SBTi proposes more flexibility in 132-page net-zero overhaul

The Science Based Targets initiative has published a 132-page “initial consultation” document describing proposed revisions to the Corporate Net Zero Standard.

SBTi’s methodology has become the de facto framework that guides companies in setting science-based targets for emissions reductions that seek to hold global temperature increases below 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050. 

The draft has been delayed for months amid arguments over SBTi’s direction and a CEO resignation. More than 3,000 companies have announced plans to commit to net zero. About half have actually had their targets validated, and about one-third are small or midsize companies. 

Nothing in the proposal published March 18 is technically final. SBTi has assembled five expert working groups to critique the revisions. It is also soliciting feedback via an online survey until June 1. From there, revisions will be made, and a new draft will be circulated for another round of comments before SBTi’s technical team and board consider them for approval.

Sweeping changes to Scope 3 methodologies

Some changes proposed in the draft will be tougher for companies to meet than the current net-zero standard, but SBTi is more flexible about requirements some corporations have criticized — especially its methodology for Scope 3 emissions from corporate supply chains.

More than half the companies surveyed by SBTi pointed to handling Scope 3 as their most significant challenge when aiming to become net zero. Revisions proposed in the draft would dramatically change that process. Key examples:

  • Scope 3 targets are mandatory for big companies (those with more than $450 million in revenue), regardless of the percentage they contribute to overall emissions.
  • Companies will need to identify their most emissions-intensive activities — sources that account for at least 1 percent of Scope 3 or that generate more than 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equipment per year.
  • SBTi proposes dropping the fixed percentages it previously applied for setting Scope 3 targets in favor of a system that would allow companies to focus instead on “relevant” categories — those that account for at least 5 percent of their Scope 3 footprint.
  • Companies must use “direct influence” to require tier one suppliers (those with which it has a direct relationship) to set their own net-zero targets. 
  • Targets can take different forms — ranging from absolute emissions reductions to proof of “net-zero-aligned” procurement activities, such as buying steel or cement from suppliers that are reducing their production emissions in line with a plan to reach net zero. 
  • SBTi is more open to the idea of “indirect mitigation” of activities that companies can’t directly control. That might mean, for example, buying sustainable aviation fuel certificates through a book-and-claim system to reduce emissions related to air travel. It could also mean setting other procurement targets for lower carbon versions of materials that typically have high emissions, such as steel or concrete.

Under consideration: Recommendations for carbon removal targets 

The path to net zero has always recognized the need to let companies abate residual emissions at the end of their journey; usually less than 10 percent of the carbon footprint for their baseline year. 

The draft includes suggestions that would let companies get credit for “high-integrity” carbon removal activities taking place between now and their net-zero target year (usually 2050).

Here are three pathways being considered as part of the new consultation:

  • Option 1: Require companies to set carbon removal and abatement targets for the near term and long term aimed at mitigating projected residual emissions in their net-zero year.
  • Option 2: Recognize companies that set near-term and long-term carbon removal and abatement targets for that purpose.
  • Option 3: Give companies flexibility for how they address residual emissions.

The options above pertain specifically to residual emissions that a company isn’t able to abate by its net-zero year. SBTi is also exploring whether to “recognize” companies for using carbon credits and other mechanisms to address the annual emissions generated as companies transition to net zero, which it refers to as “ongoing” emissions. But the draft doesn’t go into detail about what form the recognition would take.

Stricter governance expectations and other notable changes

The update proposes different criteria for large and small companies; there are also nuances related to geography. And all this is just the tip of the iceberg. Companies will also need to:

  • Set net-zero goals more quickly. Once large companies commit to setting targets, they’ll have one year to deliver instead of the two years they previously had to get validated. Smaller companies still get two years.
  • Anticipate spot checks. The draft suggests “any company and target” is subject to random assessments to confirm conformity with the standard and ensure integrity. Potential triggers for that sort of scrutiny include a credible complaint.
  • Brace for regular baseline data evaluations. SBTi wants companies to reevaluate their base year emissions on an annual basis and whenever there’s a big organization change, such as a merger or divestment. 
  • Write a climate transition plan. The draft recommends publishing one within 12 months of having a net-zero target validated. These are disclosures that describe investments and business model changes a corporation must make to hold global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Roughly one in four companies that make voluntary annual disclosures to researcher CDP do this. 
  • Keep close scrutiny on baseline years. The organization wants them to be “representative of actual structure and performance.” Previously, it allowed companies to reach as far back as 2015. The revision would require companies to pitch a baseline no earlier than three years before their initial validation. Plus, big companies will need a third party to assure their emissions inventory calculations.
  • Shift to better data collection processes. SBTi is pushing for companies to demonstrate more use of primary data, and for continuous improvements in how they trace emissions from suppliers. Full traceability for their most emissions-intensive activities is expected by 2035.
  • Renewals could be required more quickly. Targets are typically set in five-year cycles. After that period, companies need to set new ones. Certain events could force an earlier renewal, such as the divestment of a business line or the need for a baseline year emissions recalculation.

