Building tailored sustainability solutions for evolving businesses

In 2020, Grant Thornton Ireland took a strategic decision to establish a sustainability practice initially focusing on the financial sector, expanding to small and medium enterprises, state bodies and corporates.

Recognising sustainability is a multidisciplinary field, we set about building a diverse team that would blend the best scientific and industry experience with our existing professional services expertise. Through targeted hires, and internal transfers, we are proud to have grown a partner led, dedicated, passionate, and practical team of all the talents which works together with our other service lines to deliver pragmatic actionable solutions to our clients.

We work closely with our clients to understand their strategy and benchmark their performance against international standards across relevant organisations in the market globally. We recognise that organisations are operating at different levels of maturity when it comes to sustainability and we pride ourselves on working with our clients to develop bespoke solutions to their exact needs to help them evolve and prosper in a changing environment.

Our sustainability solutions

We help organisations calculate, validate, and reduce their carbon emissions through end-to-end decarbonisation support. Our services include emissions baselining, scenario planning, and development of science-based targets (SBTi-aligned where applicable). We design fit-for-purpose carbon data infrastructure, enabling transparent reporting, robust Net Zero strategies, and streamlined implementation across operations and value chains

We provide full support in the end-to-end integration of climate and sustainability-related risk within financial and non-financial organisations.

We support clients in the development of robust and credible finance solutions enabling you to raise debt, diversify your investor base and direct capital toward sustainable objectives.

The ability to measure and communicate on sustainability is critical. We offer the tools, and methodologies to help businesses embed sustainability data, decision-making and performance into everything they do.

We assist clients in determining their obligations under new and developing sustainability reporting regulations and support them in complying with or adopting mandatory and voluntary disclosures relevant to their business.

Transformation is at the heart of sustainability. We provide clients with the tools to transform their business to stand up to stakeholder scrutiny, meet regulatory demand and increase your resilience for the long term.

Education is a key enabler of sustainability and this service is core to our offering. We work closely with the firm’s learning and development team to design and develop sustainability-related training that are effective and deliver the best outcome for participants.

Why Grant Thornton

Grant Thornton’s sustainability team is passionate and practical, blending the best scientific and industry experience with sustainable finance, climate risk, regulatory and reporting expertise.

We drive wider change towards a sustainable future, by working with clients to help them understand (and activate) their role in sustainability. We do this by providing accessible and authentic expertise, transferring knowledge and insights to build long-term capability and drive cultural change.

We have best in class sustainability and climate expertise: Our team includes sustainability practitioners with extensive hands on experience in climate risk, sustainable finance, environmental engineering and policy as well as highly experienced industry subject matter experts (SMEs).

In addition, we have data scientists developing in-house climate stress models. We believe our unique mix of skillsets combine the best of scientific knowledge with real world experience allowing us to deliver practical, actionable and sustainable solutions.

We believe in the importance of delivering future proof solutions: We understand that integration of sustainability and climate-related risk management across a business is a multi-year journey, which is an evolving and iterative process of improvement.

We lean on global best practice in our approach to the development of climate risk frameworks and sustainability strategies, ensuring that a holistic approach is taken which is aligned to a company’s strategic direction and broader commercial strategy.

Grant Thornton provided ongoing support to the EFRAG Secretariat in the development of the initial European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), the regulatory reporting standards under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), and our global firm is represented on the EFRAG Sustainability Reporting Technical Expert Group.

Recognised as perhaps the most comprehensive set of sustainability standards, we have supported Wave 1 companies to meet their obligations under CSRD and publish sustainability statements meeting auditor expectations. 

The experience we have gained allows our team to bring key insights to our clients on the challenges in implementation of the CSRD, the implications of the proposed changes, and the cross over with other standards including IFRS.  

People are our most valuable asset and we pride ourselves on the quality, depth and breadth of expertise and experience that we bring to all our engagements. We deploy a partner-led holistic team, which works with clients on their sustainability journey.

While we have deep technical expertise, our real skill lies in our ability to bring our clients along with us through the engagement. Training is a core tenant of our approach which ensures that there is knowledge transfer throughout all engagements.