Archive for September, 2008
For many organisations carbon offsets can be a useful part of an overall Greenhouse Gas (GHG) reduction strategy when used in conjunction with genuine emission reductions. In essence an offset is purchased to counterbalance or compensate for emissions generate by an organisation. One carbon offset cancels out 1 tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions.
Whilst the potential benefits of carbon offsets have received a huge amount of press recently, not all of the coverage has been favourable and it can be confusing for organisations trying to figure out just where offsetting fits into their carbon emissions management strategy.
Offsets are sometimes seen as a easy “get out” for organisations not willing or able to make tougher internal decisions associated with emission reductions. Furthermore, there is still a good deal of uncertainty and misinformation around exactly which type of carbon offsets should be purchased and the relative pros and cons of the different offset options on the market.
An important decision to make for an organisation looking to acquire offsets is whether to purchase them from the regulated Kyoto-compliant market, delivered under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), or from the unregulated voluntary market. Certified offsets bought and sold through the CDM are known as CERs or Certified Emission Reductions. Offsets bought and sold through the voluntary market are know as VERs or Voluntary Emission Reductions.
CERs
Under the Kyoto protocol, developed countries can choose to invest in GHG emission reduction schemes in developing countries, the idea being that the overall global cost of reduction is lower. Key to this approach, and indeed to all offset schemes, is the concept of additionality i.e. that the GHG emission reductions would not have occurred without the additional incentive provided by the offset payment.
CERs have become the official international currency for trading emissions reductions and around two billion CERs are expected to be generated by the end of the first phase of Kyoto in 2012. CERs provide arguably the highest quality carbon offset.
VERs
The alternative to CERs is to purchase VER offsets. Whilst a VER credit will, in theory, provide the same offset as a CER credit, VERs are not currently regulated in the same way and will not necessarily have gone through the same rigorous certification process as CERs. VERs can vary significantly in their quality depending on the supplier and you should perform your own due diligence prior to making a purchasing decision.
Although the VER market might look a little too unregulated for some organisations’ liking, there are a number of global and national standards you should look out for when purchasing this type of offset.
Globally, The Gold Standard and Voluntary Carbon Standard provide the highest level of VER accreditation. If you’re looking for qualify VERs, or your organisation is global and wants offsets that can be used internationally, then these two standards are the ones to look out for.
In addition to these two global standards, in Australia you can also purchase offsets accredited under the Greenhouse Friendly scheme and NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme (GGAS)
Who to buy your offsets from
When it comes to deciding who to purchase your offsets from there are three choices, a retailer, a broker or a wholesaler, and as you’d expect prices generally increase as you go up the offset supply value chain. Ask sellers to disclose how much of the company’s money goes directly to the project and how much covers their administrative costs.
For a list of offset providers in Australia, together with the standards under which each provider is accredited, take a look at the Carbon Offset Guide website.
Keep reviewing your offsetting approach
An organisation’s carbon emissions footprint and approach to emissions management and reduction will no doubt change over time. The carbon market is also likely to change in the coming months and years. This is particularly true in Australia with the introduction of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. With this in mind, organisations should ensure their approach to carbon offsetting is reviewed on a regular basis to ensure it is still in line with strategic goals and best practice.
Successful businesses need to be mobile but being mobile can be a challenge in a carbon constrained world. Fortunately this is one area of an enterprise’s carbon footprint that often provides real improvement opportunities. Reducing the emissions associated with business travel can deliver significant cost savings and can also increase employee satisfaction and productivity.
The scale of the problem
In Australia transport is responsible for around 14% of overall national emissions.
The relative importance of business travel related emissions can vary widely between organisations in different industries and can often be a far larger contributor that the national figures suggest.
In organisations with signficant Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, such as an aluminimum producer, travel related emissions may be less than 1% of total emissions. On the other hand for a services business, travel related emissions can be as high as 75% of emissions or more.
The Greensense approach
As always with carbon management, the first task for an organisation is to set a baseline for current emissions, against which improvements can be measured. This isn’t always easy and may require a degree of estimation in areas where detailed data isn’t available.
The diagram below represents our approach to tackling work-related travel emissions. We’ve talked about each step in a little more detail below.
