Organizations looking to embed sustainability across the organization need to bring about behavior change in order to obtain their goals. Effective resource management through positive behavior change will bring about reduced utility and resources costs resulting in financial savings.

Communicating sustainability effectively will also help to achieve sustainability goals, whether it is a carbon reduction target or simply a way to demonstrate the organization’s commitment to its social responsibilities.

The first step in implementing an awareness strategy is to create a vision statement that embodies what the organization is aiming to achieve, followed by the specific goals by which the organization will be measured in order to achieve its vision.

A sample vision could be as simple as:

The vision of ABC Company is to play a significant role in combating climate change in our community by empowering our employees to embed sustainability practices throughout all daily corporate activities.

You need to be sure you can measure the success of your vision statement and should clearly articulate to the organization using simple and clear high level goals. For example:

1. Establish a low carbon culture among the organization

2. Increase general sustainability knowledge throughout the organization

3. Embed sustainability practices throughout the organization

These high level goals will then require a subset of tasks that can be easily executed and measured. It is important to articulate the vision and its goals in a repeatable and engaging manner in order to increase momentum and buy-in across the organization.  We will explore further different methodologies and tactics on how to engage employees in your awareness program in our continued blogs on this area. Stay tuned!

The challenge with sustainability has always been its breadth – the term “sustainability” really is an abstract for several different pieces that need to come together in a process-driven fashion for it to work. To that end, measuring and tracking sustainability program and their impacts in terms of a clear return to the organization has been challenging. That said, it is not impossible to do. However, companies must realize that there is no silver bullet to achieving sustainability, and they are well advised not to go looking for one. I have seen too many companies with great sustainability policies that run into a few hundred pages, but precious little to show in terms of execution and results.

To start with, organizations should pick one or two initiatives that best align with their vision, culture, strategic objectives, and market needs. Starting small, getting some wins under the belt, and then building out from there is the way an organizational sustainability strategy should be planned. The tracking mechanisms and quantitative performance metrics should invariably be worked into the plan from the very beginning. Different organizations will measure sustainability projects differently depending on their specific needs. For example, for a university, a metric on student engagement may be important if they are trying to position themselves as a green university for youth. Similarly, for a leather tannery, it may well be a percentage reduction in waste water that it generates and/recycles. More often than not, there will be more than a few metrics that will need to be tracked to build a comprehensive return on sustainability picture.

Commonly, investments in sustainability initiatives show up as cost positions on financial statements or are hidden in operating expenses. Investors and stakeholders are and will continue to increasingly demand justification for these investments. Therefore, accurate and transparent measurement that can provide a quantifiable cost/benefit accounting for investments in sustainability programs is imperative – this positive or negative number and/or percentage margin is termed as the “Return on Sustainability.” Essentially, this number represents the difference between the cumulative investments and yields/results from all investments (this can include financial and non-financial inputs) in sustainability initiatives for an entire organization or reporting unit.

There can be several advantages for organizations taking a return on sustainability approach. These can include, but not limited to:

• A sound basis for deciding which sustainability programs should continue, modified or terminated
• Convert sustainability into a quantifiable profit centre rather than an abstract cost driver
• Meeting investor or stakeholder concerns on sustainability impacts and investments
• The ability to compare sustainability investments on the same level with other investments within the organization
• Backing brand enhancement claims around sustainability with firm numbers

As compared with return on investment (ROI), which follows the returns from single projects over time, return on sustainability will usually be a composite metric from several different sustainability investments/initiatives. Organizations that are just starting to invest in sustainability will have to wait to see results in the future, while their costs are incurred now. Hence, on a period reporting basis, such companies will possibly even show a negative performance. Whereas, organizations that have invested in sustainability programs on an ongoing basis, and which are currently seeing results from those investments, will reflect the best performance on a period reporting basis. This lag should always be factored into any return on sustainability planning.

