Climate Fresk for Companies: Understanding the Climate Before Building a Climate Strategy
When we ask different people what it means to have a “climate strategy,” the answers can vary widely.
For one person, it means properly separating office waste. For another, buying carbon credits. A third might mention installing solar panels, publishing a sustainability report, or holding an awareness workshop.
All of these actions may have their value. But, in isolation, none of them constitutes a climate strategy.
This type of confusion is not merely semantic. It can lead an organization to accumulate environmental initiatives without understanding their main impacts, what reductions it needs to make, and how to integrate climate into business decisions.
That's why many organizations start with a Climate Fresk workshop. Before simply asking "what should we do?", there's another important question:
Do the people responsible for the decisions share even a basic understanding of what a climate strategy needs to address?
Environmental actions do not automatically constitute a climate strategy.
Separating waste is an important environmental practice. But waste management and climate strategy are not synonymous.
Depending on the organization's activity, most emissions may come from the purchase of raw materials, energy consumption, transportation, travel, products sold, or the supply chain.
A waste separation policy can be positive and yet only impact a small portion of a company's carbon footprint.
The same applies to carbon credits.
Financing projects to reduce or remove emissions can contribute to climate action. But buying credits does not replace the need to know one's own emissions, identify priority sources, and reduce what can be reduced within operations and the value chain.
Measuring alone is not enough either.
A greenhouse gas inventory is a diagnostic tool. It allows us to understand where emissions are occurring and to track their evolution over time. However, on its own, it does not yet define priorities, responsibilities, investments, or a reduction trajectory.
A consistent corporate climate strategy needs to connect different dimensions:
to measure relevant direct and indirect emissions;
Identify the main sources of emissions and dependencies;
to establish a reduction trajectory compatible with science;
Transform this trajectory into decisions, responsibilities, and indicators;
To monitor the results and review the actions;
assess physical risks and transition risks;
and define how the organization can contribute to climate action beyond its own value chain.
The problem, therefore, is not that organizations are doing nothing. Many are already undertaking various initiatives.
The problem is believing that a collection of disconnected actions equals a strategy.
Climate reduction, compensation, and contribution are not equivalent.
The Net Zero Initiative framework, developed by Carbone4, helps organize organizations' climate action into three complementary pillars:
reduce their own direct and indirect emissions;
to contribute to the reduction of emissions from other actors;
Preserve and develop carbon sinks.
The main contribution of this model is to make explicit that the results of these three pillars are not interchangeable.
A reduction achieved within the company's value chain is not equivalent to an emission avoided in an external project. Similarly, funding a carbon removal project does not automatically eliminate the emissions generated by the organization's operations.
Each front answers a different question and needs to be measured and communicated separately.
This distinction is also at the heart of the Contribution Framework developed by Sweep . Instead of treating carbon credits as a mechanism that “erases” the organization’s emissions, the framework proposes using them as a way to finance climate action beyond its value chain.
In practice, the company sets a budget, for example based on an internal carbon price, instead of buying credits proportional to the volume of its emissions.
The change is not just in vocabulary.
In the traditional logic of offsetting, the company tends to show a balance: its emissions would be neutralized by the credits acquired.
In the logic of the contribution, the results remain separate. On one side are the company's emissions and its reduction trajectory. On the other, the funding allocated to external climate projects.
This allows us to recognize the value of the contribution without creating the impression that a ton emitted has ceased to exist because a credit was purchased.
A consistent climate strategy doesn't just ask how many credits would be needed to declare a zero balance. It seeks to define:
How much and how quickly does the organization need to reduce its own emissions?
How to transform this trajectory into decisions and investments;
How to deal with emissions that you have not yet managed to eliminate;
and how to contribute further to the climate transition outside of your value chain.
Information does not automatically produce understanding.
We have never had access to so many climate reports, charts, news, and indicators.
Even so, fragmented information does not automatically produce a systemic view.
A person may know that deforestation releases carbon, that heat waves are intensifying, and that sea levels are rising, without being able to reconstruct the relationships between these changes.
You may also be familiar with concepts such as scopes 1, 2, and 3, neutrality, adaptation, and transition risk without understanding how they connect to the concrete decisions of your organization.
This is one of the main challenges of climate education: organizing knowledge without erasing complexity.
It's not about turning all professionals into climatologists or carbon accounting specialists. It's about building a common ground so that decisions are not made based on incompatible interpretations of the problem.
This requires understanding some essential relationships:
Annual emissions increase the concentration of gases that accumulate in the atmosphere;
Mitigation seeks to limit warming, while adaptation seeks to reduce vulnerabilities to its impacts.
