Posts Tagged ‘carbon inventory’
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!
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.
The Vulcan Project is inspiring climate science with important lessons for business.
This project has mapped carbon dioxide emissions in the United States in 2002 at the level of individual factories, power plants and roads. As well as making the research data available online the project has developed some amazing visualizations such as those shown in the following video.
The same team is now building on these results with the Hestia Project, which aims to provide “detailed space-time information on fossil/industrial CO2 emissions via an intuitive, interactive, photorealistic, three-dimensional visualization of the Earth.”
This work is inspiring and clearly demonstrates the value in having detailed and verified data and having the ability to visualize the data to aid in education, planning and decision making.
At Greensense we think data capture and data visualization should be part of all businesses climate change strategy. We think having the capability to see and understand your business’s carbon inventory — at a sufficient level of detail — is the key to enabling meaningful actions to be taken and new strategies to be developed. This detail should extend across your supply chain and down into individual business areas and business activities.
Many businesses are already developing carbon inventories but are doing so only to meet regulatory requirements, such as those under the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting System in Australia.
While initiatives to develop corporate carbon inventories are important, without the capability to capture data at the right level of detail and visualize that data these inventories won’t be the strategic tools they could be.