From EMS to CDP
Carnival Corporation's environmental and sustainability information reporting system leads to greenhouse gas reporting and international recognition
The Challenge
Carnival Corporation & plc, a global cruise company and one of the largest vacation companies in the world, wished to demonstrate its environmental leadership by improving its internal processes for sustainability data collection and reporting, and by measuring continual improvement across its 11 subsidiary Operating Lines.
Carnival Corporation & plc has long been committed to high standards of environmental compliance and performance. The company formed a Corporate Environmental Compliance Department in 2002, which was subsequently expanded in 2006 to form the Corporate Maritime Policy & Compliance Department (MP&C). MP&C provides a common, integrated approach to management of Health, Environmental, Safety and Security matters, and reports to the Board of Directors on such matters. More recently, Carnival has begun to broaden the scope of its transparency to include public sustainability reporting.
Our Solution
Working with Five Winds International since 2005, Carnival Corporation & plc developed and implemented Environmental Management Systems (EMS) within all of its Operating Lines, which include Carnival Cruise Lines, Holland America Line, Princess Cruises, and Seabourn Cruise Line in North America; P&O Cruises, Cunard Line, and Ocean Village in the United Kingdom; AIDA in Germany; Costa Cruises in southern Europe and China; Iberocruceros in Spain; and P&O Cruises in Australia. In 2006, each of these Operating Lines (except for Iberocruceros, acquired in 2007) became certified to the ISO 14001 standard, an international EMS standard that aims to help organizations minimize how their operations negatively affect the environment. Each EMS helps Carnival employees to understand their specific roles and responsibilities for achieving the company's environmental goals and includes procedures for controlling data and information flow. Specifically, an EMS helps a company measure and monitor, as they outline the data that should be collected, handled, stored, and reported.
In 2009, Carnival Corporation & plc selected PE International's SoFi software tool as a means to capture and analyze its environmental performance data, which spanned several metrics, including energy use, water consumption, waste disposal, and emissions of greenhouse gases, ozone depleting substances, NOx and SOx. In addition, Carnival uses SoFi to collect other sustainability performance data including labor, human rights, society, product responsibility and economic metrics. The software system enables user-friendly data collection across the Operating Lines, ensuring effective management of all units of the company.
Benefits and Value
Carnival Corporation & plc's EMS implementation across its operating lines has provided a strong foundation for its current approach to sustainability reporting. The company has responded to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) four years in a row. Carnival has also been named to the Carbon Disclosure Leadership Index (CDLI) for 2008 and 2009. The CDLI is a ranking applied to companies responding to the Investor CDP questionnaire, based on the depth and scope of their disclosures and the quality of their reporting. Carnival Corporation & plc has positioned itself as a leader in environmental responsibility by effectively and efficiently measuring and managing to ensure its environmental standards are maintained.