You can’t argue with those numbers, skeptics! If you happened to be living in Canada, you will attest to the warm November we’ve had so far. I’m not complaining; maybe Canada will become one of the best places (climatically) to live in 25 years from today. But what about the Bangladeshes and the Sudans and the Maldives of the world, where rising sea waters and increasing desertification are creating climate refugees even today.

All the political wranglings and debates notwithstanding, climate change is happening faster than we expected. So what are we going to do about it? Can the proclaimed “dead” Cancun COP turn out something viable? Let’s wait and see.

A study by GISS climate scientists recently published in the journal Science shows that atmospheric CO2 operates as a thermostat to control the temperature of Earth.

There is a close analogy to be drawn between the way an ordinary thermostat maintains the temperature of a house, and the way that atmospheric carbon dioxide (and the other minor non-condensing greenhouse gases) control the global temperature of Earth. The ordinary thermostat produces no heat of its own. Its role is to switch the furnace on and off, depending on whether the house temperature is lower or higher than the thermostat setting. If we were to carefully monitor the temperature of the house, we would see that the temperature does not stay constant at the set value, but rather exhibits a “natural variability” as the house temperature slips below the set value and then overshoots the mark with a time constant of minutes to tens of minutes, because of the thermal inertia of the house and because heating by the furnace (when it is on) is more powerful than the steady heat loss to the outdoors. If the thermostat is suddenly turned to a very high setting, the temperature will begin to rise at a rate dictated by the inertia of the house and strength of the furnace. Turning the thermostat back to normal will stop the heating.

The complete article can be found at http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/lacis_01/index.html

Over the years, sustainability has been transformed from something “fluffy” and the domain of environmentalists to the top of the corporate priority list. Melding sustainability in an effective corporate policy can help in saving costs by driving operational efficiencies, it can help motivate and retain employees, and it can contribute in a major way to brand building and positioning.

Most organizations, however, flounder when it comes to actually doing something about it. Sustainability is sometimes difficult to define in terms of what an entity does (e.g., it is truly difficult to figure out the real impacts of drilling oil wells on the ocean floor and the probability of a spill – ask BP!) and the fact that achieving social, environmental, and economic benefits appear to be a herculean thing to do all at once. The other problem with sustainability initiatives has been few metrics that can actually be tracked with certainty. I have run into too many organizations that have (apparently) taken steps towards sustainability but never measured progress – nor did they know how to. In the end, all that work becomes only a “feel good” factor. Is it worth the effort?

Applying the Pareto principle can help – organizations should figure out those (20% of) activities that have (80% of) the impact, and then focus on the key areas within which to implement sustainable measures.

Here’s where I believe carbon management can play a helpful role. The fact that carbon can be used as a common denominator to measure a number of activities across an organization – energy, transport, employee travel, waste, wastewater, non-fuel emissions, etc. – makes it especially appealing as a first step. Well defined protocols and methodologies already exist for calculations that make it relatively easy to do as compared to defining broader sustainability metrics.

Sustainability is clearly a more complex subject, and carbon management forms but one part of it. However, not only is carbon management relatively easy to understand and implement, but a comprehensive GHG inventory can also provide surprisingly insightful information for organizations looking to take their first step towards a more sustainable future. And that first step is usually the most important in building a sustainable mindset within an organization and laying the foundation for future sustainability initiatives.

The word sustainability is derived from the Latin sustinere (tenere, to hold; sus, up). Dictionaries provide more than ten meanings for sustain, the main ones being to “maintain”, “support”, or “endure.” However, since the 1980s sustainability has been used more in the sense of human sustainability on planet Earth and this has resulted in the most widely quoted definition of sustainability and sustainable development, that of the Brundtland Commission of the United Nations on March 20, 1987: “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” [Wikipedia]

Canada’s lethargy in instituting a federally mandated GHG scheme can largely be attributed to political dithering. The current Conservative government aggressively opposes any binding reductions and blames the previous Liberal government for signing the Kyoto Protocol but not passing an aggressive climate policy to achieve those aims.

