CBCA Interview | "Doing nothing is now a bigger risk than doing something"

An interview with Jennifer Kass and Maura McKnight from San Francisco Business Council on Climate Change (BC3) about how San Francisco businesses are supporting the City with its climate goals.

City of San Francisco by Rezaul Karim

As home to the headquarters of many large companies, sunny San Francisco Bay is renowned as one of the most important business hubs in the world. But in recent years, frequent droughts and increased vulnerability to air pollution from wildfires have made it an unfortunate poster child for the devastation and urgency of the climate crisis. In response, the City of San Francisco has worked hard to reduce its emissions by 41% since 1990 and on 8 December 2021 launched a new Climate Action Plan to be net-zero by 2040. 

For the San Francisco Business Council on Climate Change (BC3), one of the oldest and most successful city-business partnerships in the City-Business Climate Alliance (CBCA) network, responding collaboratively to this crisis is of paramount importance. BC3 is a non-profit organization (officially a ‘fiscally sponsored project’) set up by the City of San Francisco to work with businesses to improve sustainability and address climate change together. BC3 has 20 members - mostly large corporate entities in the Bay area - who focus on learning from each other, setting ambitious targets and piloting innovative projects together. 

San Francisco’s new Climate Action Plan, launched on 8 December 2021

The CBCA team interviewed Maura McKnight, Executive Director of San Francisco BC3, and Jennifer Kass, Deputy Director at San Francisco Department of the Environment to find out more about BC3. Jennifer is one of the co-founders of BC3, and for the last 16 years has helped grow the initiative from an ambitious idea to a fully self-sustaining non-profit organisation, while still working within the City of San Francisco. For the last 3 years, Maura has been directing BC3, focusing on member development, managing the relationship between the city and business members, as well as managing the 4 other members of staff. In total, Maura has spent more than 18 years working at the intersection of energy, environment, technology and social change.


How it all started

The BC3 initiative first started in 2005, when Mayor Gavin Newson of San Francisco hosted the UN World Environment Day and launched the new United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) cities programme. Jennifer recalls, “I had just started at the department and it landed on my desk and somebody just said ‘Do something with this, figure it out.’” She laughs, “At the time, the City was launching its first climate action plan and so the City was coming up with all the metrics and projections, but we wanted it to be a community-wide plan and we recognised that our municipal footprint in San Francisco is small – miniscule even! And so we were going to need the partnership of both residents and local businesses if we were going to have a real impact. The question was – how do we get those folks invested in what we do?” After much thought and deliberation, the team decided they needed a programme to engage specifically with local businesses to help put their climate plan into action. Jennifer says “We focused on the business community because we figured the multipliers are so much bigger there. You’ve got customers, employees and supply chains, which offers a much bigger picture and community to work with.” 

Lombard Street in San Francisco by Brandon Nelson

After about 18 months of brainstorming and initial engagement with businesses, the Mayor and the Head of UNGC officially launched BC3 in March 2007. Jennifer reflects on this time, “At the start, a lot of the support was in-kind, and Gensler (an architecture company) was first to host a half-day workshop to brainstorm ideas. There were lots of organisations being created around the time to allow businesses to help governments (and vice versa) but we wanted to work at the intersection, create dialogue and take action together. We wanted everyone to focus on some clear goals and have shared ownership. As a local government, it was important for us not to completely own this because we may not always agree with the other members’ ideas or the way to meet these goals and we didn’t want to put more limitations on these companies, so the idea was ‘Let’s not judge, let’s just get going!’. We then began to think about ‘How do we build a social network so that these businesses can work together and learn together locally?’ We have unique constraints and opportunities in the Bay area, and so we wanted to incubate ideas together, test them out locally and demonstrate leadership so that these ideas could be rolled out globally too.”


Managing relationships in the network - supporting “coop-atition”

Developing personal, trusted relationships within the local community is a clear priority for Maura and Jennifer. The San Francisco Department of Environment and BC3 maintain a close relationship and regular contact, which allows easier communication and collaboration. Meetings are often held at the department of environment, which sends a strong message to the new business that there is a close relationship with the City. Maura explains, “The City of San Francisco, through the ups and downs of this initiative, has always had a staff person who believes that this is a priority, who wants to fight the fight and build those relationships with the private sector. That is important”. She adds, “I think that over time, by having a small membership, we have built a network of trust and personal relationships between businesses and the City. Out in the world, some of these companies and brands are highly competitive in terms of customers and acquisitions, so if we want them to collaborate and implement projects on the back end, we have to build that trust over time – a sort of ‘coop-atition.’”

For Maura and Jennifer, BC3 is more than just a city-business partnership, it’s a support network. As Maura describes, “People in sustainability positions in these companies are facing big challenges these days and have huge goals in front of them. I mean no company has ever met a net-zero target before! We are setting them but no one’s met it before. So I think in many ways, BC3’s role has become increasingly clear in terms of its value to these companies and that’s where being a neutral entity is really key. They need each other and so we convene them in a safe space where they can talk about the struggles they face and share ideas on solutions (both internal and collaborative approaches). We don’t let anyone sell to each other in our network and we’re very cautious about that.” Jennifer adds “We needed to create a space where people could build human and emotional connections to solve this huge challenge together, with a local community focus.” 

