What is ESG and how to improve your business’s ESG ratings and help tackle climate change

As we all face the ongoing challenges caused by global climate change, it’s important that businesses come together and find ways to combat the climate crisis. For the third year running, The Co-operative Bank has been rated as the UK's best Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) rated high street bank by leading ESG risk rating agency, Sustainalytics*. We put sustainability at the heart of our business and we want to help other businesses to do the same. That’s why we teamed up with the Federation of Small Businesses in providing a free webinar on Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG), the ethical standards that can help businesses to have a more positive impact on our environment and the communities they work in.

“Not only do sustainable businesses help to address the global climate crisis, they can also be better for business by attracting and retaining a loyal customer base, supplier network and people within your small business.”

Sat Pillai, Chair of the Environment Policy Unit at the Federation of Small Businesses

ESG is an acronym that stands for:

Environmental – what actions a business takes to protect the environment

Social – how the business treats people (employees and the local community)

Governance – how a business holds itself accountable.

These are a subset of non-financial performance measures which include ethical, sustainable and company governance issues such as making sure that there are systems in place to ensure accountability, and managing the business’ carbon footprint.

Having an ESG strategy can help businesses to be more accountable, more sustainable, and can help them to contribute to the fight against the climate crisis. The webinar explains what ESG means for small businesses, provides advice on how you could develop an ESG strategy to become more sustainable, and potentially make your business more attractive to your customers, suppliers and people.

Key topics covered include:

• What is ESG and why is it important for small business?
• How can an ESG strategy help your business and practical ESG solutions you could implement?
• Co-operation and collaboration; how working together makes a bigger impact
• Best practice tips; for ethical business and supply chain, how The Co-operative Bank’s Ethical Policy helps and how to make positive sustainable financial decisions
• Q&A session where our experts can help explain ESG.

Watch the full webinar recording here

Download the webinar event slides

Making sustainability management simple

When it comes to improving the sustainability of your business, having the right support can make all the difference. That’s why we’ve partnered with Zellar, a software platform that helps businesses manage, measure and improve their sustainability journey in one place.

Zellar is a community of people who are passionate about helping UK businesses become more sustainable. The platform has been designed to empower employees and business owners to rise to the challenge of climate change by making sustainability simple and actionable.

With personalised guidance on how you can lead on sustainability, Zellar helps you understand where you are now, as well as how you can change and improve on your journey to going green.

Find out more

*As of October 2023, The Co-operative Bank received an ESG Risk Rating of 8.5 from Morningstar Sustainalytics and was assessed to be at negligible risk of experiencing financial impacts from ESG factors. In no event should this Risk Rating be construed as investment advice or expert opinion as defined by the applicable legislation.

If you’d like to find out more about making more sustainable choices for your business, please visit our Sustainability hub.