The solution, said to be the first of its kind in South Africa and developed by local consultancy sustainableIT, provides organisations with the ability to manage and report on their carbon emissions at a fraction of the cost of traditional consultancy based approaches.

How does it work?

TheCarbonReport.com is a cloud based offering which guides an organisation through an intuitive process and builds an emissions inventory based on the globally accepted Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Reporting and Accounting Standard.

The offering is priced as an annual subscription which varies based on the complexity and size of the organisation and provides not only the ability to capture a carbon inventory but also to report on it through a fully featured reporting tool.

A ‘walk through tour’ is also offered at no charge which gives users the ability to evaluate the solution before signing up to the service.

The solution also offers validation of metrics as well as certification of audits if required.

This is not another calculator

Teresa Legg, director at sustainableIT describes the solution as ”not just another calculator”. “What we have done with The Carbon Report is build an intuitive toolset that allows organisations of any size or complexity to build an auditable carbon inventory and report on it. There are few, if any, tools out there that do this as simply or as cost effectively as we have managed.”

Reporting is done with strict adherence to the GHG protocol and has been developed in such a way that ownership of the process can be retained internally.

The calculation and reporting complexity of traditional footprinting has been absorbed within the tool so as not to confuse the end user but still deliver a quality report as output.

Broaden the base

The offering is aimed at organisations of any size or complexity. “Every business has to start focusing on the triple bottom line of people, profit and planet”, explains Legg. “Understanding your carbon footprint provides a measure of your impact and allows you to develop concrete plans to reduce emissions and ultimately eliminate unwanted costs in your business”, she concludes.

The process of carbon footprinting just got a lot easier and business needs to start focusing on emissions reduction opportunities if it is to remain globally competitive in a rapidly changing low carbon economy.

Visit The Carbon Report here to get started.

The Carbon Report is a proprietary offering designed to enable participation by all businesses, large and small, in baselining their carbon emissions and producing a carbon footprint. The solution is designed to take a business through a defined process of ring fencing the boundaries of the audit, identifying its emissions producing activities, data gathering and finally the production of a report based on the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol Corporate Standard.

The GHG Protocol Initiative is a multi-stakeholder partnership of businesses, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), governments, and others convened by the World Resources Institute (WRI), and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Launched in 1998, the initiative’s mission is to develop internationally accepted greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting and reporting standards for business and to promote their broad adoption worldwide.

The GHG Protocol is widely regarded as the standard for corporate GHG accounting and company reporting. From a carbon perspective, the protocol is analogous to the generally accepted financial accounting principles (GAAP)  for a organisation’s normal accounting and reporting practices.

All emissions calculated are accounted for in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent gases (CO2e) as required by the GHG Protocol. Due to the varying ability of greenhouse gases to trap heat in the atmosphere, some are more harmful to the climate than others. Each greenhouse gas has a “global warming potential,” which refers to its heat trapping potential relative to that of CO2. Greenhouse gas emissions are therefore typically reported as CO2 equivalents (CO2e) for consistency, allowing like for like comparisons.

The end product is an audit or carbon footprint report which can be used for communications with shareholders, customers, corporate communications and employees. More importantly it is used as a baseline report to measure emissions savings (by default costs) in future years.

Learn more….

Some statistics provided by the United States Department of Energy back this up:

- Office buildings account for 19 percent of all commercial energy consumption.

- Seventy percent of office building energy consumption is electricity, which is used for lighting, heating, cooling, and office equipment.

- More than a quarter of U.S. GHG emissions are from transportation sources. This includes travel by road, rail, and air, including the transportation related emissions generated by employees travelling for office-related business and commuting to and from their jobs.

- Eighty percent of transportation-related fossil fuel use comes from road transportation and 13 percent from aviation.2 Forty-seven percent of passengers on U.S. domestic flights are travelling for business.

A carbon footprint or GHG inventory is the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by an organisation, usually over a period of 12 months.  For simplicity of reporting, it is often expressed in terms of the amount of carbon dioxide, or its equivalent of other GHGs, emitted.

