Best Practice Tool for Carbon Management
GEMI update of web-based tool guides companies to improve carbon management strategies and performance.
The Challenge
The Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI), a non-profit organization and a global leader in developing insights and creating environmental sustainability solutions for business, wanted to update and enhance its online climate change resource tool to guide companies through the process of developing and implementing an effective carbon management strategy.
GEMI provides a forum for corporate environmental sustainability leaders to learn from each other through the activities of work groups, sharing best practices and benchmarking with peers. In keeping with its mission statement "Business helping business achieve environmental sustainability excellence," GEMI helps businesses through its online interactive tools providing guidance on environmental issues, including supply chain management and water impacts. In 2005, GEMI decided to update the functionality and platform for all its interactive tools. In parallel with this effort, GEMI wanted help updating and expanding the content of its climate change tool to keep it current with recent developments and emerging best practices.
Our Solution
Five Winds collaborated with GEMI member companies to provide revised and updated content for the tool. Specifically, GEMI was interested in updates on business drivers such as new greenhouse gas regulations and stakeholder expectations; a wider range of business risks and opportunities, a more mature scope of carbon management approaches, and case studies on how companies are responding to climate change. Five Winds drew from its project experience, researched best practices for managing the business risks and opportunities associated with climate change and worked with GEMI member companies to understand their approaches.
Five Winds also explored a broad range of external stakeholder requirements related to carbon management, including those from the Carbon Disclosure Project and the US EPA Climate Leaders program. Five Winds' Carbon Management Services lead, Duncan Noble, used approaches from the Cool Business Guide he created (highlighted in this issue's "From the Archives" article) as a foundation to help companies understand the business implications of climate change and how best to respond.
The GEMI tool separates carbon management into four stages: assess risk, formulate strategy, implement strategy, and review (see Figure 1). "Advice and resources are provided from businesses that have already completed one or more of the planning stages," said GEMI's Business and Climate Work Group Co-Chair, Maurice Bechard, Vice President, Global Environment Health and Safety, JohnsonDiversey, Inc.1 The tool is currently available free of charge online as part of GEMI's mission of "business helping business."
Figure 1: The GEMI Business and Climate Change process
Source: GEMI
Benefits and Value
All companies, regardless of size or level of response to climate change business drivers, will find the web tool useful, as GEMI's major goal was to provide information and guidance for businesses in every stage of the carbon management strategic planning cycle. Companies just beginning the carbon management journey can use the tool as a template, and those farther along can use it as part of a gap assessment against best practices.
As Mr. Carl Wirdak, Director, Environmental Affairs, Occidental Petroleum and GEMI's Business and Climate Work Group Co-Chair noted, "The content of GEMI's Business and Climate web tool is based on company experience in addressing the many facets of the climate change issue, and provides a wide range of case studies drawn from a number of different business sectors."2 And, as GEMI's Business and Climate Work Group Co-Chair, Audrey Bamberger, (formerly with Strategic Environmental Initiatives at Anheuser-Busch Inc. and currently with Pathways to Sustainability) explained, "This [tool] provides compelling, quantifiable value to companies."
For more information on Five Winds' Carbon Management Services, contact Duncan Noble at +1 (613) 722-6629 ext. 224.
