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STRATEGY & IMPACT

Discover our sustainability and impact strategy services:

 

Why choose Proxima?

We have supported many of Aotearoa New Zealand's largest and best known organisations to develop and refine their approach to sustainability; helping them to increase their positive impact.  By partnering with Proxima, you embrace a powerful blend of sustainability expertise and strategic acumen. Working together, we build a roadmap for success that not only elevates your environmental and social impact, but also strengthens your business and its potential to create value.​

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Sustainability strategy

There is no one-size-fits-all approach for strategy. The potential for each organisation to have impact and contribute to a sustainable future is unique and different.  We'll help your team understand the issues in a way that reveals a clear and sensible direction forward, so they can take ownership of the plan and integrate the right initiatives into their work programs.

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We can help you: 

  • Assess impact: Identify your organisation's environmental, social, cultural, and economic footprint and handprint. Our experts collaborate with internal and external stakeholders, pinpointing priority areas to manage risks and capture opportunities.

  • Co-create vision and strategy: Collaboratively design a clear sustainability vision and ambitious yet achievable goals. We align these objectives with your core business strategy, ensuring harmony and purpose.

  • Implement and support: Execute your customised plan with confidence. Our partnership extends from consulting to hands-on support, embedding the plan, mentoring, and even temporary resourcing as needed.

  • Monitor and evaluate: Continuously measure progress and fine-tune for optimal results. Our approach ensures you have the right metrics and targets to make sure your plan stays on track.

Sustainability impact and materiality assessment

At the heart of all good strategy is a clear understanding of what to focus on and why. Whether you're just starting the sustainability journey or reviewing your current plan, we'll work with you to identify the most relevant and significant impacts of your business - both positive and negative (handprint and footprint) - as a solid foundation for decision-making.

 

An impact assessment can be a stand-alone piece of work or part of broader process where we support you to create or update your sustainability strategy.  It's a useful process to raise awareness and understanding of the most important sustainability issues for your organisation, and we encourage you to involve others to make the most of that opportunity.

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An impact assessment is tailored to your specific needs and might include: 

  • Scope: determine the scope of the assessment and any specific objectives.

  • Benchmark: agree any specific standards, indices frameworks for benchmarking against.  Examples might include the GRI Standards, DJSI, CDP, B Corp, Future-Fit Business Benchmark, The Natural Step or industry specific standards.

  • Discovery and research: review existing data and information from current measures and reporting.

  • Stakeholder engagement: involve people with relevant information, expertise or interest.  

  • Materiality: prioritise impacts using a recognised framework or tailored scoring approach.

  • Report: reporting useful insights and findings from the process to inform decision-making.

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Climate risk assessment

The ⁠Aotearoa New Zealand Climate Standards took effect on the 1st of January 2023. They require specific organisations to disclose how they are managing risks and opportunities related to climate change. However, this work is rightly recognised as good practice for all organisations; and should be integrated into usual risk management processes.

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Irrespective of your sector, the size of your organisation, or the location of your operations, climate change will have an increasing impact on your ability to create value.  Our focus is on helping clients build their capabilities to navigate this rapidly changing and uncertain future.

 

Climate risk assessments are not a routine compliance exercise. This is a strategic project that underpins long-term value creation and is inherently connected to ensuring the success of an organisation's strategy. Responding to actual and potential impacts of climate change is a priority for all organisations, whether obliged to disclose or not. We'll work with your team to develop and integrate a long-term risk and opportunity management approach into your systems. Workstreams include:

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  • Review: governance structures and risk management processes

  • Scope: map value chain interactions to identify possible risks and opportunities

  • Evaluate: use scenario analysis to test the impacts of different plausible futures

  • Prioritise: assess impact of identified risks and opportunities 

  • Plan: facilitate development of a transition plan and mindset

  • Integrate: develop climate risk management approach

  • Measure: set metrics and targets 

  • Report: share and disclose relevant information​

Stakeholder engagement

Stakeholder engagement is a fancy term for understanding what other people think.  It's a valuable discovery process to understand different perspectives and those who can help bring your sustainability and impact strategy to life.  The sorts of people you might engage include staff, shareholders, investors, suppliers, business partners, customers, communities and specific subject matter experts.

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It's easy to come up with a list of people you want to involve that's way too long.  We can help you narrow that down using an appropriate stakeholder mapping and prioritisation framework.  We can also help you develop a stakeholder engagement model tailored to your specific needs and circumstances.

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To maximise value from the process, we encourage organisations to: 

  • Good practice: follow the AA1000 AccountAbility Stakeholder Engagement Standard, or some other recognised and proven approach.

  • Engage actively and authentically: listen to feedback, take it on board and respond with further information where appropriate.

  • Be inclusive: involve a full range of diverse perspectives, including those who may be critical of your organisation, as well as people who can talk on behalf of nature and future-generations.

  • Choose wisely: engage at the right level to ensure the people you involve have the knowledge and information that will be most useful.

  • Close the loop: get back to those you've involved to show how their input influenced decisions.

  • Improve continuously: document the process to support consistency and future improvements.

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Metrics and targets

When it comes to setting targets, it's vital to include the people who will be responsible for achieving them.  There's a delicate balance to ensure targets are sufficiently ambitious, yet achievable.  We'll work alongside you to lead or support these discussions, ensuring targets will keep you on the right path to your sustainability and impact goals.

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Metrics and KPIs are vital tools to measure progress.  The right metrics can help you test your impact hypothesis and return on investment in sustainability and impact initiatives.  With more and more organisations claiming to on their sustainability journey, having the right metrics in place will ensure authenticity whilst supporting your annual sustainability and impact reporting.

 

We can help you: 

  • Engage the right team members and experts.

  • Develop a framework of metrics and KPIs to support implementation of your sustainability and impact strategy.

  • Align metrics with frameworks and indices like GRI Standards, DJSI, CDP, B Corp, Future-Fit Business Benchmark, SDG Impact Standards or other impact reporting frameworks.

Strategy review and alignment

Lots of organisations already have a sustainability strategy or policy in place, as well as a whole raft of separate processes and initiatives for sustainability outcomes.  Sometimes these policies, systems and initiatives are well aligned.  Often they are not; which can cause frustration as well as wasting people's time and money.

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We can help you review your existing strategy and implementation approach to ensure it's well aligned with other internal processes and your desired objectives.  A typical process might include:

  • Desktop review: Review internal documents, policies and reporting approaches.

  • Internal discovery: Internal discovery interviews and workshops to understand how current processes contribute to desired sustainability objectives.

  • Recommendations: Present initial findings with identified strengths, challenges and opportunities for improvement.

  • Take action: Co-design solutions and final recommendations with internal team to develop an achievable action roadmap.

Impact model design

There's a growing understanding that sustainability is no longer enough.  With natural and social systems being constantly eroded by systemic challenges, focused positive impact is needed to restore and regenerate the potential for a future that is economically inclusive, socially just and environmentally regenerative.

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Developing an impact model lies at the core of strategy to make a targeted contribution that addresses some of these challenges.  Based on a theory of change (or impact hypothesis), the model aligns activities with expected short, medium and long-term outcomes with desired systemic impact.

 

We can help you: 

  • Define impact: set specific impact goals aligned with your purpose, mission and capabilities.

  • Develop theory of change: craft a strategy that aligns activities with targeted short, medium and long-term outcomes.

  • Engage: bring internal and external stakeholders on board to test and flesh out the impact model.

  • Measure and report: Set up effective measurement and reporting processes.

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