There's a version of this problem everyone knows: The sustainability team has done the work, climate targets are set, supplier requirements are clear, rationale is solid. And then somewhere between the RFP being written and the contract being signed, sustainability requirements get negotiated away, deprioritised, or quietly dropped.
This isn't because people working in procurement don’t care about sustainability. It's because sustainability hasn't been translated into the language procurement uses in its operations: specifications, evaluation criteria, contract clauses, risk allocation, commercial trade-offs. Sustainability professionals are often expert in their domain, but underprepared for the procurement room.
The Climate Pledge was co-founded by Global Optimism and Amazon, and is powered by 647 companies in 49 countries around the globe. Working together, we designed a Procurement Accelerator to help fix the problem. We don’t attempt to turn sustainability professionals into procurement experts: that's not the goal. Instead we build confidence in people to initiate the right conversations, to challenge constructively, and to position sustainability requirements as a genuine value exchange rather than an additional burden.
The programme is built around play. Participants bring live or upcoming procurement projects to use as their working case study throughout. Using our Design Playground methodology, they explore each deal through multiple lenses - the buyer, account manager, supplier CFO. They break down procurement logic that can feel impenetrable from the outside. They work through how specifications shape market behaviour, how evaluation criteria drive supplier responses, how contract terms allocate risk, and where there is more flexibility than perhaps had been assumed.
By the final session, participants have practised using a real scenario. They leave with a repeatable framework, practical contract language and clause libraries, and a clearer sense of where to push and where to negotiate.
HOW THIS CONNECTS TO OUR WIDER THINKING___
WAYFINDER equips procurement professionals to understand and act on sustainability. The Accelerator equips sustainability professionals to work effectively with procurement. These are mirror images of the same problem. Organisations that invest in both sides of that conversation tend to make meaningfully faster progress on Scope 3.