Window for public consultation open

The organization will consider input on all of the revisions in the Corporate Net Zero 2.0 draft between March 18 and June 1.

Over the summer, SBTi will review the feedback to determine where adjustments or clarifications are needed; it plans to publish a summary of that input and how it is being addressed, but no specific timeline for that process has been disclosed.

Changes will be incorporated into a new draft that will be circulated for a second public consultation, before it is ultimately submitted for approval by the SBTi technical council. The final step for adoption is a vote by the SBTi board of trustees. 

“This is an iterative process and the public consultation will help us identify the changes we can make to ensure SBTi’s revised standard creates impact at scale as effectively as possible,” said Alberto Carillo Pineda, chief technology officer at SBTi.

For 2025 and 2026, companies can still set science-based emissions reduction targets for 2030 using the existing Corporate Net Zero and Near-Term Criteria methodologies. Goals set in those years will be valid for either five years or until the end of 2030, whichever is earlier. 

Starting in 2027, SBTi expects companies to set targets according to the finalized version of Corporate Net Zero Standard 2.0, due by the end of 2026. 

Are you a corporate sustainability professional who’d like to discuss the proposed updates? Connect with me on LinkedIn (or email me) to start a dialogue.

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Introducing Trellis Impact 25 to usher in the next phase of sustainability

The profession of sustainability is changing. It always has been, though this moment feels more fraught than any before it.

Sustainability professionals are being buffeted by countervailing forces: On the one hand, to accelerate progress in reducing emissions and in restoring or regenerating despoiled resources and ecosystems; on the other, to stand down, or at least communicate less, mindful that the political winds are blowing fiercely against corporate climate action and other sustainability initiatives. All this while delivering tangible benefits — financial and otherwise — to their companies.

This is hardly the first challenging moment in sustainable business. I’ve been watching the profession evolve for more than 35 years, the last quarter-century with Trellis Group and its predecessor, GreenBiz. (For the preceding decade, I’d written and published “The Green Business Letter,” a monthly print subscription newsletter.) Indeed, this June marks 25 years since the website GreenBiz.com went live, a moment for us to reflect on all that’s been — and all that’s yet to come.

The 25-year roller coaster

During that time all of us have weathered three recessions, multiple political swings, countless technological breakthroughs, various global conflicts, fickle consumers, impatient investors and a global pandemic. Not to mention continually evolving language we use to describe who we are and what we do, from environmental responsibility and ESG to regeneration and resilience.

It’s been a rollercoaster ride: lots of ups — and more than a few frightening downs.

At Trellis, the runup to our 25th anniversary has been a time to recalibrate our products and services to meet this moment, with all its promise and peril. Last year, for example, we rebranded the company as Trellis Group and launched a vastly improved website. We transformed our seven weekly newsletters into a single daily offering: Trellis Briefing. We also recast our 17-year-old membership group for sustainability executives into Trellis Network, opening its various communities to anyone in a member company who wants to participate.

Now we’re reimagining our events, too.

Starting this fall, three of our events — GreenFin, Bloom and VERGE — will come together as a single, multifaceted event: Trellis Impact, in San Jose, Calif., Oct. 28-30. Starting next year, Trellis Impact will add Circularity to the mix and the event will relocate to San Francisco’s Moscone Center in early summer — June 23-25, 2026. GreenBiz, our flagship event, remains as is, back in Phoenix on Feb. 17-19, 2026.

It’s a big change for us — and for you — and reflects a number of trends.

First and foremost is the realization that the focus of these four event brands — decarbonization, the circular economy, biodiversity, and the finance to pay for it all — can no longer be seen as discrete topics but as inextricably linked. Addressing them in a single, integrated event will enable our community to increase both individual and collective impact.

Moreover, we’ve heard from our community that sustainability professionals need fewer events, not more, given the vicissitudes of travel budgets and time away from home — and, of course, one’s carbon footprint. And that by bringing four events under one roof we will enable their teams to more easily learn and share together about topics, trends and technologies that cut across multiple departments and remits.

We believe that Trellis Impact will be fit for purpose for the years ahead, a more holistic view of the sustainability solutions we all need to go further, faster during this decisive decade to cut carbon emissions.

Make it bigger: Addressing sustainability challenges in concert

It all brings to mind something called the Eisenhower Principle.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th U.S. president, decorated five-star general and World War II hero, considered himself an expert problem solver. He once explained, “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.”

