Net Zero Capacity Building for SME Suppliers: Accelerate Your Scope 3 Emissions Reduction

Accelerate Scope 3: The Imperative for SME Supplier Capacity

Many of your key suppliers are SMEs who lack the resources to measure emissions. Rather than imposing punitive requirements, we help you support them through training and partnership, accelerating your own net zero progress while strengthening your local supply chain.

Why Councils Invest in Net Zero SME Capacity Building

  1. Accelerate your own net zero progress: helping suppliers measure and reduce emissions directly improves your Scope 3 footprint
  2. Demonstrate leadership and partnership: investing in suppliers rather than penalising them builds long-term relationships
  3. Support the local economy: helping local SMEs build carbon literacy strengthens their competitiveness
  4. Create scalable change: a supplier trained for your contract will apply that capability across their entire business
  5. Overcome capacity barriers: offering capacity building removes the ‘lack of resources’ excuse and turns resistance into partnership

What We Deliver

Carbon Maturity Assessments:

Our consultants work directly with your suppliers to assess current capabilities, identify data gaps, benchmark against industry standards, and create tailored roadmaps for improving their score (D → C → B → A).

Carbon Literacy Training: We deliver workshops to supplier teams covering the fundamentals of carbon accounting, how to collect data and calculate emissions, identifying reduction opportunities, understanding client expectations, and using tools available to SMEs. Training can be delivered in-person or virtually, tailored to specific industries (construction, care services, facilities management).

Implementation Models

  1. Financial Support: We help you design grant or subsidy programmes for material suppliers to access training and assessment services.
  2. Conditional Contracts: We help you draft contract language that pairs council-funded training with a supplier commitment to calculate and report footprint within 18 months.
  3. Consortium Approach: We work with multiple local authorities to create regional training programmes, generating economies of scale for supplier networks that serve multiple councils.

We don’t just recommend these programmes, we deliver them on your behalf, manage supplier relationships, and report back on progress.