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New ‘Climate Label’ Requires Companies to Invest in Climate Solutions

Talk is cheap: The first-of-its-kind certification requires internal carbon pricing and funding for GHG-reduction projects as criteria — aiming to accelerate corporate climate investment.

Published 1 month ago | About a 3 minute read

Image: The Change Climate Project

Tuesday at Climate Week NYC, The Change Climate Project (TCCP) launched the 2025 version of its certification Standard and debuted The Climate Label — the evolution of the nonprofit’s established climate-action certification program, Climate Neutral Certified.

The newly launched Standard and Label will take effect beginning in 2025. The evolution of the certification requires companies to walk their talk on meaningful climate action — centering climate-transition funding as a critical component of every company’s journey to net zero. Certified companies can use The Climate Label in their marketing to signify third-party validation of their climate initiatives.

TCCP’s multi-year, stakeholder-driven effort to develop the new framework incorporated recent lessons from across the climate movement. The 2025 Standard will accelerate corporate climate investment at a scale and pace that matches the urgency of the climate crisis. Voluntary corporate action can address persistent gaps in climate finance if more companies set an internal carbon fee and fund GHG-reduction projects within and outside their supply chains.

Notably, the 2025 Standard takes a more inclusive approach to climate finance, carving out the need for investments both within and beyond a company’s operations and supply chain. To foster trust, certified companies must disclose, in addition to their annual GHG emissions, details about their reduction plans, transition spending, and the funding of carbon credits and other market-based instruments.

“Most corporate climate targets are still not backed by the requisite funding to meet them. Meanwhile, people continue to struggle to distinguish honest corporate climate action from greenwashing,” said Austin Whitman, CEO and co-founder of TCCP. “We are confident that the updated Standard will bring about much needed progress and clarity in the corporate climate movement.”

Leaders in climate and sustainability from NGOs and companies, together with consumers, provided over a thousand comments on successive versions of the 2025 Standard and updated label. The framework builds on the important work of other corporate climate initiatives including the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market and the Science Based Targets initiative; as well as emergent templates for climate-transition planning and reporting.

“How companies actually invest in climate action matters more than aspirational pledges,” says Elizabeth Strucken, Managing Director of Corporate Partnerships at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The transparency at the heart of The Change Climate Project’s approach can help ensure that climate goals and promises are backed by the progress we need to see in this decisive decade.”

As part of the development process, the draft framework also underwent detailed beta testing with over a dozen companies to ensure its efficacy and integrity. This set of corporate climate leaders — which includes Allbirds, JuneShine, MiiR, REI and Winrock International — successfully met the 2025 Standard criteria and are the first to earn The Climate Label certification.

”We’ve been proud to partner with Change Climate over the last several years to help elevate REI’s climate strategy and bring much-needed tools and guidance to the industry,” says Greg Gausewitz, REI’s Senior Manager of Product Sustainability. “We’re pleased to see them launching The Climate Label to help more businesses take accountability for their emissions and invest in climate solutions.”

TCCP’s certification program aims to generate hundreds of billions of dollars for the net-zero transition by tapping the power of consumer preferences. The Climate Label and updated Standard will begin to replace the Climate Neutral Certified mark in early 2025.