Climate change is now widely regarded as an existential threat to the planet, fuelling demands to make growth more sustainable. This pressure is transforming the outlook for many industries. Long immersed in different markets and technologies, Frontier has the expertise to help firms rise to the sustainability challenge.
Sustainability is no longer an optional extra, a box to be ticked to make everyone feel better. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions has become a priority. Governments are setting deadlines to achieve carbon neutrality. Financial institutions are looking to become more of a proactive part sustainable solutions. Government policies and regulatory directives are infused in everything from transport, air quality and energy to agriculture and natural environmental protection. And, with each passing year, more sustainability focused targets are being incorporated into companies’ strategic, operational and financial planning.
Sustainability is as important to us at Frontier as it is to our clients. But settling on the best ways to make the world more sustainable is fiendishly complex. Just as it’s not enough to make a new year’s resolution to adopt a healthier lifestyle, meeting sustainability goals requires careful thinking, hard work and trade-offs.
While there is no magic wand to make everything sustainable, there are valuable tools. One of them is economics. This is where we come in. Frontier’s experience across multiple jurisdictions, industries and markets gives us a comprehensive view of how governments, regulators and businesses can harness practical economics to adapt and thrive in a world where sustainability has moved centre stage.
Moving people and products from A to B is essential to any successful market economy but comes at a significant environmental cost. We use economics to design more efficient transport systems and influence policy with a focus on aviation decarbonisation, electrification of ports and e-fuels for the automotive sector.
A low-carbon future requires radical changes to our energy systems. Frontier has a firm grasp of the incentives that will help markets deliver affordable, diverse, secure and environmentally sound energy supplies. We blend economic principles with innovative thinking to balance competing objectives and to address issues such as government intervention to tackle environmental concerns.
Our solutions need to work with the environmental grain, not against it. This calls for sound economic insights into what kinds of action are effective and how the associated benefits measure up against the costs. To that end, we apply advanced economic modelling techniques to an in-depth knowledge spanning regulation, competition and commercial issues.
Policy is central to the global sustainability drive. We advise on the best economic mechanisms to bring about positive outcomes for climate change, environmental protection and decarbonisation in the water, energy and transport sectors. A clear economic framework that accounts for the costs and benefits of different courses of action is critical for choosing the optimum policy.
Deft regulation that incentivises businesses and consumers will also be crucial to achieving sustainable growth. We think it’s important that regulatory frameworks are considered in the round and that they themselves are sustainable in the long term. For instance, competition law may well need to be adapted to make sure it does not work against sustainability.
We approach sustainability as an opportunity, not a threat. We work with companies to identify the behavioural and operational changes that will make their business more efficient and more competitive as well as more sustainable. We present clients with options for meeting multiple targets, set out the associated costs and benefits and show how these differ across sectors.
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