That’s a fitting prescription for today’s world, which has been variously described as a “polycrisis” (crises that interact so that the whole is more overwhelming than the sum of its parts) or “permacrisis” (a world lurching from one unprecedented event to another) — or, most likely, both. Rather than tackle each sustainability challenge individually, we believe it can be more impactful to “make it bigger,” addressing them in concert.

And that by doing so we can help unlock newfound synergies and new business opportunities for companies and their customers, accelerating the positive impacts we all seek.

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Why federal efforts to ‘expedite’ environmental permitting probably won’t

In an effort to expedite the federal permitting process, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) rescinded its power to implement the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), likely achieving the opposite result and further slowing an already long permitting review. The changes, announced via the Interim Final Rule released by CEQ, formally relinquished its authority under the guise of efficiency and expediency, instructing individual federal agencies to continue with existing practices and procedures instead. CEQ concluded that “it may lack authority to issue binding rules on agencies.”

But according to an analysis of CEQ’s decision by the law firm Allen Matkins, this move is likely to create future chaos and uncertainty.

“Without uniform regulations,” stated the firm, “each individual agency might now impose its own requirements on the NEPA process, [resulting] in greater challenges coordinating environmental reviews and permitting among multiple agencies.”

When Trellis reached out to CEQ for comment, a representative responded, “CEQ is not relinquishing its role in NEPA implementation; quite to the contrary — President Trump’s Executive Order, Unleashing American Energy, directs CEQ to work with all agencies as they revise their NEPA implementing regulations.”

This lack of alignment between official rules and administration comments is likely to contribute to the challenges mentioned by Allen Matkins.

How the dismantling affects NEPA

NEPA ensures that all large projects seeking federal permitting to break ground prepare an environmental impact statement or environmental assessment. Along with CEQ’s regulations that provide structure for NEPA implementation, the Permitting Council, established in 2015, facilitates the coordination of projects granted federal permits and subject to NEPA.

Changes implemented by the Trump administration include:

  • CEQ will no longer have authority over agency implementation of NEPA.
  • Each agency will have to revise or include its NEPA implementing procedure to expedite permitting approvals.
  • While revising, agencies must exclude analysis of environmental justice in NEPA implementation.

CEQ also included instructions for agencies to narrow the scope of “cumulative effects analysis,” removing much of the review process that investigates environmental impact altogether.

How a CEQ-less NEPA affects clean energy projects

Experts believe that the move will have a negative impact on how many clean energy infrastructure projects move forward overall, and how quickly.

“Thousands of electricity generation projects are awaiting approval to connect to the grid,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) in a recent Environment and Public Works Committee hearing. “Millions of engineering construction and manufacturing jobs stalled in part because of our inability build transmission lines. This must change.”

Consider the $1.8 billion Pantheon Solar Project, currently mired in uncertainty. A Nevada solar plant on public land, the project began applying for a permit in 2020 and is still mid-process. According to the Permitting Dashboard — the federal website that catalogs all current and proposed projects applying for federal permits — Pantheon has still not conducted its environmental impact statement. That process was supposed to begin in February, but its status is apparently up in the air.

Pantheon is going through the Bureau of Land Management. But given CEQ’s response to Trellis, the White House will surely have a say in its future.

It’s also likely that a significant amount of litigation will follow each individual agency’s revised NEPA rules of engagement. Companies and stakeholders currently in the permitting application process should expect implementation delays and legal uncertainties for at least the next year.

In other words, CEQ’s effort to expedite permitting potentially create a whole new set of roadblocks, defeating the intent of its recent actions.

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How to future-proof water systems in an era of extreme weather

From my home in Los Angeles, I witnessed the devastation of wildfires earlier this year and how they underscored the rising urgency to modernize water infrastructure. A slew of dangerous chemicals were released into Los Angeles’ drinking water and stormwater systems during the wildfires, leaving many communities concerned about whether their water was safe to drink. 

These wildfires shone a light on whether our water systems are equipped to handle disasters. As wildfires grow more frequent and intense, it becomes even more urgent to adapt our water infrastructure to meet this new reality. Much of the nation’s water infrastructure is nearing the end of its lifespan. And yet, modernizing drinking and wastewater systems could exceed $744 billion in costs over the next 20 years.  

Between the urgent need to upgrade decades-old systems and the rising impacts of climate-driven weather extremes, the vast networks of pipes, treatment plants, and drainage systems across the U.S. are under immense strain. 

Uncertainty around legislation and funding

Federal and state legislation and funding could put a significant dent in addressing critical water infrastructure needed to support economic growth and communities. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, for example, earmarks $50 billion for water, wastewater, and stormwater infrastructure upgrades. As of November, about $41 billion had been awarded for the measure, which garnered broad business support. 

States, meanwhile, also have pushed for water infrastructure improvements. Last year, California voters authorized $10 billion in spending on environmental projects, with nearly $4 billion for projects dedicated to improving water quality and protecting the state from floods and droughts and restoring rivers and lakes.  

