Archive for the ‘Greenhouse Gas Abatement’ Category
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.
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.
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.
Some recent research at ANU has found that natural forests are a much better carbon sink than plantation forests. As well as storing up to three times more carbon, natural forests hold the carbon for much longer because they aren’t cut down on a rotation basis like plantation forests.
This is one reason that paying money to plant trees is not always the simple option it appears. Many carbon offsetting options in Australia are based on tree planting. In some cases tree planting projects lead to a mono-culture that reduces bio-diversity. Also, when a tree dies, perhaps because of fire or through land-clearing, then the carbon it has stored is released back into the atmosphere.
Interestingly in 1990, the baseline year for calculating emission targets under the Kyoto Protocol, land clearing was responsible for an incredibly high 24.5% of Australia’s overall emissions (Terms and Impacts of the Kyoto Protocol). Thus we have the infamous ‘Australia Clause’ in the Kytoto Protocol giving credit for reducing land clearing and the reason we have been meeting our recent Kyoto targets.
BP has been telling us about climate change for some time and saying that talk stopped long ago. They have now started a new billboard campaign to tell us that they have helped offset Australian greenhouse gasses by two million tonnes. But what does it mean to offset emissions? Is two million tonnes of carbon offsets a lot? How does the average person evaluate a claim a like this?
Carbon offsets
A carbon offset is an investment in a project that reduces greenhouse gas emissions (e.g. an energy efficiency project) or sequesters carbon in the ground (e.g. reforestation).
Offsetting projects are assessed following the protocols established under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative. They can then be accredited under a variety of national and International schemes. For example, in Australia they can be reported and certified under the the Australian Government’s Greenhouse Friendly program, as BP has done.
Sometimes carbon offsets are referred to as carbon credits (credit for offsetting 1 tonne of greenhouse gasses). A carbon credit in the context of voluntary offsetting is not the same thing as a credit under an emissions trading scheme and the two are not exchangeable. We’ll talk more about Australia’s planned emission trading scheme (or carbon pollution reduction scheme as the government has started calling it) in a later post.
BP conducts a range offsetting projects under their Global Choice Brand. In Australia this primarily means offsetting the emissions associated with their staff vehicles.
Taking cars off the road
How much of current sea levels will be preserved by offsetting two million tonnes; how many endangered species will avoid extinction; how many violent storms will be stopped?
The Australian government publishes information on the impacts of climate change. However we can’t really relate individual offsetting back to these kinds of real-world impacts.
To help people evaluate the the benefit of offsetting two million tonnes BP have related their offsetting back to cars. They say:
Seven years after launch, our BP Global Choice™ programme had made a reduction in greenhouse gas equivalent to taking over 400,000 cars off the road.
This is an analogy, BP haven’t necessarily taken any cars off the road. Instead they have invested in projects that have offset an amount of emissions equivalent to the emissions produced by a certain amount of car travel.
An average car traveling 25,000Km in a year will produce about five tonnes of greenhouse gasses. This gives us the figure of 400,000 cars (two million divided by five). Having done this calculation we do need to modify BP’s claim a little: “Seven years after launch, our BP Global Choice programme had made a reduction in greenhouse gas equivalent to taking over 400,000 cars off the road [for one year, or 60,000 cars a year for seven years].”
While the concept of a car is more concrete than a tonne of carbon emissions it is still difficult to evaluate a number like 400,000 without some perspective. According to Australian Bureau of Statistics there are about 14 million registered cars and light passenger vehicles in Australia.
Australia’s overall emissions
Another way to assess two million tonnes of offsetting is to put it in the context of Australia’s overall emissions. In the Kyoto Period of 2008 to 2012, Australia’s emissions are forecast to be about 600 million tonnes per year.
That’s about 70,000 tonnes an hour. So two million tonnes of offsetting is equivalent to about 28 hours of Australia’s overall emissions.
Another comparison is with Australia’s per capita emissions, which is about 28 tonnes per person per year. Based on this figure two million tonnes of offsetting is equivalent to the emissions for 70,000 people for a year: somewhere between the population of Bunbury and Ballarat.