The Alberta oil sands, for example, contribute little over 5% of Canada’s emissions (Conference Board of Canada); being the main Conservative political stronghold, it was convenient for the Harper government to align with the previous Bush administration and take a position that blamed developing countries like India and China for deadlocked climate talks. However, with the US moving aggressively under Obama’s leadership, Canada risks being left behind which could have significant economic impacts in terms of taking advantage of international carbon trading schemes and introduction of future carbon taxes on exports from Canada.

In the absence of coherent Federal direction, some Canadian provinces have taken unilateral steps to ensure that they do not miss any potential benefits from the shift to a carbon constrained economy. While the Federal plan targets reductions by 2020 and 2050, and aims at channeling significant funds into still emerging CCS technologies, provincial policies with more immediate impact have already been introduced. British Columbia, for example, introduced a carbon tax on all fossil fuels, while Quebec and Ontario have started to phase out coal-fired generation.

The writing is on the wall; under significant international pressure and unilateral action by provinces, it is only a matter of time before a more stringent federally mandated GHG emissions regime is introduced. While its exact nature is uncertain, it most likely will be some combination of cap and trade, incentives, taxes, and focused funding for clean technologies.

(Excerpt taken from an article entitled “Copenhagen and Beyond” authored by self and Dr. Bernard Fleet, and published in the ESE magazine in Jan 2010; please contact me for a copy of the article)

According to Wikipedia, “CCS (or carbon capture & sequestration) is a means of mitigating the contribution of fossil fuel emissions to global warming, based on capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from large point sources such as fossil fuel power plants, and store it away from atmosphere by different means. It can also be used to describe the scrubbing of CO2 from ambient air as a geoengineering technique.”

While CCS has the potential of reducing emissions to the atmosphere, however it also has some major drawbacks – a) it is a nascent technology not yet fully proven; b) there is no guarantee that carbon sequestered in below-ground reservoirs will not leak; and c) CCS projects are prohibitively expensive.  Also, for regions of the world that are profiting from energy intensive industries, CCS is a convenient way of “reducing emissions while not really reducing emissions,” in that if one can capture the carbon and push it below ground then one could potentially continue with emissions intensive activities, even increase the net carbon that is emitted.

An example of this is Alberta, which has plans to capture and store 50 million tonnes of carbon per year by 2020 and 139 million tonnes by 2050.  It has invested $2 billion in four large-scale CCS projects to prove that this is possible. Clearly, if it can prove the technology works, it becomes far easier for it to continue to extracting oil from the tar sands. However, here is the disconnect – the Alberta government has levied a $15 per tonne tax on carbon emissions, way too low from the economic perspective. Analysts agree that this figure should be upwards of $60, some say closer to $100 per tonne, for the initiative to have a positive economic impact. Seems like a running with the hare, and hunting with the wolves policy to me.

CCS will work only for large scale projects, and probably the technology will be proven in coming years. However, it cannot be the only solution to the problem. It should form part of a package that includes other steps (cap & trade, carbon tariffs, etc.) to be truly effective.

While there was not much clarity on how companies not disclosing their exposure to climate risks will be penalized, the decision lays the groundwork for pushing the regulatory envelope on this front. The guidance issued follows earlier disclosure requirements on social, governance and environmental risks. Clearly, Mary Schapiro, the chairwoman of the SEC, is committed to furthering President Obama’s climate agenda. Between the existing EPA mandates, state-level legislations like AB 32  in California, voluntary programs like CCX and CCAR, and a possible climate change legislation in the near future, the US is starting to become one of the most exciting market on the carbon front.

I can’t help but draw a parallel with what happened when the SEC 17a4 and the Sarbanes-Oxley legislations were enforced after a string of financial fisco’s like Enron and Worldcom – companies had no option but to comply or pay steep penalties! The SEC decision is bound to push climate risk exposure to the top (or certainly close to the top) in the board rooms.

Link to SEC Press Release