Posts Tagged ‘carbon management’
The Environmental Institute of Australia and New Zealand (EIANZ) are running a climate change leadership forum on November 23rd, on tools, techniques and leadership lessons on climate change adaptation and mitigation. Greensense Managing Director, Derek Gerrard, will be presenting on smart technologies and behavioural change, reviewing the Subiaco Oval case study, as well as our carbon emission’s reporting solution for Local Government in partnership with WALGA.
If you haven’t registered and would like to you can find out more information here.
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.
The majority of global executives regard climate change as being strategically important but fewer act on these opinions according to a survey conducted by McKinsey Consulting. The survey also found that many executives are actually positive about the opportunity for climate change to boost the bottom line.
Standard approach
There are relatively good standards and guidance available on how business should account for their greenhouse gas emissions and so we see a lot of consistency between businesses in this area. Similarly as regulations regarding reporting or pollution cap-and-trade systems, or carbon taxation emerge in different regions then businesses have a clear prescription to follow.
However, there is no authoritative guidance or established best practices guiding business on how they should consider climate change in other aspects of their strategy and operations: corporate reputation, brand and customer engagement; planning for the environmental risks associated with climate change; procurement and supply chain management; development of products and services; employee engagement; and so on.
So it is not surprising that the survey found there were mixed views about where responsibility for ensuring their companies take climate change into consideration actually lie. Roughly equal percentages of respondents apportioned responsibility to C-level executives, corporate-level strategists, and business unit or functional unit managers. It won’t be surprising to you that even in a low carbon-intensity business Greensense believes that climate change should be a C-level executive responsibility.
Carbon Management Office
So what is the right organizational model to act on this responsibility? Greensense recommends that it’s customers establish a Carbon Management Office. There are a two basic models for a Carbon Management Office.
Firstly where the Carbon Management Office is a centre for excellence that acts in a consulting capacity setting standards; selecting tools such as carbon management software; providing support to business area managers with training, guidance and best practices; and, providing strategic advice to the executive. In this case responsibility for carbon emissions, energy production and use, maintenance of a carbon inventory and of meeting regulatory requirements is distributed within individual business areas.
Secondly where the Carbon Management Office also has a centralized governance role with ownership of the corporate carbon inventory; responsibility for reporting on business performance related to climate change; responsibility for compliance and regulatory reporting; and responsibility for enforcing processes and policies related to climate change. For example, the process where by all new corporate initiatives must prepare a Greenhouse Management Plan and the conditions by which this plan must be submitted to an executive committee for review and approval.
While establishing a Carbon Management Office is a clear best practice there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. The Carbon Management Office must be aligned to the companies culture, structure and strategy. So, for example, we also see cases where there may be multiple Carbon Management Offices: a centralized corporate office and a separate office attached to a business area with high carbon-intensity operations and specialized monitoring and compliance requirements.
Internal carbon markets
As maturity and understanding of carbon management increases within companies we also see the Carbon Management Office providing an internal carbon registry enabling business areas to exchange carbon credits and pollution permits to meet individual emissions targets. This will enable the business to more efficiently meet its overall external emission targets. This kind of opportunity is a good example of the benefit of having the right organizational model in place.
Making sense of climate change
Please contact us if you’d like to establish a Carbon Management Office in your company.