But there is rising uncertainty surrounding such funding due to the dynamic situation in Washington. As this plays out, it’s crucial for companies and investors to take advantage of private sector opportunities to drive innovation, partnerships and investments in climate-resilient water infrastructure. 

This work strengthens water supplies for businesses and fuels economic activity: investments in new and improved water systems could annually contribute more than $220 billion to the U.S. economy and create about 1.3 million new jobs.

Private sector opportunities

For many decades, municipal bonds have been a critical tool for shoring up water infrastructure. Today, green bonds can offer investors a powerful opportunity to finance water and wastewater management projects that promote climate adaptation and resiliency. Certification frameworks such as the Climate Bonds Initiative provide criteria ensuring these investments go toward water infrastructure projects aligned with environmental goals. 

Companies — from data centers to agriculture — that need clean water to operate also have a role to play in ensuring the water systems they depend on are reliable and built to endure weather extremes. This shared interest in resilient water infrastructure presents an opportunity for businesses to work with peers, governments and other stakeholders on projects that prevent water service disruptions and higher costs to businesses and communities. 

Moving past traditional approaches

As we work to strengthen our water infrastructure system to meet a new climate reality, we must also think beyond traditional approaches. Nature-based water systems and solutions can play a critical role in managing water and restoring and protecting ecosystems within watersheds that help filter and transport clean water. Holistic approaches such as wetland protection and restoration help strengthen water systems against the growing pressures of extreme weather.

Some companies are leveraging partnerships to accelerate and broaden the impact of these solutions. Olam, a food ingredients and agri-business company, has partnered with the USDA Forest Service, National Forest Foundation, and Knorr (a Unilever Brand) on restoration projects to improve resilience, including potential impacts of severe wildfire, in California’s Pine Flats watershed.

Through the California Water Resilience Initiative, companies such as Ecolab and General Mills are working with the Pacific Institute to build corporate support for projects and policies addressing strained water resources in the state, including efforts to restore ecosystems. 

Companies can also support federal policies that help modernize water infrastructure. Global water technology company Xylem, for example, lobbied for the 2016 passage and implementation of the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act (WIIN Act), which provides grants to improve infrastructure resiliency in disadvantaged communities. 

The Los Angeles fires are just the latest example of how climate disasters are pushing America’s aging water systems to the brink. We need an all hands-on deck approach, with innovative solutions and funding, to upgrade and replace the nation’s network of water infrastructure at the pace and scale that ensures the long-term health and safety of communities and the economy.

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Assessing the environmental fallout as Europe lurches rightward

Many Germans voted for change in the country’s February 23 elections, following a second consecutive year of economic contraction. In defeating Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left Social Democratic Party (SDP), Friedrich Merz’s right-wing Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party secured 28.52 percent of the vote and 208 seats in the Bundestag.

The election, though, will likely be remembered not for Merz’s victory but for what happened down ballot: 

  • Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), an extreme far-right party that openly espouses neo-Nazi sentiments and denies the existence of human-caused climate change, came in second, with 20.8 percent of the vote. AfD now holds 152 seats, up from 83 in 2021.
  • A socialist left party, Die Linke party, also won more seats, with eight percent of the vote.
  • Die Grünen, the German Greens, lost seats; only 11.61 percent of voters backed the party.

For business, these results are significant. As Europe’s largest economy falters, and climate is becoming a polarizing issue in a country long considered a leader on clean energy, right-wing German politicians frequently pit environmental action against economic growth. For CSOs and others on the sustainability front lines, this evolving situation will likely require changes in strategy and tactics.

Already, CSOs are seeing fewer sustainability roles advertised and environmental work increasingly absorbed into other departments. And, as far-right parties gain influence, some think businesses will have to become more publicly political. Indeed, some German companies are abandoning traditional positions of neutrality to voice political opinions.

Across the continent

Many think this wave of “greenlash” in Germany and the European Parliament was inevitable.

More right-wing politicians joined the European Parliament last summer, many campaigning on the promise of rolling back the EU’s environmental regulations. Some were responding to the protests of European farmers, who blocked city streets with tractors to challenge elements of the European “Green Deal,” a set of policies intended to make the bloc carbon neutral by 2050.

Environmental policies are already being reassessed and weakened. The phase-out of the internal combustion engine, originally set for 2035, has been called into question; the EU Deforestation Regulation is delayed and the EU Emission Trading Scheme is expected to be reevaluated this year. 

At the end of February, the European Commission published proposed changes to the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) that would see 80 percent fewer companies required to report and sector-specific reporting scrapped.

That said, not all European far-right parties deny climate change to the same extent as the AfD. Rather, their problem is with carbon taxes, green energy subsidies and emissions regulations, which they deem to be the agenda of the “global liberal elite,” said Peter J. Bori, a PhD candidate in environmental politics and a researcher at the Democracy Institute of the Central European University.

