The other trend of 2007 was the emergence of retailers whose reliance on climate-worried consumers prompted a tectonic shift of priorities. That is why Walmart is placed second, although Marks and Spencer’s Stuart Rose is also featured. Snapping at their heels are much smaller yet purer retailers such as Abel and Cole, who do not air freight any products, support local farmers and deliver organic produce to people’s doorsteps in carbon neutral vans powered by recycled chip fat. So the wider question is whether the ‘any time, any place’ mentality of modern supermarkets will continue. Consumers are the most likely determinants of the outcome.

That leaves Number 1 – Iberdrola. Twenty years from now, it is possible that we will have de-centralised, microgenerated energy making entrepreneurs of all of us (It is allowed for in the UK’s recently passed Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Act). Producing energy where it is consumed is vastly more efficient than the centralised, dramatically wasteful power station model that we currently have, and other companies in the list are hastening this new era – companies such as Combined Heat and Power developers Ceramic Fuel Cells and Ceres.

But until this universe emerges, we’re stuck with large scale, gridded utilities whose role in guiding us towards a low-carbon future could hardly be understated given that power generation accounts for over a third of Europe’s current greenhouse gas emissions. Iberdrola is a beacon in this regard because CEO Ignacio Galán has reinvented it as the greenest utility one could imagine, short of doing away with it altogether.

It goes without saying that we congratulate all the other companies in this list and wish them well in 2008.

Methodology

The list was researched between June and December 2007, and an extensive shortlist of companies built up through multiple interviews with leaders in both the profit and non-profit low-carbon sectors – an extended form of peer review. In addition to CNBC European Business’ editorial team, an external panel was also appointed to nominate and review candidate companies. The final list was decided on the basis of the degree to which the company had taken a courageous or ground-breaking stance on climate change (typically larger corporations), or that it embraced a future, low-carbon solution in the form of clean technology or renewable energy (typically a smaller SME or recently listed public company.) The underlying philosophy of the list, as in its first edition, continues to be respect for companies that have explicitly connected climate change to their bottom line. The preponderance of larger companies earlier in the list reflects their larger impact on actual emissions and power to influence the rest of the business community; conversely, the crowd of smaller companies in the second half reflects their commercial immaturity and general volatility. Despite this broad pattern no attempt has been to quantify the carbon savings of the companies. In this respect we refer readers to the Carbon Disclosure Project, noting that the emissions figures reported to the CDP are self-reported rather than third party audited, and that there is no accepted orthodoxy as yet for the measurement and disclosure of Scope 3 emissions under the GHG Protocol.