Tag: emission reduction targets

Top Five New Year’s Climate Change Resolutions for Organizations of All Types and Sizes

Posted on by John Shideler

New Year’s resolutions may date back millennia, perhaps as far as early Babylonian times. In the modern era individuals may make solemn commitments to lose weight or exercise more. Meanwhile, organizations set about to achieve quality and environmental objectives while maintaining or improving financial performance metrics. Fortunately, when it comes to climate change resolutions, organizations—and individuals—can often achieve win-win outcomes. In this spirit Futurepast offers its Top Five Climate Change Resolutions for Organizations in 2010.

We rank as number five the establishment of an organizational inventory of greenhouse has emissions. For leading organizations, GHG inventories are not new. However, getting one is the place to start for organizations that have put off formal consideration of the carbon intensity of their operations and products. An inventory allows companies, governmental units, and other types of organizations the chance to quantify how much carbon dioxide equivalent gases they emit on an annual basis. The inventory is broken down by type of emission, such as Direct Emissions from stationary and mobile combustion, as well as process and fugitive emissions. Another category is Energy Indirect Emissions, which acknowledge how an organization’s demand for purchased electricity or steam frequently causes utility companies to combust fossil fuels to produce the energy an organization needs. A third category of accounts is Other Indirect Emissions which includes emissions associated with both the upstream supply of raw and processed materials an organization uses as well as the downstream effects of the products and services it furnishes to the market. Transportation of these materials, goods and services typically are also included in the upstream and downstream calculations. Definitely, if your organization doesn’t already have one, now is the time to establish an accurate and verifiable GHG inventory.

Number four on our list of resolutions for the New Year is to obtain information from your supply chain about the carbon intensity of their inputs to your organization’s activities. Leading companies like Walmart have pioneered in this field, and more and more market leading organizations understand the importance of doing so. It comes down to sustainability. Simply put, organizations that are not able to reduce their carbon footprint in the coming years run the risk of falling behind their competitors and losing market share. This is bad for them, their customers, and other stakeholders. Now that market leading organizations have inventoried their carbon emissions and considered ways to reduce them, the next logical place to look is in the upstream part of the value chain.

Our number three resolution is to use the organization’s inventory to set emission reduction targets. An inventory allows organizations to see clearly where their most carbon-intensive operations or activities lie. Armed with this information, objectives for performance improvement can be set. This typically occurs at the highest level of the organization during periodic exercises known as “management reviews.” Top management sets the direction, assigns responsibilities and time frames, and allocates the resources necessary to achieve the targeted improvements.

Futurepast’s second most important resolution for organizations this year is to communicate its GHG performance and improvement objectives to stakeholders. The audience for this communication is both internal and external. Employees must understand the message so they can take needed actions to meet the organization’s climate change objectives. Suppliers need to know what part of the value chain the organization has identified as bearing the highest potential for targeted emission reductions, so they may rise to the challenge and deliver them. Customers are an important audience as well, because increasingly they will make business-to-business or consumer decisions based upon least intensive carbon options, when all other factors are equal. Last but not least, the investor community has a growing desire to know how the organizations they own are meeting the climate change challenges of the twenty-first century. Indeed, in some cases, climate change disclosures may already be called for in securities regulations in those cases where a publicly traded company has determined that a reasonable person could be influenced by its climate change risks and management’s decisions about how to address them.

This year we cap our suggestions for resolutions with our number one recommendation: Reduce the carbon footprint of your organization’s activities and products. Implement actions that reduce consumption of energy, squeeze carbon emissions from the upstream supply chain, and reduce the carbon footprint of products over their life cycles. Increase the efficiency of lighting and heating/cooling systems, optimize distribution networks, reduce packaging, and improve recyclability. Encourage employee car-pooling, transit use or biking to work. Like the individual that goes on a diet and exercises more, organizations that produce equivalent products and services that use less materials and energy will gain an edge in the competitive marketplace and augment its appeal to customers. And in the classic win-win way, it will achieve these benefits while benefiting the organization’s bottom line.

COP-15 Accord Breaks New Ground In Voluntary Commitments from China, India and Brazil; Could an ISO GHG Management System Standard Help with Verification?

Posted on by John Shideler

The COP-15 negotiations in Copenhagen did not produce a new treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. This left many countries and observers bitterly disappointed. It also left in doubt the future beyond 2012 of institutions spawned by the Kyoto Protocol such as the Clean Development Mechanism and the program of Joint Implementation, both “flexible mechanisms” of Kyoto that produce tradable carbon offset credits.

But the agreement brokered by US President Barack Obama did accomplish one goal the US has long held dear. It formally committed the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, China, to concrete goals for greenhouse gas emission reductions. At Chinese insistence these goals will be based on reducing the intensity of China’s growth in future emissions rather than in absolute cuts. And for now, no text has been agreed to that will give China’s or any other country’s emission reduction targets the force of international law. Nonetheless the largest of the world’s most rapidly industrializing developing countries have agreed to set targets, and that principle is important.

Many details of the new agreement have been left for resolution to future meetings. One of the most contentious is the verification regime that will permit assessment of the progress developing countries make on achieving targeted reductions. President Obama insisted that independent verification was essential and that all countries should consent to it. Earlier in the talks the Chinese had insisted that its sovereignty was at stake and that it would certify the results of actions taken without the involvement of outside parties. While the details are not yet clear, President Obama’s direct negotiations with the Chinese premier on Friday Dec. 18 appeared to have succeeded in obtaining China’s agreement to some acceptable form of monitoring and verification.

Transparency was a major theme of the COP-15 before the international leaders arrived on the scene for conference’s waning days. At an earlier COP the principle had been agreed to that emission reductions from developing countries should be “monitored, reported and verified”—or MRV’d for short. The MRV concept specifically was to be applied to “Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions” that developing countries take on a voluntary basis. Hence the interest of having the largest emitters in the rapidly industrializing world, China and India in particular, set targets and agree to some kind of regime for monitoring and verification.

It was left to a future meeting—perhaps the COP-16 in Mexico City in December 2010—to flesh out the details for monitoring, reporting and verification. In the meantime ISO—the International Organization for Standardization—presented a concept at a side event cosponsored by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for a greenhouse gas management system standard that could be used by national governments—or regional or local subunits of governments—to manage, monitor, report and verify climate change mitigation actions. The outline of such a standard was presented by the US-based United Nations Foundation, an advocacy group, and commented on by an Indonesian delegate to the talks in his capacity as Vice Chair of ISO Technical Committee 207 Subcommittee 1 on Environmental Management Systems. Last week in my blog I described the standards published by ISO TC 207 Subcommittee 7 on Greenhouse Gas Management and Related Activities which would also support this management system approach.

The ISO approach is valuable for at least two reasons. First, it provides a framework for countries, regions, or communities to manage climate change mitigation actions at the operational level. A management system provides a ready framework for capacity building and technology transfer, which is just what the developing world needs to implement mitigation actions. Second, it provides assurance to countries furnishing climate change mitigation assistance that their investments in hundreds of locations throughout the world are properly deployed and that results are monitored, reported and verified.

ISO management system standards, in particular ISO 9001 for quality management and ISO 14001 for environmental management, are some of the most popular and widely adopted management system standards in the world. There is no doubt that a management system standard for climate change mitigation could be developed on an accelerated timetable and that it could be of enormous importance in achieving the verification objectives set forth in the Copenhagen COP-15 accord. Third-party verification could be achieved by bodies independent of any national government or the UNFCCC while at the same time augmenting the effectiveness of the Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions.