Business In Vancouver: The climate is changing, so should your business strategy

Vancouver, BC - Sustainable Business: Nina Winham

You’ve got your marketing strategy, your investment strategy, your operations plan, your human resources strategy. Probably a few other plans, strategies and to-do lists. Your company is on track and headed forward. But wait: have you thought about your climate strategy?

It’s not a crazy idea anymore to be thinking about how your company may be contributing to climate change and to have a strategy to deal with it. What once seemed too abstract to wrap a spreadsheet around is quickly coming home to the bottom line. Nothing so new here. We’ve heard a spate of announcements about the “first carbon-neutral” company in various sectors, from airlines to financial institutions to coffee roasters. What is new is how quickly this is approaching the mainstream. And what’s interesting are the additional changes that heading down this path can bring.

The basic steps in going carbon neutral are simple. Account for your greenhouse gas emissions. Develop a plan to reduce as much as possible (you’ll more than likely save money, because you’re essentially reducing energy consumption). Finally, offset what you can’t eliminate so that the emissions you still produce are reduced or re-captured elsewhere. Voila: it balances out to “neutral.” The reality of taking these steps is a bit more involved, of course. Donovan Woollard, COO of local offsetting company Offsetters, says his company is increasingly providing support to clients in the areas of employee engagement and information for internal stakeholders.

“You get a fair amount of organizational culture change that comes in when you brand yourself as carbon neutral,” he says. “A whole bunch of ideas flood forward from employees about ways to do more. The knowledge and ideas in your staff start to come out, as well as some questioning: are we really that green? Why aren’t we doing more?”

 

Ultimately, Woollard says, companies benefit from the “morale benefits of being a leadership-based company.” That translates into improved productivity and decreased turnover – as long as you expect this type of ferment and energy, and are ready to receive and channel it well.

Choosing appropriate offsets is another area of complexity. There has been criticism of the new industry of offsets, which has arrived on the scene so fast that it’s only just starting to sort out its terminology and achieve some standardization. So you need to shop around and think about what you’re buying.

For example, if you invest in a forest that promises to capture carbon, what assurances do you have that it won’t be cut down? Harbour Air (“North America’s only carbon-neutral airline”) recently announced its first investment in an offset project. This is where things get even more interesting. Having been carbon-neutral since January, largely through collecting a minimal additional fee from each customer flight, the airline was ready to “purchase an offset.”

The money went to the Delta View Habilitation Centre – an extended-care facility. Delta View bought a ground source heat pump system for heating, air conditioning and domestic water preheating for its new 200,000-square-foot facility. This will reduce its potential greenhouse gas emissions by 75% over the conventional gas and electric system it would otherwise have been able to afford. The project was tested by a third party to ensure it would not have occurred otherwise and provides an “offset investment” that reduces total carbon emissions. It’s a good project, for a good cause, conferring benefits to Harbour Air, Delta View and the atmosphere. And you wouldn’t have imagined it even five years ago. That’s rapid change.

Woollard says the market for offsets is shifting quickly from companies seeking the brand benefits of being first movers to the broader market of those who realize it will be poor management to be left behind, especially as regulation in this area is likely to increase. Meanwhile, the stories coming from the first movers show this: the more we shift to manage our climate impacts, the more the business climate itself will change.

Nina Winham (nina@newclimate.ca) is principal of New Climate Strategies, a company specializing in helping clients build value through a shift to sustainability.