From zero to huddle
Climate Huddle was created by South Pole as a community for people who are passionate about sustainability. It exists to give them the information they need to help businesses take meaningful climate action. In the coming months, our team will be working hard to develop tools and resources, and build a community dedicated to making climate action more accessible for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
At South Pole, we have the knowledge and experience to guide businesses to a more sustainable future. All we need is for them to tell us what they need. Everything we create will be based on feedback and questions from real people, working in real businesses.
The climate action gap
Climate Huddle came about when South Pole recognised a gap in the offerings available to SMBs to progress on their climate journey. Historically, taking meaningful climate action has been limited to large corporations with vast resources and budgets. This has created a gap whereby small and medium enterprises (SMBs) have been underserved by reporting frameworks (such as GRI and CDP) and exempted from government regulation, while also suffering from under-resourcing in terms of financing and a lack of dedicated roles available for sustainability professionals.
The Climate Huddle vision
Armed with this knowledge, South Pole decided to invest in a new business line: ‘Digital Climate Solutions’. We started putting together a team to digitalise consultant workflows and streamline them into an accessible product. Out of this desire to ‘democratise’ climate action, Climate Huddle was born.
By providing education and software resources specifically designed for SMBs, as well as a community forum, Climate Huddle aims to create a community where members can ask questions, share experiences, and move forward on their climate journey.
How did we build Climate Huddle?
The Digital Climate Solutions team set out to better understand the problem. Would it be enough to ‘simply’ build the workflows that South Pole consultants use to calculate and manage businesses’ emissions? Should we make this kind of process self-service? Or is the problem deeper than that? We decided to talk to SMBs to understand the problem.
Here’s what we learned:
Resources for taking climate action are technical or too generic and SMBs don’t understand where to start
Taking action is simply not at the top of businesses’ priority list
SMBs are unique and varied; finding resources to fit their needs is hard
Taking action is becoming a competitive advantage but there is still a lot of hesitation and scepticism about doing it right
With these problems in mind, here’s what we came up with:
Start by creating a space for SMBs to begin, and give direction on the right resources with the potential to ask questions
Make access to the right tools and resources as simple as possible, so the people within SMBs who care about sustainability can get started
Develop resources that include blog posts, webinars, and case studies to address issues specific to SMBs
Build the tools SMBs need to make effective change based on South Pole’s 16 years of expertise in helping businesses take climate action
Where is Climate Huddle at and what’s next?
Launching this website and our Huddle Community is our first step. We’re just getting started, so our knowledge base and community will continue to grow as we get more members. South Pole’s Digital Climate Solutions team is already working on tools and technology to digitise the climate journey, so be sure to sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know when things are launched.
We want Climate Huddle to be a valuable place for SMBs where we can bring answers, facilitate discussion, and build the tools and technology for businesses to make the changes they want to make to become more sustainable. We’re going to grow to include businesses from various sectors around the world and we hope that you’ll be an active member of our community so we can take climate action together.
Join the community here! If you still aren’t sure whether it’s right for you, feel free to reach out to us at .