Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the UK economy, yet face growing sustainability and emissions reporting requirements with limited capacity to respond. Without proportionate and consistent approaches, there is a risk that SMEs are excluded from green finance and supply chains as expectations continue to increase.

We convened the SME Sustainability Data Taskforce to bring together industry practitioners to identify the key data, policy, and market barriers facing SMEs. The Taskforce developed the UK SME Voluntary Emissions Standard, providing a proportionate, practical baseline for SME emissions reporting that is credible, comparable, and aligned with existing frameworks.

We are now engaging with government, regulators, financial institutions, and corporates to promote adoption of the Standard as an accepted baseline for SME emissions reporting, with the aim of reducing fragmentation, lowering reporting burdens, and enabling SMEs to access finance and participate fully in the net zero transition.

Emerging markets face a significant funding gap in their transition to net zero, limiting their ability to manage climate risk, scale clean energy and nature solutions, and deliver sustainable development. Despite global commitments, capital mobilisation remains slow due to fragmented policy frameworks, underdeveloped project pipelines, limited risk mitigation tools, and insufficient coordination between governments, financiers, and delivery partners.

We address these barriers by combining policy enablement, climate diplomacy, capital mobilisation, and local capacity building into an integrated delivery model. Anchored in UK parliamentary engagement and our role as a UN Race to Zero Accelerator, we leverage the UK’s financial services ecosystem and diplomatic reach to convert political commitments into investable opportunities in priority regions.

We work with governments, investors, development partners, and local institutions to strengthen enabling policy environments, improve institutional readiness, and design financing structures that crowd in private capital. This includes developing model regulatory frameworks, advancing Article 6.2 cooperation, building credible pipelines, and structuring blended and outcome-linked finance vehicles.

Our focus is on moving from dialogue to delivery—embedding policy agreements into practical governance arrangements, scalable financing platforms, and bankable projects. By aligning policy, capital, and local capacity, we help unlock sustainable investment flows at scale and support emerging markets in delivering high-integrity climate and nature outcomes.

Decarbonising the built environment is critical to achieving net zero, yet progress is constrained by limited access to high-quality building and tenant data, misaligned incentives between owners and occupiers, and difficulties in identifying financeable retrofit opportunities at scale. These barriers slow investment, increase energy costs, and lock in higher emissions.

We are working with partners on Innovate UK–funded programmes to enable secure, scalable access to tenanted building data and to use that data to identify, prioritise, and structure retrofit opportunities. This includes working directly with financing partners to translate improved data availability into investable propositions that reduce energy bills for occupiers while lowering the emissions profile of buildings.

By integrating data enablement with financing and delivery, this work supports cost-effective retrofit at scale and helps unlock capital into the decarbonisation of the UK’s building stock.