“They accept that environmental degradation and some climatic changes are taking place,” Bori said. “But they tend to downplay the extent to which it is caused by human economic activity or understate the urgency of taking action against it. When they do see humans as responsible, they tend to externalize the blame to ‘others’ — such as immigrants, foreigners, neighboring countries.”

Climate denial gaining

Although extreme-right politicians on the continent have been successful — think: Le Pen in France, Salvini in the Netherlands, and Meloni in Italy — Germany was for a long time the exception. “This is now changing,” said Daniel Freund, a Green MEP in Germany.

The AfD is now a far more influential parliamentary force, with the power to water down Germany’s climate policies. The party’s leader, Alice Weidel, has suggested she wants to “tear down” Germany’s wind farms and rejects the European Green Deal. And AfD’s official federal election program says, “The alleged scientific consensus on ‘man-made climate change’ has always been politically constructed.”

Cuts, closures and continued action

In any event, sustainability professionals are “one step before panic” following the German election, said Philippe Birker, co-founder of Climate Farmers, a European regenerative agriculture education company based in Berlin. “We have just decided to close our carbon credit arm in the organization, and this is largely due to the shift in the political landscape.” 

“I know qualitatively that more than 10 different sustainability actors [in Europe] are either closing or downsizing their teams,” Bicker said.

That’s the worrying news. More encouraging is that many companies continue to move forward on climate action.

“The BMW Group has a clear plan and a long-term sustainability strategy that we consistently implement, independently from political movements,” said Cornelia Bovensiepen, BMW Group’s sustainability spokesperson.

Alina Arnelle, CSO of BeCause, a Danish sustainability data company for the travel, tourism and hospitality sectors, is one of the CSOs who has noticed fewer sustainability job openings. But she also sees evidence that environmental work at the corporate level continues, albeit in different forms. 

“I see sustainability being dispersed and integrated into roles that have been there forever,” Arnelle said. “For example, marketing is responsible for communicating how sustainable the company is; procurement is responsible for having criteria for making supplier choices. Then you have risk and legal departments, which integrate ESG risk into their overall risk assessment of the company.”  

Going forward

Some observers note that German companies and leaders seem more inclined to voice political opinions. “Five or 10 years ago, many business leaders tried to be silent around political topics,” said Matthias Ballweg, co-founder of Circular Republic, a Munich-based company helping other businesses adopt circular economic models.

“I’ve never seen so many business leaders actively voice political statements, mostly around geopolitical topics and against the AfD,” Ballweg said. “But obviously it’s on both ends of the spectrum—we’ve also seen quite a number of [large] donations from business leaders to the super right-wing party in the recent weeks.” 

“We need to get a bit more political at a moment when the chips are down in Europe,” said Martin Stuchtey, a professor at University of Innsbruck and the founder and co-CEO of the Munich-based Landbanking Group, which enables farmers and other land stewards to earn income based on the ecosystem services their lands provide.

Stuchtey argues that any idea that politics is beyond the concern of business leaders is outdated. “There’s now an almost corporate political responsibility to say, ‘Look, we can only be successful and profitable as a company if we live in an open society where minorities are protected, where labor migration is possible, where you can trust your newspapers and where there is public debate.”

Going forward, then, individual CSOs will have to decide if and when to speak up as Merz consolidates his climate agenda and the EU reveals the extent of its regulatory re-openings.

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Inside BASF’s insetting project that cut agricultural emissions by 90 percent

“This has the potential to be very big.”

That was agriculture sustainability expert Andy Beadle’s conclusion after wrapping up the first insetting project executed by his employer, chemicals giant BASF. 

The project, which funded the production of crops with a dramatically reduced carbon footprint, is an example of the surge of interest in the use of insetting in food and agriculture. The process, which allows companies to help suppliers cut emissions and claim an associated emissions reduction, is taking off after years of work to formulate the rules that govern it. 

To learn more about how this project worked, Trellis asked Beadle to walk us through the key steps.

Customer demand

BASF’s insetting work is motivated by demand from customers and partners that want to cut Scope 3 emissions, said Beadle. The Science Based Targets Initiative does not allow offsets to be used to meet interim net-zero targets, so companies are looking instead to invest in emissions reduction projects within their value chains. 

BASF is well placed to help deliver such projects because it’s connected to farmers through its work selling fertilizer and other agricultural inputs. It has also developed a life-cycle assessment tool known as AgBalance, which can be used to model the impact that a specific intervention on a farm — a reduction in fertilizer use, for example —  will have on the carbon footprint of the crops grown there.

In this case, the on-farm work took place on barley fields in Ireland and was funded by Belgium-based Boortmalt, a leading provider of malted barley to whiskey distilleries and other food companies.