A carbon footprint measures an organization's contribution to emissions, while risk analysis seeks to understand how climate change may affect its activities.
The risks depend not only on the physical phenomenon, but also on the exposure and vulnerability of people, territories, and operations;
A climate solution can reduce a specific impact while simultaneously creating new social or environmental effects.
The IPCC itself links social learning, capacity building, and the construction of shared goals to climate-resilient development.
In Brazil, the 2024–2035 Climate Plan also includes education, training, and awareness-raising among the cross-cutting strategies needed to strengthen climate action.
Raising awareness, therefore, is not a decorative step. It is a condition for improving the quality of decisions.
How does the Climate Fresk work for companies?
The Climate Fresk is a collaborative climate awareness methodology based on IPCC reports.
During the workshop, participants work in groups to reconstruct the cause-and-effect relationships of climate change. Instead of receiving a ready-made explanation, they need to formulate hypotheses, organize information, argue their points, and revise their interpretation.
In a business application of the Climate Fresk, the goal is not just to transmit scientific knowledge. Facilitation helps the group connect the climate system to the organization's activities, decisions, and vulnerabilities.
A traditional lecture organizes the relationship between the person presenting the knowledge and the person listening. In a collaborative methodology, disagreements cease to remain hidden.
It is precisely in this process that some of the best questions arise.
During my experience as a facilitator, trainer, and former national coordinator of the Climate Fresk in Brazil, I realized that the most important moment of a workshop doesn't always happen when someone discovers a new piece of information.
It often appears when a person manages to connect knowledge they already possessed separately.
The finance team realizes that a physical impact can translate into an economic loss. The purchasing department understands that a significant portion of emissions and vulnerabilities may lie within the supply chain. Human resources identifies relationships between climate, health, and working conditions. Operations recognizes that energy efficiency and climate resilience are not necessarily the same thing.
The Climate Fresk is powerful because it helps to make these relationships visible.
But letters alone don't solve anything.
The quality of the experience depends on the facilitation, the questions asked, and the ability to relate the science to the organization's context.
Climate awareness cannot be corporate entertainment.
A sustainability workshop can bring people together, generate good photos, and receive positive reviews. None of that guarantees that it will produce change.
The risk is turning climate awareness into an isolated event: interesting for a few hours, but disconnected from the decisions made the next day.
To avoid this, it is necessary to know why the activity is being carried out.
Who will participate? What decisions do these people influence? What concepts do they already understand? What doubts or resistance exist? What should happen next?
A leadership workshop should not necessarily have the same focus as an activity for operational teams.
A group that is starting a greenhouse gas inventory does not have the same needs as another that is assessing climate risks, setting reduction targets, or building a transition plan.
The methodology may be the same, but the facilitation and debriefing need to be tailored to the context.
After raising awareness, the organization should be able to identify its next step:
Initiate or deepen your emissions inventory;
Identify priority areas for reduction;
Analyze climate risks and vulnerabilities;
to construct scenarios and transition paths;
Develop internal skills;
or to organize responsibilities, indicators, and climate data.
Without this continuity, the workshop risks producing awareness without the capacity for action.
From the Climate Fresk to the climate strategy
An organization doesn't need to wait for everyone to become an expert before it starts taking action.
But it is necessary to ensure that the people responsible for the decisions are not acting based on incompatible interpretations of the problem.
A shared understanding helps to distinguish structural actions from marginal measures, interpret data more critically, and distribute responsibilities among different areas.
It also allows us to recognize that the climate strategy doesn't belong solely to the sustainability team. It materializes in choices regarding investments, purchases, products, logistics, operations, finance, and human resource management.
At YBY Dinâmicas, we conduct Climate Fresk workshops for companies, public institutions, universities, and civil society organizations.
Each experience is structured according to the audience, the context, and the organization's objectives. Awareness-raising can be followed by other stages of the climate journey:
Scenario and trajectory building using the 2tonnes methodology;
Calculation of carbon footprint;
Preparation of greenhouse gas inventories;
Defining reduction plans;
and organization of climate data through the Sweep platform.
The point is not to hold a workshop simply to claim that the team has been made aware of the issue.
It's about building an understanding that allows for better design, measurement, and management.
Because better strategies don't just start with more sophisticated answers.
They start with clearer questions.
Does your organization need to build a shared understanding of climate before moving on to measurement or strategy? Learn about the Climate Fresk workshops facilitated by YBY Dinâmicas.
Learn more about our workshops here .
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