Business Services

The Clark Group helps businesses improve their environmental performance in ways that increase profitability and enhance competitiveness. Using methodologies that we developed at Harvard University, we help clients make sure their companies are “Climate Ready” ™ and help our clients train their management team to identify and capitalize on the sweet spots where environmental improvement aligns with profitability and competitiveness. Unlike other companies, we also help our clients to shape the larger market and policy contexts in which they operate thereby dramatically expanding the opportunities for alignment of environmental and economic objectives.

Our Expertise
What Sets Us Apart
Some of Our Initiatives
Selected Clients
Our Team

Our Expertise

Climate Assessments: With over fifty-years of combined experience conducting environmental assessments for businesses and governments, The Clark Group is uniquely positioned to help our clients quantify the environmental effects of business operations and prioritize and implement cost-effective strategies to reduce a company’s environmental impacts. Critically for companies operating in today’s business environment, we can help make sure your company is “Climate Ready.”™ Having helped establish carbon trading markets and shaped policies that will become the nation’s climate laws, we can help make sure your company is reducing its green-house gas emissions in ways that will enhance your financial bottom line.

Management-Level Sustainability Training: Other companies tell you what to do, we train your managers how to think systemically about improving environmental performance. Working with Clarus Consulting, a top-tier management-consulting firm, we have developed proprietary management training modules with demonstrated effectiveness in improving environmental performance and profitability.

Corporate Environmental Improvement Strategies: The Clark Group combines its high-level expertise in environmental science, environmental policy, and business expertise to develop and implement successful climate and environmental strategies for our clients. Our strategies help businesses discover the “sweet spots” where environmental and economic performance are aligned.

Market and Policy Alignment: Having worked at the highest levels of government including the White House, the Pentagon, and Capitol Hill, The Clark Group is uniquely positioned to help our clients develop business strategies that take advantage of rapidly changing federal environmental policies. By working to shape federal tax, spending, and regulatory policies, we are able to help our clients positively align economic and environmental business objectives.

What Sets Us Apart

The Clark Group helps businesses improve their environmental performance in ways that increase profitability and enhance competitiveness.

So what sets us apart from the hundreds of other companies in the United States that are now selling “environmental sustainability?” Simply put, most of these companies are selling approaches that, themselves, are not sustainable.

Lots of companies offer quick fixes – ways to reduce your environmental footprint. While these are good measures to be sure, they tend to produce marginal gains that diminish with time. Sustainability is about more than changing the light bulbs.

At The Clark Group, we approach sustainability differently. Working in partnership with Harvard University’s prestigious Loeb Fellowship Program, The Clark Group undertook a yearlong study of market trends in the United States and a survey of business leaders from multiple commercial sectors. From that analysis, we have drawn three conclusions:

First and foremost, we recognize that for any company to be sustainable it must be environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable. A sustainability process that does not enhance a company’s economic bottom line is inherently unsustainable. By definition, sustainability is achieved through the alignment environmental and social interests with profitability and competitiveness.

Second, we believe that a company cannot become sustainable by listening to outside consultants. To be sustainable, change must come from within. That’s why The Clark Group offers a proprietary management-training curriculum that recognizes that superior economic and environmental performance must begin with effective management. Through this proven approach, companies have dramatically improved their efficiency and found those sweet spots where environmental and social objectives align with economic performance.

Finally, we believe that a company cannot be sustainable unto itself. For a business strategy to realize the maximum economic, environmental, and social gains, the strategy must both recognize, and influence, the greater market context in which the business operates. This means that a strategy must look both up and down the value chain and examine the full-range of opportunities for improved economic and environmental performance from supply to manufacturing to end-product use. It also means that an effective strategy must look at the policy and regulatory context in which a company operates and will operate in future and must look for opportunities to positively align that context with a company’s economic, environmental, and social goals.

Some of Our Initiatives

Market Research with Harvard University: In 2007, The Clark Group worked with Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the latest market trends relating to business and the environment in the United States. Entitled Turning the Ship: Environmental Transformation of the U.S. Economy, this study included twenty sets of analyses from industry leaders and covered topics ranging from green insurance products to industrial ecology to coffee sourcing by Starbucks Coffee.

Green Building Strategy Development in Atlanta: Working on behalf of a private developer, The Clark Group and Sloss Real Estate Corporation created a special partnership to help produce conceptual designs for a major green mixed-use development in Atlanta, Georgia and to think holistically about programmatic uses for the development including sustainable food sourcing, energy use, and transportation alternatives.

Federal Tax Code Changes for Brownfield Investments: In 2002 The Clark Group was retained to seek changes to the federal tax code to encourage investment in revitalization of contaminated real estate. Our firm designed a national campaign that enlisted the support of a diverse array of interests including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Taxpayers Union, U.S. Conference of Mayors, and Environmental Defense as well as selected local and regional environmental and business organizations. By engaging these interest groups and by working with supportive members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, we were able to secure significant changes to the federal tax code during a single term of Congress.

Federal Funding for Environmental Compliance Systems: Working with the Department of Defense Appropriations subcommittees, The Clark Group has helped a private sector client secure critical funding to help deploy state-of-the-art environmental compliance systems at defense installations across the country. These systems have improved environmental performance and helped reduce costs and multiple defense installations.

Helping a Regional Bank Become “Climate Ready”™ The Clark Group has been retained by a major regional financial institution to help it become “Climate Ready.”™ For this project, The Clark Group is undertaking a comprehensive assessment of three critical questions:

1) To what extent are banking operations and lending decisions contributing to global climate change?;

2) How will global climate change affect markets and risks for this institution?; and

3) What opportunities and challenges will be presented by pending federal climate change legislation? By developing a proactive climate change strategy, clients like this financial institution can contribute to efforts to reduce global climate change and can gain a competititve economic advantage.

Selected Clients

First Interstate Bank
Thirty-Third Latitude Properties
Middle Georgia Clean Air Coalition
Cherokee Investment Partners
Environmental Defense
Riverbirch Corporation
Enviance, Inc.
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Our Team

Brian Kuehl
David Evans
Lisa Mahoney
Terry Kellogg