Generating the credits

Many regenerative agriculture techniques have the potential to cut farmland emissions. After talking to barley farmers, Beadle’s team settled on a cover crop, which is planted after the barley has been harvested; and straw retention, which involves leaving a fraction of crop residues on the field. Both practices are known to increase soil carbon and, as a co-benefit, limit soil erosion.

Before asking farmers to get involved, BASF needed to be confident of two things: that the company could accurately measure the carbon savings and that the credits generated would be registered and tracked. “We can’t have that ton of carbon being sold multiple times because it’s a real reputational risk,” explained Beadle. “Not just for the BASF brand; it would also be a reputational risk for any of the customers we work with.”

To ensure the credits withstood scrutiny, BASF aligned the project with a methodology developed for the voluntary carbon market — titled VM0042 Improved Agricultural Land Management — by Verra, a key standard-setter for the market. Among other things, the methodology includes rules for how soil carbon levels should be measured before and after regenerative practices are applied. In this case, representative soil samples taken at the beginning and end of the project were fed into software developed by Regrow, a company that models agriculture supply chains, to estimate soil carbon across all the fields involved.

The whole process — from the project plan through to the credits that BASF claims were generated by the interventions — then needed to be audited and approved by SustainCERT, a non-profit that verifies carbon projects. “They will randomly select farmers and ask them, ‘So you said you grew, show me the receipt that you bought cover crops that went from here to there’,” said Beadle. Once SustainCERT had signed off, the credits — which BASF calls “Verified Impact Units” — were placed on the auditor’s registry.

Assessing the potential

The monitoring period for the intervention wrapped up in late 2023. Earlier this month, BASF and Boortmalt announced the results: 722 tCO2e saved by the 12 participating farmers. That alone isn’t significant; Ireland’s agricultural sector emits around 20 million tCO2e annually. But at a farm level, emissions associated with the crop were cut by nearly 90 percent. Most of the change came from carbon dioxide was captured from the atmosphere and stored in the soil, said Beadle.

BASF now has a slew of other insetting projects in the works, including a project with a major European bakery, rice farms in Japan and another barley company. Given the tight margins and unpredictable nature of farming, producers are cautious about adopting new techniques. But there is potential for huge growth, noted Beadle.

“No farmer is going to immediately say to me, ‘Here, have my whole farm, let’s do it,” he said. “Everybody wants to start small. They want to really see what they’re getting. They want to see how they can then use that. But if I look at the projected plans, we are talking over hundreds of thousands of hectares in Europe moving forward.”

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The sleep gap: How social inequality affects good rest

We all know a night of good rest can be the difference between being ready to face the day or struggling to focus and counting down the hours until you can get back under the covers. But new research shows a stark inequality in good sleep for more vulnerable groups.

Using a range of 0 to 100 based on five key factors, Trellis data partner GlobeScan asked more than 55,000 consumers how well they slept for the IKEA Sleep Uncovered report. The survey asked respondents to rate their:

  • Sleep quality (overall)
  • Sleep time (average number of hours)
  • Drift-off time (how long it takes to fall asleep)
  • Sleep flow (how often you wake up)
  • Wake-up state (how often you wake up feeling tired)

Results show financially insecure individuals, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities and women with young children all score below the global average sleep score of 63. Women, in general, consistently scored lower than men (60 vs. 65), with one in three women rating their sleep as poor. The research showed financial stability, bedroom sharing and stress are key determinants of sleep quality.

What this means

Sleep, a basic human need, has become a privilege rather than a given. These findings reveal how deeply inequalities — whether financial, gender-based or social — permeate all aspects of life, even shaping something as fundamental as rest. Poor sleep is both a symptom and a driver of inequality, affecting physical and mental health, productivity and overall well-being. The consequences extend far beyond the bedroom: When vulnerable groups are deprived of quality sleep, it exacerbates economic hardship, widens health disparities and reinforces cycles of disadvantage. 

Based on the IKEA Sleep Uncovered report, which surveyed 55,221 adults across 57 markets between August and September.

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Lessons from Eileen Fisher’s newest circular collection

Moth holes and merlot stains usually send shirts to the trash, but these imperfections are leading to new creations at Eileen Fisher. The company’s Mended collection of blatantly repaired, patched or merged clothes is launching March 27, selling new white linen shirts concocted from pre-worn ones.

These and other Mended items — which will only be produced by the tens and sold online — will make up a small fragment of Eileen Fisher’s robust repair and recycling efforts. But they are part of the company’s grander ambitions: to reduce its footprint, inspire change in the industry, cater to customer preferences and continue to set the pace in this burgeoning sector.

“The work that we do is leading the way for other brands to follow us,” said Carmen Gama, Eileen Fisher’s director of circular design. “Right now, it does not contribute to the bottom line but we’re building customer loyalty.”

