearn shortly after learning something new. The result is often inefficiency.

Insight:
Companies that interpret standards together, focus on synergies between frameworks, use existing expertise, and work more agilely, move faster, and avoid unnecessary rework. Peer learning reduces workload and increases quality.

One member company described how practical advice on synergies and pragmatic workflows helped them move forward by clarifying priorities and reducing repeated efforts.

7. Advocacy: When Remaining Emissions Require New Rules of the Game
When internal measures are largely exhausted, it becomes clear that some emissions require system-level changes: infrastructure, taxes, standards, or political frameworks. Additionally, this election year precedes the mandate period leading up to 2030, when several sustainability goals must be met. More companies, including smaller ones, are therefore considering more structured advocacy.

Insight:
The most effective efforts are based on concrete implementation bottlenecks. When several companies push the same issue, legitimacy, impact, and endurance increase. The key is to be concrete and solution‑oriented.

Several member companies also noted that global standards are not always adapted to Swedish conditions—which strengthens the case for collective advocacy and coordinated input.

Summary and Outlook – From Insight to Implementation Capacity
Taken together, the seven points describe the same core challenge from different angles: the transition places new demands once it leaves the document and meets the everyday reality of business.

• Points 1 and 3 show that impact often lies in the value chain and requires new partnerships.
• Points 2 and 5 highlight that internal governance, mandates, and long-term thinking must support the work.
• Point 4 places this in a context where resilience and prioritization capability are crucial.
• Point 6 reminds us that interpretation burdens can slow progress.
• Point 7 shows that some emissions cannot be addressed without new rules of the game.

Meanwhile, SBTi continues to grow globally, now covering around 41% of global market capitalization, strengthening SBTi as a shared reference point for investors and value‑chain requirements. With upcoming changes—such as Net Zero 2.0 with five‑year target cycles, more target types, and clearer requirements for governance and procurement in Scope 2 and 3—the focus is shifting further from “setting targets” to driving iterative implementation.

What is needed going forward is not more separate checklists, but a cohesive ability to translate insights into practice:

• Change management that makes climate action practical across the organization (points 2 and 5).
• Value chain work and value generating partnerships that enable shared learning, requirements, incentives, and risk‑sharing when the market is not yet “ready” (points 1 and 3).
• Shared interpretation and collaboration that counter regulation fatigue (point 6), strengthen resilience in uncertain times (point 4), and improve legitimacy and endurance in advocacy (point 7).

And perhaps most importantly: several member companies emphasize that, in practice, it is the combination of community and shared direction that helps them stay the course when the world shifts. It may sound soft, but during the implementation phase it is often a very concrete prerequisite for maintaining momentum, reducing rework, and continuing to deliver real impact.