“There’s no more time left to experiment in silos and so we need to push out our learnings and find the win-wins as quickly as possible. Doing nothing is now a bigger risk than doing something.”

Maura McKnight

For Jennifer, she believes the City’s role in BC3 is to offer the city’s perspective, advise on the policy landscape, and connect BC3 members to important city staff in different departments. She comments, “We’ve found this to be a really helpful way to engage with folks outside of our regular channels and to have cross-cutting discussions on new policies. It’s also been a great way for the City to push out new programmes on renewable energy, recycling etc. into the community through employee engagement programmes. Being part of BC3 has also helped us to better understand the challenges that businesses are facing - ‘What are the problems that we are not seeing?’. For example, when we were discussing our Climate Action Plan with BC3 members in 2013, we were particularly interested in congestion pricing and so BC3 members got together and created their own whitepaper on congestion pricing. It’s good to hear businesses say where they can support in meeting the City’s goals so that we’re all moving in the same direction.”

Membership and funding model

While the City itself initiated this project, they have since evolved the initiative into a registered non-profit, fiscally sponsored project. To fund the initiative, BC3 now receives grants from donors and membership fees. Maura explains, “Half of our revenue comes from our Sunshares programme (a community solar installation programme) and half comes from business memberships. We seek grants when appropriate, but our typical budget is around $300,000 a year.” In the past, BC3 has had over 100 members of different sizes, all paying different membership fees dependent on size. However, this didn’t work too well, as Maura explains. “With lots of members, it’s not only difficult to just chase down membership fees and manage relationships but it’s also difficult to know what to focus on. Now we just focus on large companies in San Francisco.”

Current members of San Francisco Business Council on Climate Change (BC3)

Membership is now $10,000 a year flat fee, which is much more manageable operationally and means that only companies which have the resources, dedication and leadership to really commit time to this initiative, take part. Jennifer adds “It took us a long time to get a clear focus. In the beginning, the net was wide and we wanted as many businesses as possible to join. But the business model for that was just overwhelming. If you’re spending as much time getting $100 member fee as you do a $10,000 member fee, then that really doesn’t make sense.” She continues, “We didn’t want to be exclusive, but we had to scale back and really focus on creating a long-term sustainable model.”

New focus - carbon removals, climate-smart recovery and employee activation

As a smaller member-driven organisation, BC3 does not have permanent sectoral working groups but rather focuses on contemporary topics chosen by its members each year. In the past, they have developed a Green Tenant Toolkit, created a guide for installing workplace charging infrastructure and have even set up a groundbreaking aggregate Virtual Power Purchase Agreement (VPPA) deal, which enabled 42.5 MW of a 100MW solar farm in North Carolina.

Currently, BC3 is focusing on: 

Carbon Removal Investments Guide developed by the Business Council on Climate Change (BC3) in collaboration with Carbon180, Anthesis, Atlassian and Autodesk.

On the first focus, climate positive solutions (carbon removals), BC3 has already made great strides in supporting its members. Maura explains, “This is a good example of us listening to our members and where they’re at. All of them have set or are setting aggressive climate targets, but meeting their net-zero goals is a very daunting task. With the new IPCC report, it is clear that we are not going to meet our global climate goals without some kind of carbon removal strategies. A lot of them have been using offsets for a while, and while there are some controversies there, there are standards and a verification process. Carbon removals is an emerging market and soon there will be a verification process but we’re kind of at the stage where we don’t have time to just wait for all of that to happen. Our members feel that and know that, but nobody wants to do it on their own, and so we co-developed a Carbon Removals Toolkit.”

Maura has since brought experts in to explain the technological side, as well as the benefits and costs to the business members, and publicly launched the toolkit in Fall 2021. In October BC3  put together a carbon removals buyers forum where members can share their strategies, concerns and get support from each other. Eventually, they hope to enable these companies to take collective action in the carbon removals space. Maura adds “We’re not advocating that people do specific things, we’re just putting together some best practices and tools, so they can develop their own strategies.” Listen more about how BC3 is scaling up carbon removals in this podcast. You can download the Toolkit and PDF Guide here.

Maura and Jennifers’ key advice: 

Finally, we ask what Maura and Jennifer’s main advice to other cities looking to start a similar initiative would be. Jennifer answers, “Do something that makes sense for your community, don’t just try and fit into another city’s model. Also, it has to be institutionalised within that government’s structure and not just based on political will so that when the Mayor changes, it doesn’t disappear. By embedding it within the environment department, we continued to work with the Mayor’s office through 4 changes in administrations and keep BC3 going.” 

Maura adds “This [climate] space is moving so fast that no one can really hold onto it anymore or track it. Companies need help, they need support and I think BC3 is a good model for what we should be doing more of globally. There’s no more time left to experiment in silos and so we need to push out our learnings and find the win-wins as quickly as possible. Doing nothing is now a bigger risk than doing something. We want to support the leaders who are willing to step out on the edge of the branch and move forward on this.”

To find out more about the San Francisco Business Council on Climate Change, visit their website. You can also find out more about the CBCA initiative on the CBCA website.

Watch the replay of the 2021 Climate Action Plan launch event. TEDxCityofSanFrancisco featured a curation of talks and performances to inspire community action in the fight against climate change.