Another benefit, Gama explained, is that because Eileen Fisher handles so many products after use, it enjoys a competitive advantage over other companies scrambling to satisfy California’s new extended producer responsibility (EPR) law, which requires brands to manage worn apparel.

Setting a slower pace

“In Eileen Fisher’s case, repair is a signal that its clothing is worthwhile, well made and timeless,” said Ken Pucker, an advocate for sustainable fashion and former Timberland executive who teaches business at Dartmouth and Tufts universities. “It is a throwback to how clothing used to be worn and reworn.”

Eileen Fisher’s concept of “a simple wardrobe” generally seeks to encourage consumers to buy a small number of long-lasting items and to influence other businesses to slow their pace of material waste. The privately held B Corporation doesn’t share sales figures but has withstood the winds of fast fashion for 41 years by espousing circular economy concepts. Three years ago, the Eileen Fisher Foundation issued a 135-page, anti-waste playbook for the industry.

The Irvington, New York, company hopes to popularize creative reuse, repair and deconstruction of clothes, just as it was a pioneer in branded resale. Eileen Fisher was among the few brands offering consumer takeback and resale in 2009, Gama noted. The effort, later called Renew, expanded nationally in 2013. With branded resale normalizing, Eileen Fisher began exploring how to manage unsellable inventory, according to Gama. She joined the brand a decade ago to oversee managing damaged takeback items, from design to production. Her approaches included mending, over-dyeing and remanufacturing “special collections.”

Last year, the company took back 300,000 items, up nearly 10 percent from two years earlier. From 2009 to 2023, the Renew program collected more than 2 million units of apparel and re-sold 660,885 of them. Taken-back goods also wind up warehoused, donated, repurposed or downcycled into shoddy fibers for auto carpets or seating. In addition, Eileen Fisher works with partners Re-Verso in Italy and Hallotex in Spain to create fiber-to-fiber recycled sweaters.

The Mended collections

The Mended collections focus on garments that can’t be fixed or laundered but are otherwise serviceable. Most garment repairs strive to restore to “good as new” condition, which Eileen Fisher also does for customers. By contrast, the Mended approach draws attention to the former flaws with visual mending, such as paneling or patchwork. It echoes the wabi-sabi concept in Japan of finding beauty in flaws. 

The clothes can be made whole again, but there is such a thing as too many moth holes. “The team really does try their best to cover them all,” Gama said. “They try to match the exact same color of the sweater, and that’s why sometimes these things take a lot of time.”

For upcoming Mended collections, Eileen Fisher will make about 75 white linen shirts in March, followed by 120 dyed linen shirts in May. It’s overdyeing shirts for April, with partner Botanical Colors of Seattle, to hide stains. October will feature outerwear and November will see a cashmere sweater. “These collections are very small right now, but if we see a lot of interest from our customers, we can start scaling volume,” Gama said.

Eileen Fisher’s latest creation is merging two linen shirts into one. “For these white shirts, we are grabbing one that is very damaged, and then just cutting some of those panels and adding them to the next one,” Gama said. “They’re very simple and elevated. And actually, you can’t tell that this is a repaired garment. It looks new by itself.”

A unique appeal, and costs

Most businesses that make mending and reconstruction a feature, rather than a bug, do so on an even smaller scale, such as Eva Joan in Brooklyn or Suay in Los Angeles. The Welsh brand Toast offers a visual repair program. One corporate example is The North Face, which sells Remade puffer jackets that mix the non-matching sleeves and bodices of used jackets.

“I see so many people looking for customized, one-of-a-kind items, especially younger kids, teenagers,” said Cynthia Power, a consultant to apparel companies who worked for more than a decade at Eileen Fisher. “When you combine a quality item with a beautiful, visual mend, you all of a sudden have an incredibly high quality item that no other person has. That’s an incredible feeling and experience.”

Sometimes fixing one garment takes an entire day, which adds costs, Gama added. “It does take a lot of resources to do that, but it’s part of our value to offer these types of services to our customers, because we really want to tell the story that we are here to try to extend the life cycle of this garment as much as we can,” she said.

Making items last as long as possible has real environmental consequences. For example, a single cotton shirt may require hundreds of gallons of water to make. Repairing a T-shirt instead of buying one new saves about 17 pounds of CO2, roughly equivalent to driving a gas-powered car for 20 miles, according to a February report by the nonprofit Waste and Resources Action Program (WRAP).

Takeaways

Gama shared tips for other apparel companies interesting in reducing their footprints with circular-economy programs: 

  • Set priorities. “Circularity can be completely overwhelming,” she said. Therefore, Gama advised, it’s important to pick a focus, such as materials or handling at the end of life. “Because if you are an established brand it’s not easy to just switch and become circular. It’s baby steps.”
  • Be open and flexible. “We’ve been able to streamline a lot of these operations because we’re constantly talking to new innovators and service providers,” she said. “And if we find that it doesn’t work to do something outside we bring it back in house.”
  • Consider end of life at the beginning. “The more we know about the end of life solutions, the better it can inform the designers, so by the time that garment comes back to us it’s already kind of thought through.”