The cost of offsetting
Finally we might assess an offsetting initiative in cost terms. Depending on the cost of the offsetting project and the quality of the outcome and the accreditation, offsets typically cost between AU$10 and AU$30 per tonne.
On this basis offsetting two million tonnes might cost between AU$200M and AU$600M: now that’s definitely a big number.
So the Australian Greenhouse Office Green Paper has been released describing the Rudd Government’s first attempt at doing something meaningful in the fight against climate change.
The paper is there to generate discussion ahead of the white paper and draft legislation due for release in December 08. So let’s do just that – generate some discussion:
At Greensense we care about the environment and the impact that any change has on not only our quality of life but our ability to sustain life. We exist primarily to make a difference and secondly to do business. Surely any battle against climate change needs to take the same approach – environment and life first, economics second.
Ross Garnaut summed it up well in his report stating that:
“Without that action, it is probable that Australians, over the 21st century and beyond, will experience disruption in their prosperity and enjoyment of life, and to longstanding patterns in their lives.”
It seems though, that the government can only speak of economic fear right now, worried of the impact of petrol prices, how low income households will cope, will high emission producing businesses be protected well enough to not take their operations offshore and the list goes on. They can get away withit becausethere is still enough ignorance among the general public on what an increase in global temperatures really means. The thing is – no one will care too much about the economics if there starts becoming a tangible difference in constraining life.
The Green Paper from the outset has a focus solely on the economics of any decision and protection of the very organisations, that since the industrial revolution, are the cause of the problem. So fear is driven around economic impact, with the government’s paper bowing to the green lip service driven by the corporate dollar, rather than tackling the real issue – let’s reduce carbon emissions on every level as quickly as possible for the sake of generations to come.
To solve climate change it requires a massive cultural shift not only at a economics level but at individual household and business level with all tactics being applied to have any chance of making a difference, from carbon trading, green oriented technology and power, offset programs and beyond. By making The Green Paper the first attempt at legislation changes we have made climate change an economic issue rather than a life issue.
So lets get to some specifics to prove the point:
Free permits are being offered to the Emission Intensive Trade Exposed (EITEs) organisations. When a carbon trading scheme should be there to drive down carbon pollution why would we protect the highest carbon producers – economic fear. Where is the investment in innovative solutions to the problem that raises awareness to the real issue and drives a cultural shift in dealing with it. The whole concept of carbon leakage illustrates that the real heart of the issue is not understood by business.
The legislation only targets companies that produce more than 25,000 tonnes of carbon in a year which is 1,000 of the 7.6 million companies within Australia. Now on the one hand it makes sense to focus on the highest carbon producers but here are the issues (even forgetting the free permits to the EITEs). Of the highest producers the agricultural industry will not be included because, “the Government does not consider that it is practical at this stage to include agriculture emissions in the trading scheme at commencement”, yet they are the second highest carbon producing industry. By only targeting 1000 of the 7.6 million companies in Australia we will not create the required cultural shift if we can’t find a way to make it relevant for everyone.
To apply a national carbon limit it assumes a foundation of accurate measurement. This will predominantly occur under the reporting standards generated by the NGER Act 2007. The problem is this only brings companies who produce over 87,500 tonnes of carbon per year reporting by 2010 and those producing more than 50,000 tonnes in 2011. That seems to give a lot of inconsistencies on the governments own plans to address this is a sensible fashion if they want the carbon trading scheme running by 2010.
The government cannot articulate the real impact to the individual household or business with comments in the report such as: “such a concentration of carbon dioxide is expected to have severe impact on our environment” and “the IPCC concluded that Australia’s water resources, coastal communities, natural ecosystems, energy security, health, agriculture and tourism would all be vulnerable to climate change impacts if global temperatures rise by 3 degrees or more.”. The fact that we are vulnerable and the impact is severe doesn’t seem to present a well structured case as to why we need to do something. Cultural shift will drive the change and perhaps investment needsto be made into providing that compelling case (which happens to be something that Greensense is very good at).
So by all means fear the economics of any carbon trading scheme and be sure to join the discussion to make sure there is an effective solution, but lets not forget that the fear should lie in the very issue that the we are trying to fix.