Step 1: Baseline travel emissions and patterns
- Identify data sources — these may be internal to the organisation or from third parties such as your travel agent
- Identify and understand travel patterns — knowing who travels, when they travel and why is crucial to providing alternative travel options
- Estimate emissions — generally this involves a number of factors such as fuel types used, distance traveled, travel type etc
- Follow international standards — follow international GHG Protocol and ISO 14064 standards to ensure emissions are estimated and reported in a consistent and transparent manner. It’s also important to ensure emissions from business travel can be incorporated into the organisation’s overall emissions inventory.
Step 2: Develop travel solutions and targets
- Identify and prioritise emission reduction options — this will include measures to help you travel less and travel more efficiently
- Set target levels — these should be set at an organisational level and cascaded down to departements, teams and even individuals
- Implement formal change management programme — attitudes of employees and even clients can provide barriers to change. If there is no incentive for behaviour to change the initiatives you introduce will most likely fail. Greensense will work with you to ensure your emissions reduction programme has the best possible chance of success — activities include staff engagement and education, securing executive level support and engagement with third parties such as travel agents.
Step 3: Adopt new travel practices
- Identify the best ways to implement new practices — this may be as a pilot programme to help identify any unforeseen consequences of change to business process
- Monitor progress against target
- Establish ongoing emissions reporting — carbon emission management is not an one-off exercise but a one of continuous improvement
Step 4: Optmise — ongoing travel reduction
- Keep your eye on the ball — as businesses grow and transform, so will carbon emissions profile. It’s important to keep monitoring emissions data and modifying reduction strategies accordingly
- Move towards a more strategic approach — whilst to start with organisations may simply look at alternatives modes of travel, a more strategic goal only becomes attainable once organisations start looking at alternatives to travel
Finally, be pragmatic
Changing an organisations culture and processes is never easy. The key is to focus on what can be done, not on what can’t. Even small steps towards addressing your organisation’s work-related travel emissions are worthwhile and can often provide the justification and motivation for further effort.
For many organisations useful data is already available and work-related travel can be an excellent place to start the change process.
To find out how Greensense can help your organisation address it’s travel emissions please contact us at info@greensense.com.au.
Redmonk is a boutique IT industry analysis firm who have also started a sustainability business line: Greenmonk. On the Greenmonk blog they recently asked for top tips for helping RedMonk/GreenMonk become carbon neutral.
So here is our top tip. The first and most important step is to develop a carbon inventory. You can’t be carbon neutral until you are actively measuring and then managing your carbon footprint.
The Corporate Accounting Standard for creating and managing a carbon inventory is published by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative.
The ISO also publish a standard for greenhouse gas accounting as part of ISO 14064 but it is entirely consistent with the GHG Protocol Initiative’s standard. For a small self-contained services organisation with no direct emissions, like RedMonk, these standards are not onerous to follow.
To make it even easier GHG Protocol Initiative have also published a simple guide for developing a carbon inventory for an office-based organization: Working 9 to 5 on Climate Change. This would be a great place for RedMonk to start.
And of course RedMonk could also engage a climate change consultancy with auditors trained to develop carbon inventories following the GHG Protocol — like Greensense!
Ross Garnaut began his presentation on the recently released draft supplementary report to the Garnaut Review on Targets and Trajectories, which recommends reduction targets for Australia, with these words:
“There are moments in the history of humanity when fateful choices are made. The
decision over the next few years on whether to take strong action to mitigate human–
induced climate change is one such moment. ”
Much of the media chose to focus on the response of the conservation movement to the report with headlines such as Green groups at war with Garnaut, a simple story that misses the complexity of the issues and, as Garnaut reminds us, the significance of the decisions we face as a nation.
It is perhaps tempting to try and analyse the issues of climate change through the lens of simple stereotypes and simplistic positions.
- The Greenie wants radical reductions now — the risks of climate change require urgent reduction now, not Garnaut’s tiny 10% reduction by 2020, and damn the consequences for the economy.
- Big Business wants to wait for a global agreement before any reductions. Australia is only responsible for 1.5% of global emissions so why risk the economy when we can’t address climate change by ourselves.
- The Politician wants to wait a little longer to test the mood of the electorate and is very worried about figures coming out of treasury about the impact on household budgets.
It may be amusing to Garnaut that he is now being characterised as being on the side of Big Business. Earlier this year when he released the original report he was attacked for being alarmist regarding the impacts of climate change for Australia.
So what fateful choice should Australia make now and what is Garnaut advocating?