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Google now lets marketers measure emissions from online ads

Google has introduced a carbon footprint calculator that lets advertisers measure the emissions associated with running campaigns on the world’s largest advertising platform.

The resource, Carbon Footprint for Google Ads, is only available to a limited number of accounts but access will be broader in an unspecified future.

The tool will help ad agencies track emissions associated with online marketing and advertisements on a client-by-client basis “with greater precision,” Google said. It uses widely accepted accounting methodologies from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and Global Media Sustainability Framework.

The tool also provides estimates for other online management tools for advertisers, including DV360, an application for running complex, multichannel campaigns.  

Push for detailed disclosure

Google offers similar calculators for other services. For example, corporations that use Google’s cloud computing resources to host their websites or handle their email and other workplace applications can calculate an emissions report that can be used to assess the environmental impact of their information technology operations.     

The new Google Ads carbon reports will be useful as mandatory regulations — including California’s climate disclosure laws and the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive — take effect.

These laws require detailed data for Scope 3 emissions, which include services and products companies procure to support their business. 

Digital marketing activities fit into that category and the new Google Ads tool will help advertisers and marketing teams prepare for closer scrutiny, said Jason Parkin, founder, president and chief operating officer at advertising agency Compose[d]. “It places more of a lens on the emissions impact of these technologies.”

Few corporations talk specifically about marketing in relation to climate issues. An exception is Seventh Generation, which is now evaluating its marketing and creative partners to better understand how much of their business is linked to fossil fuels companies. It asks marketing partners to sign the “Clean Creatives” pledge, which asks firms to refrain from supporting campaigns that undermine progress toward a clean energy transition.

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What the EPA’s rollback announcement means right now

EPA Chief Lee Zeldin announced what he’s calling the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history,” within the EPA by overhauling 31 environmental rules dating back to the Obama-era.

“[The EPA’s] announcement could put millions of Americans’ health in jeopardy and is antithetical to EPA’s core mission, said Conrad Schneider, U.S. senior director at the Clean Air Task Force. “Deregulating emissions from power plants, oil and gas facilities, cars, trucks, and more, is dangerous and erroneous action that will hurt American’s safety and wellbeing.”

Some of the rules facing overhaul include:

  • Power plant emissions regulations (Clean Power Plan 2.0): On May 1, 2024, President Joe Biden’s EPA released the Clean Power Plan 2.0, requiring coal plants set to retire before 2035 and 2040 to reduce emissions by 16 percent; any coal plants operating past 2040 are expected to reduce emissions by 90 percent.
  • Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP): The Obama-era rule GHGRP requires large emitters, fuel and industrial gas suppliers to report greenhouse gas emissions and other relevant information to the EPA.
  • Steam Electric Power Generating Effluent Guidelines: Updated in 2024, the rule places strict guidelines on the level of toxins released in wastewater associated with coal plants.
  • Technology Transition Rule: This rule sets limits on technologies that emit hydrofluorocarbons in specific sectors, requiring businesses to transition to more efficient models of the tech as its developed.
  • 2009 Endangerment Finding: This Obama-era regulation classifies carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride as a public heath threat.

“The EPA will be reconsidering many suffocating rules that restrict nearly every sector of our economy and cost Americans trillions of dollars,” Zeldin said, without offering evidence, in a video posted along with the EPA’s statement.

It’s important to clarify that none of these regulations have been changed as of yet. Zeldin merely announced his intention to “reassess” specific programs in the near future. But even the potential of changing regulations for which corporations and utilities have had to reconfigure their operations is destabilizing. And while some may find it easier to adjust to a change in relatively recent policy, Obama-era regulations have been business-as-usual for more than 15 years.

In any case, there is no definitive timeline for these changes. And it’s likely that dismantling the reported 31 rules will be a complicated process slowed by lawsuits.

“Before finalizing any of these actions, the law says EPA must propose its changes, justify them with science and the law, and listen to the public and respond to its concerns,” said Jackie Wong, senior vice president for climate and energy at NRDC in a statement.

The extent to which the EPA or the Trump administration will follow the law remains an open question.

What’s next

For sustainability professionals, the EPA’s announced intentions — and potential for pushback — promise regulatory uncertainty. That will mean disruption to both day-to-day business operations and long-term planning. Any investments or actions intended to comply with Obama- or Biden-Era rules may be obsolete if the relevant regulations are stripped down or removed altogether. In short, this development leaves many professionals with a giant question mark on their 2025-2026 budgets moving forward.

Trellis will continue to monitor the story as it progresses.

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