150,000 Certified: What the Carbon Literacy Milestone Means for UK SMEs
Will Marshall
Founder
As pressure on UK businesses to evidence their environmental performance grows, the question of who inside an organisation actually understands carbon has become considerably more pressing. The Carbon Literacy Project has now certified more than 150,000 people worldwide, a milestone that says as much about the state of workplace climate education as it does about the organisation behind it. For UK SMEs weighing whether to invest in training, the underlying figures offer a useful read on where climate skills currently sit, and what is still missing.
A Milestone Built on a Record Year
The 150,000 figure was reached on the back of an unusually strong year. According to the Carbon Literacy Project's 2025 review, 33,054 learners were certified during 2025 alone, a 28% increase on the total certified by the end of 2024. That works out at roughly 90 people completing certification every day.
Growth on that scale requires delivery capacity, and the training infrastructure expanded alongside it. The Project accredited 154 new courses during the year and extended into 10 new nations, moving Carbon Literacy further beyond its Manchester origins.
The pool of people qualified to deliver training also widened, with 335 new facilitators, 39 new trainers and five new consultants joining the community. For SMEs, this matters practically rather than symbolically: more accredited providers means shorter waiting times and more sector-specific course options than were available even two years ago.
Why Climate Skills Are Becoming a Business Requirement
The milestone lands at a point where climate knowledge is shifting from a nice-to-have into a commercial necessity. Larger customers are asking suppliers for emissions data, tender documents increasingly carry sustainability criteria, and lenders are beginning to request the same information.
The supply of people able to answer those questions has not kept pace. LinkedIn data cited in analysis of the UK green skills gap found UK demand for green talent grew 46% between 2023 and 2024, while the supply of workers with green skills grew by only 5.3% over the same period.
That gap is felt most acutely by smaller organisations. A recent ACCA and UK Finance report found that 82% of SMEs regard sustainability requirements as a barrier, with the majority pointing to a lack of in-house expertise rather than any lack of willingness to act. This mirrors a pattern covered previously on this blog, where two-thirds of UK SMEs still cannot categorise their emissions by scope.
The Challenges Behind the Numbers
A milestone of this size invites a degree of caution. Set against a UK workforce of more than 33 million people, 150,000 certifications worldwide represents meaningful progress rather than transformation, and the figure is cumulative across every year the Project has operated.
There is also a limit to what a single day of training can achieve. Carbon Literacy provides a shared vocabulary, an understanding of emissions sources and a basis for informed decisions. It does not, on its own, produce a decarbonisation plan, a verified carbon footprint, or a reporting-ready dataset. Businesses expecting certification to satisfy a customer questionnaire will find it addresses the knowledge problem rather than the data problem.
For the smallest businesses, the practical constraints are real. Releasing staff for a full day of training carries an opportunity cost that a micro business feels far more sharply than a corporate employer, and course fees vary considerably between providers. Those cost questions are worth examining directly, as covered in a previous post on whether Carbon Literacy training is free in the UK.
The Project's own safeguard against box-ticking is the pledge requirement. Every learner must commit to a significant individual action and a group action before certification is granted, which converts learning into something measurable. The quality of those pledges varies, and businesses that treat them as a formality get correspondingly little from the exercise. Reviewing examples of pledges that work for UK SMEs is a useful way to avoid that outcome.
Carbon Literacy Action Day 2026 Sets a Deadline
For businesses that have been considering training without committing to a date, the calendar now provides one. Carbon Literacy Action Day 2026 falls on Thursday 12 November, with any course concluding between 9 and 12 November qualifying for participation. The date has been aligned with COP31.
The event has grown into a substantial coordinated effort. The 2025 edition drew 2,782 participants from 133 organisations across 21 countries and five continents, and the Project estimates that learners have saved approximately 36,000 tonnes of CO2e through pledged actions over the event's first five years. That figure rests on self-reported pledge data and should be read as an indication of direction rather than a precise measurement.
The value for an SME is less about the headline and more about the deadline. A fixed date creates the internal commitment that open-ended intentions rarely produce, and participation places a small business alongside recognisable organisations in a way that supports credibility with customers.
Practical Steps for SMEs Considering Training
Businesses weighing up certification can approach the decision methodically:
- Start with the decision-makers: Train the people who authorise spending, choose suppliers and set operational policy before rolling out more widely. Knowledge that cannot be acted on delivers limited return.
- Choose a sector-relevant course: The Project accredits toolkits for specific industries. A course built around the realities of a given sector produces more usable pledges than a generic alternative.
- Set the pledge expectation in advance: Tell attendees before the course that their pledges will be reviewed and revisited, which raises the quality of what they commit to.
- Pair training with measurement: Carbon Literacy answers the "why" and "what next" questions. A carbon footprint answers "where are we now". The two are considerably more useful together than apart.
- Consider organisational accreditation: Businesses that certify a sufficient proportion of their workforce can pursue Carbon Literate Organisation status, which carries more weight in tenders than individual certificates.
The Path Forward
The 150,000 milestone confirms that workplace climate education has moved from the margins into something approaching standard practice, particularly among organisations that have recognised how quickly supplier expectations are tightening. It also underlines how much distance remains between the number of people who understand carbon and the number of businesses being asked to account for it.
For UK SMEs, the practical conclusion is straightforward. Climate knowledge is becoming part of the basic competence required to hold onto contracts and satisfy customers, and it is more affordable to build that knowledge before it is demanded than in response to a deadline set by somebody else. November provides a natural point to begin.
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