The first thing to understand is that Garnaut is trying to find a position that will support a global agreement on reductions. If developing countries, notably China, do not accept significant constraints on their carbon emissions, then it won’t be possible to reduce concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere to safe levels (around 400–450 ppm by 2050).
The reduction target of 10% of 2000 levels by 2020 that Garnaut recommends will require that Australia makes abatement efforts that are comparable with other developed and developing nations. This is important for us to be a strong participant in global negotiations and to prepare Australia for the more significant reductions that will be needed in the period from 2020 to 2050.
The modelling done to date indicates that mitigations required to achieve this reduction level are about 1.1 per cent of GDP. This will require action from business and will impact household budgets, however, as Garnaut says in his report:
“The costs of well-designed mitigation, substantial as they are, do not threaten to derail the long-term growth path of Australia, its developing country neighbours or the global economy. Unmitigated climate change probably would.”
Earlier this year the government released its Greenpaper. Later this year, after receiving Garnaut’s final reports and additional treasury modelling and reviewing submissions on the Greenpaper, the Government will be making the first of many fateful choices on Australia’s response to climate change.
These are choices that as citizens we should take a keen interest in and that businesses should closely review and consider in their own climate change strategies.
Hans Rosling is a Swedish professor of health who is interested in the links between economic development, agriculture, poverty and health. He is also the director of the Gapminder institute which promotes sustainable global development.
As we’ve discussed before, we think that having the capability to see and understand your business’ carbon inventory is the key to enabling meaningful actions to be taken and new strategies to be developed. The Gapminder institute takes a similar view in relation to sustainable development.
They developed software they called Trendalyzer to translate freely available international statistics into interactive data visualizations to improve understanding and help motivate action. In the following video Hans Rosling discusses carbon emissions and the relationship with economic development using this software.
There is also a high-resolution quicktime version of the video available for download from Gapminder.
This video demonstrates how the right data presented in a compelling way can tell a powerful story.
Google has acquired the Trendalyzer software and makes it available as a hosted service to interact with and explore relationships in data. For example, we’ve created a graph using the software following the graph Hans Rosling demonstates above for you to play with (click on image below to launch):
Greensense provides a range of services but we’re particularly passionate about data capture and data visualization. Please feel free to contact us to discuss your climate change strategy.
There were two contrasting stories on the front page of today’s West Australian.
There was a report on the local state elections that the state ALP was under fire over ‘green power’ claims. While the premier Alan Carpenter was claiming a vote for his party was a vote for renewable energy, the West Australian gleefully pointed out that the government has signed contracts to provide an additional 1100MW of power generation to the South West grid that will come from coal and gas and only 100MW from renewable sources. A good example of the risks of “green washing”.
The second report was on Hurricane Gustav and the impact it was having on Louisiana. While fortunately the hurricane’s impact hasn’t been as bad as feared — although damage predictions are estimated to be between $4 and $10 billion — it is still a sobering reminder that an increase in severity of natural disasters is one of the impacts of climate change.
Hurricane Gustav: Coastguard Response
I think there were two lessons for business in today’s front page.
Firstly is the lesson that you must match your rhetoric with action. It is easy to play lip service to sustainability and the risks of climate change but increasingly customers and shareholders — and voters if you are a politician — are genuinely concerned about climate change and are looking for genuine action. Efforts you do make to promote any positive actions you are taking will be undone if they are revealed to be superficial.
Secondly is the lesson that we need to prepare our businesses for the impacts of climate change. Your climate change strategy needs to look beyond accounting for emissions, improving efficiency and engaging with stakeholders and look at the potential impacts on your business from the environmental impacts of climate change.
Climate change is real and the impacts are real and your business’ operations are likely to be affected.
In relation to tropical cyclones, the IPCC said in their Summary for Policymakers:
“Based on a range of models, it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of tropical SSTs. There is less confidence in projections of a global decrease in numbers of tropical cyclones. The apparent increase in the proportion of very intense storms since 1970 in some regions is much larger than simulated by current models for that period.”
So, the likelihood for oil producers in the US Gulf Coast, for example, is an increasing number of storms each year with increasing severity. The need for these companies to adapt to the impacts of climate change is clear.
While it may not be as clear yet for your business or industry you should still consider the potential impacts and ensure there is more to your climate change strategy than lip service and rhetoric.
