Small Business Climate Map

Create your map for navigating the climate related changes affecting your business

In a few minutes, see how weather, new rules, and changing customer habits could affect your revenue, suppliers and customers. And what you could do about it.

Start with your business

Built for small business owners by a small business owner.

What is the Small Business Climate Map?

Small Business Climate Map is a set of tools that help a small business understand how climate change could affect its viability, and what to do about it. It pulls together public data on weather, laws, costs and trade and turns it into straight forward information relevant for your business.

You enter a few pieces of information and the tools generate the results, usually within a couple of minutes. Expertise in climate science not required.

Who's this for?

People who run small businesses, are short on time, feel overwhelmed by new climate rules, are not sure what they are meant to do, nor where to go to find help, and are coming under greater levels of pressure from more and more sides demanding their information.

What small business owners are actually saying

“Accessing tools for emissions reporting can be very expensive.”
“The first step is the hardest. Addressing climate change and transitioning your business to net zero can look like an impossible task.”
“I just don’t have the staff, expertise or resources to work on sustainability or climate change.”
— a refrain heard repeatedly in small-business interviews, surfaced by Downtown.org
“Some brands are making big green claims without the evidence.”
What you can do here

Use one, a few or all of the tools. Each one answers a different question. Together, they give you a picture of how climate change could shape your work, your suppliers and your customers. Use that to create the climate map for your business.

Imagine, for example

Priya, who runs a small bakery supplying one of the big four supermarkets, has just been added to their supplier sustainability portal and wants to see how climate could squeeze her flour, butter and electricity costs over the next few years.
Tom, who exports to Germany and is sizing up a German competitor before committing to a market push, wants to know what weather, rules and customer pressure that competitor is already under.
Steve, who runs a small construction firm bidding for an NHS-funded project, where the tender asks for a Carbon Reduction Plan and he has never measured his emissions before.
Maria, who runs a florist with two vans and a chilled workshop, wants to know which one or two changes would cut her carbon footprint the most without breaking the bank.
Ahmed, a specialist cheesemaker who buys 80% of his milk from one local farm, wants to understand how exposed he would be if that farm closed or had a bad season.
Lucia, who runs a village café facing a fourth winter of high energy bills, wants practical ideas other small cafés have actually used to cut costs and keep customers coming in.
Sarah, who runs a skincare brand and wants to put “made with natural ingredients” on her labels, needs to know what evidence she needs to avoid an ASA complaint or a CMA letter.
Where the answers come from

The tools draw on World Bank, IPCC, NGFS, Climate Policy Radar, UN Comtrade, DEFRA, and city-level flood, heat, drought and storm data, 49 datasets in total. Every result in the tools links back to public data. For example, when you see "high flood risk in 2040," it is based on city risk data and climate science. Some of the data used by the tools comes from:

World Bank
country-by-country numbers on money, jobs, weather, services.
IPCC
three different ways climate change could play out.
NGFS scenarios
what central banks, banks and lenders are bracing for.
Climate Policy Radar
database of climate laws, policies and UN submissions.
UN Comtrade
who's buying and selling what, country to country.
DEFRA
the UK government's carbon numbers; what the Logbook does its sums against.
City risk data
flood, heat, drought, storm risk, for 996 towns and cities.