Typical activities or operations that contribute to a organisation’s  carbon footprint include fuel burned in company owned assets, purchased electricity, employee commuting and paper use. A company’s carbon footprint can be measured by undertaking a GHG emissions audit to document its inventory.

Once the size of a carbon footprint is known, a strategy can be devised to reduce it, e.g. by technological developments, better process and product management, energy efficiency or offsetting.

To learn more around getting a carbon footprint for your business, click here.

Commuting, long considered a drain on time and productivity, now has another drawback – its considerable impact on companies’ carbon emissions footprint. Businesses today have to understand where they are in terms of carbon emissions and plan some quick and easy gains to get on the roadmap, says Puleng director, Steve James.

According to sustainableIT director, Teresa Legg, the first step was a workshop in which the Puleng team was briefed on the parameters and methods of the audit. “In a sense, it’s explaining the whole process of doing the carbon inventory assessment, so we both understand where emissions are coming from, can establish the boundaries of the audit, and also workshop what they want to calculate,” explains Legg.

James notes it’s helpful to understand what has a direct impact on emissions, and potential outside influences. “During the positioning workshop, we realised it goes far beyond just the data centre. It’s great to understand what is happening globally, as well as from a South African governance perspective, and then relating it back to IT and other activities in the company.

“We embarked on the process to examine, as a small business, what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong, and how we can plan going forward.” A lot of people don’t understand the GHG Protocol and the different scopes and guidelines,” says Legg, adding this is something outlined in detail during the workshop.

Scope two describes emissions a company has created through the procurement of electricity; which is provided by another party (Eskom). Scope three emissions are those created by a company whose product or service you’re using. “So, if you hire a vehicle owned by another business, that would be their Scope one emission, but your Scope three,” notes Legg. It also includes air travel, paper usage and employee commuting.

“Under the GHG Protocol, you are not obliged to report Scope three, but we recommend it if these emissions make up a material component of the company, such as if it outsources its transport.” Commuting is considered Scope three because the vehicles themselves don’t belong to the company, but their emissions are produced in the process of employees getting to work. James says Puleng opted to report some Scope three emissions because, as a services-based business, much of its work involves staff travelling to clients in a technical support role.

“The emissions from commuting can be enormous, and made up a significant portion of Puleng’s total footprint,” Legg points out.

While much of the audit data needed was easily available in financial documents, sustainableIT set up an online survey for employees to report on their driving habits, including how they get to work, how many people travel with them, how many kilometres they drive and how frequently.

Legg notes they encouraged as many workers as possible to reply, to get the most representative sample. With 53% responding, sustainableIT took the travel patterns of this group and extrapolated it across the organisation, coordinating the online survey with the other information to calculate the final figures. These covered emissions generated during the 2009 financial year.

In calculating the final measurements, Legg explains the GHG Protocol standardises all greenhouse gases (including methane, nitrous oxide and so on) to reflect their warming equivalent to CO2. This allows the evaluation of various gases against a common basis. “Their Scope three emissions made up 75% of total emissions, and commuter travel 69% of their total including Scope one, two and three,” notes Legg. She adds that organisations are often reluctant to calculate Scope three for this very reason. “In services-based organisations, commuter travel can be quite high.”

James notes that Puleng, as a services-oriented business, has a lot of support contracts, with approximately 66% of its 50-odd staff complement constantly driving to clients. “We did one million kilometres and we’re a small business, so you can imagine what bigger companies are doing. It was a real eye-opener.”

In addition to its Johannesburg site, Puleng also has a Cape Town office, with commuting taking place between the two via air travel. “With hindsight, and foresight, it’s something we really have to be conscious of because it has massive implications,” states James.

Legg says recommendations included teleworking and using video conferencing and voice over IP communication where possible. “There’s a huge opportunity, especially for IT organisations, to reduce commuting through teleworking.”

James notes that Puleng has brought in teleconferencing solutions such as Skype and WebEx. “With voice over IP solutions, it’s not just employee-to-employer communication anymore, it’s employee-to-customer, at a fraction of the cost.” The company has also introduced off-site support for customers, via a service-desk support team, which James says has a massive bearing on reducing mileage.

He adds that utilising the same technologies it offers to clients, such as virtualisation and automation, in its own business, has enabled Puleng to make significant energy savings. “We’ve taken server infrastructure from 15 machines to one through virtualisation and added redundancy and backup. If you compare our old server room to the one running now, it’s like chalk and cheese.

“There are always areas for improvement, and we can be slicker around getting cars off the road,” says James. He points out the audit has provided more visibility into how the business is run. “One thing that has come out of this is a budget for air travel. It’s something we have to do, but there’s a budget for it now, which we never had before.”

For anyone embarking on a green journey, the first step always has to be measuring, says Legg. She stresses that establishing a baseline is vital, in order for subsequent reports to show where there has been emissions growth or reductions. “It’s also helpful to consider other metrics, such as emissions per employee, or per square metre, to compare organisations of different sizes.”

She says they recommended that Puleng sets targets and holds all of the initial data, so in a year’s time when it re-looks at things it knows exactly what metrics were used and can see what’s changed from the baseline. “It’s key that organisations start measuring now if they want to reduce emissions, because at some stage they’ll have to report on this. Unless they actually have a baseline and are measuring against it, there’s no way to manage emissions or measure how they’ve changed.

“Many companies are daunted, but it’s not rocket science. In most cases, the data is there already, and with a bit of guidance it can be easily accessed and translated,” she explains.

James says Puleng plans to do the audit again next year, as “it’s all good and well you get business owners to take ownership, but if you don’t follow through and measure progress, you might as well not have done it in the first place”.

He adds that banks and financial institutions are showing thought leadership on these issues and beginning to consider it in tenders and proposals. “They’ve come out with an approach of ‘how green are you? If you have a strong carbon audit and very strong BEE credentials, it shows you are a business which demonstrates social responsibility; not only in terms of the people you employ, but towards the environment we’re trying to save.”

James advises other businesses to conduct an emissions assessment because the exercise is pretty painless and you can’t manage what don’t quantify. “In this day and age, you have to understand where you are in terms of carbon emissions and plan some quick and easy gains to get on the roadmap.

“It doesn’t have to involve years of workshops and planning; many companies are already running the right solutions and just need to accelerate them. Virtualisation, for example, is one way of making substantial energy savings, power management is another.

‘”People have to get on with it, because it will be mandated soon. Understand where you are today, plan some quick gains, which is easy with the right technology, and underneath it implement a real, underlying, strategic roadmap for sustainability.”

Although the climate change conference in Copenhagen failed to achieve its objectives of a binding treaty around carbon emission reductions, sustainable business is here to stay and companies need to gear themselves towards a carbon constrained future. 

In the past couple of weeks, investors representing $13 trillion in assets issued a statement stressing the importance of concluding a legally-binding agreement including a global emission reduction target of between 50 and 85% by 2050.  The same group urged investors, businesses, and governments not to wait for a global treaty before taking action. Actions should be taken now to curb emissions.

In South Africa, due to the lack of binding legislation, measuring and voluntarily reporting on emissions has been left to the remit of companies on the JSE Top 100 as part of the Carbon Disclosure Project, as well as environmentally conscious companies recognising their responsibilities in this respect.  In 2009, 68% of the JSE Top 100 voluntarily disclosed their carbon emissions, ranking only behind Brazil in disclosure response globally.

Mid market businesses are now starting to recognise their social responsibilities in this regard as well and are starting to take action.  TheCarbonReport.com, an offering developed by local company sustainableIT, now allows companies, irrespective of size, to measure and report on emissions through validated processes.  “The solution is geared towards businesses wanting to establish their environmental impact and is the first step towards embracing a sustainable future”, explains Teresa Legg, Director at sustainableIT.  “The cost and complexity of emissions reporting has previously prohibited many businesses from participating in voluntary emissions reporting.  Through the tooling we have developed and our expertise we have been able to dramatically reduce costs to the client.  Every business, no matter how large or small contributes in some way to climate change and more accountability and responsible practice needs to be adopted ”, she elaborates.

Businesses are certainly starting to take action.  Puleng Technologies, a company of fewer than 100 staff has engaged sustainableIT to quantify their carbon footprint. “Although we are a services based company, we still produce emissions with the energy we consume, the paper we use and our travel, both commute and business related.  We recognise that we have an environmental impact and we need to measure it so that we can manage it”, explains Steve James, Director at Puleng.  “It is not just about being green, it is about developing a programme of energy efficiency and cost reductions and TheCarbonReport will provide us with the baseline we will use”, James states.

Aubrey Davies, Managing Director of Cape based ISP, I-Soft Net agrees.  “We are relatively small but measuring our impact has two benefits.  Firstly it allows us to concentrate on areas where we can become more efficient, with a baseline to measure against.  Secondly it allows us to create awareness with our staff which will result in downstream environmental benefits within their sphere of influence”.

With an estimated 900 000 small and medium enterprises in South Africa, the opportunities to reduce emissions within South Africa are exponential.  With energy costs continuing to rise, more businesses are expected to focus on energy and carbon reduction initiatives.  However, companies are encouraged to measure first to ensure that ROI is delivered and benefits are quantified.

 Government’s proposal to cut SA’s greenhouse gas emissions will force businesses to become more energy efficient, with IT leading the way to a low carbon economy.

 This is according to Tim James, founding director of Sustainable IT, who says government’s offer is very achievable, even with the current investment Eskom has in coal-based power.

The Presidency has offered to cut emissions by 34% below expected levels by 2020, and 42% by 2025, as climate negations get under way in Copenhagen. The pledge is conditional to a fair and effective agreement under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as financial and technological support from developed countries.

“The offer is a reduction in emissions intensity, rather than a reduction from a stated baseline, which makes it less compelling. But it certainly is a massive help towards achieving a deal in Copenhagen,” says James.

He adds that organisations will need to become more energy efficient, with pricing levels dictating this, irrespective of the target that may or may not be set in Copenhagen.

“Setting aggressive targets for SA business will force a reduction in carbon intensity within manufacture, which will stand SA companies in very good stead in a carbon-competitive future landscape,” says James.

These reduction figures are in line with SA’s Long-Term Mitigation Scenarios, released last year to set a strategic direction for the country’s climate policy.

Angus Rowe and Siegfried Brits, from sustainability solutions provider impactChoice SA, say the reduction targets would bring future emission levels back to almost the current level, at around 450 million tons of CO2 per year. “It seems a very ambitious target, but not impossible to achieve given stringent regulations that need to be put into place,” they add.

“The execution of such an ambitious target will no doubt lead to a cap-and-trade system whereby emissions levels will have to be allocated to economic sectors and companies within these sectors,” add Brits and Rowe.

They explain that allocations under a cap-and-trade system will leave especially large emitters with an allowable cap of emissions, while the surplus will have to be made good by buying carbon credits.

“While burdensome on emitters, this system will facilitate funding and the impetus to grow green projects on a proliferated basis, which in turn will deliver green energy for the future.”

 James points out that energy has been very cheap, particularly for corporate and industrial SA, meaning there was no real incentive to adopt low carbon solutions. “It has to change in future – our very livelihoods depend on it.

“What many fail to realise is that the opportunity for SA is enormous. Because our economy is already energy constrained, embracing and investing in clean tech and clean energy now will give us a massive competitive advantage in the future.”

According to James, ICT has an enormous role to play in moving SA towards a low-carbon economy. “IT allows us to be smart. It allows us to measure, monitor and, ultimately, reduce.

“IT is all about innovation, being efficient and adaptation. The fight against climate change demands this and IT will be at the forefront of much of the new design and innovation that is required.”

Brits and Rowe add that several factors are converging to provide a strong impetus for energy transformation in the country. “Given that the South African targets be ratified in the new global warming treaty at Copenhagen, together with the current and expected future electricity crisis in SA, companies will have no choice but to adapt all of their strategies to incorporate sustainability objectives – else business as usual will be going out of business.”

President Jacob Zuma will head to the climate negotiations next week to meet with heads of state to broker a global climate deal beyond 2012, when the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol comes to an end.