Enough Stick Already, Where’s The Carrot?

I hosted a table last week at the DC Solutions Lab 2010 on the topic of corporate stakeholder relationships and whether stakeholders incent corporations to act sustainably.

The breadth and quality of the discussion was impressive. I was struck with a consensus we reached that individuals, in their roles as customers, employees and stakeholder do not, for the most part, act on their declared values in their role as members of civil society. I am sure you could find many people filling up their Memorial Day Weekend gas tanks in a BP station (wearing their customer hat) while proclaiming their anger with BP (wearing their member of civil society hat).

I admitted to having bought a toaster oven on-line the previous night without paying any attention to the sustainability credentials of the various vendors.

There is a clear ‘stick’ incentive for companies not to end up with a disaster on their hands that leads to consumer punishment - the risk component of corporate responsibility. But much less evidence of the ‘carrot’ incentive - reward for good actions.

Participants expressed hope that up and coming generations would do more to reward corporations for being sustainable with their buying, employment and share-ownership behaviors. But we had not reached that tipping point yet.

As a CR practitioner, avoiding risk is important but ultimately it’s a weaker incentive to do better than responding to reward. Risk mitigation sets a baseline, but does not incent leadership. Who knows how many bad things CR departments across the corporate world have helped companies avoid? It’s hard to build a business case to do more based on what didn’t happen. But when customers, investors and prospective employees flock to you because you do good, go above and beyond….that will really accelerate sustainable behavior. Roll on the tipping point.

I am hoping to have someone lead a table on this theme at each Solutions Lab in the program. We have run one in each of DC and New York so far. You can see my full take on the conclusions here and from there track back to the raw notes taken during the meeting itself.

Learning to Dance: Discussing Ways to Improve Partnerships for Sustainability

"When Giants Learn To Dance" was the title of Rosabeth Moss Kanter's classic book about how corporations can be giants and innovators. Guy Clark's muscial advice is "You got to dance like nobody's watchin". But what if you are a large corporation, your dance is sustainability, and everyone is your dance partner and wants you to dance to their tune - your employees, shareholders, customers, and neighbors? This is the topic I'd like us to discuss during the 2010 Solutions Labs.

Last year I attended the DC Unconference organized by EDF, Ashoka and the Green Innovation in Business Network as part of a series across the country. The conference topic is driving green innovation in business. An ‘unconference’ is different from a traditional conference in that the agenda is created by participants at the beginning of the day. Anyone can bid to run a session as long as people are interested in attending it and most sessions are moderated discussions rather than presentations. As you can imagine, it is pretty free form and I found that invigorating.

This year the series has been renamed Solutions Labs 2010 and is running in nine locations across the country. They are a great opportunity for corporate responsibility practitioners to gain input from a broad range of stakeholders from outside of the corporation.

I am interested in using the opportunity presented by the Labs to explore the relationship between corporations and civil society on sustainability - the sustainability dance. Are those relationships well positioned to deliver sustainable solutions and behavior? (We might think for example about the contrasting relationships between the company and the employee, the shareholder and the customer). What changes would we like to see in the corporations themselves and in the relationships between the corporations and the stakeholder to accelerate positive change.

I am hoping to encourage attendees at different events across the country to run and attend sessions on that theme and record and post the findings. It will be valuable to build on each-other’s findings and also to identify commonalities and contrasts and see if we can explain them. We have some volunteers to lead sessions already and I will be running a session myself in DC on May 27th.

Are you attending a Solutions Lab in your city? Would you be interested in leading a session on these topics and collaborating in posting and comparing the outcomes? Leave a comment below and include your name and location if you would like to lead or help with a session, or add your name to the Wiki. The potential for diversity of approaches promises to be one of the most valuable and exciting aspects of the event series but for those who want it, we will prepare some questions to help leaders frame the discussion.

Full details for the series and how to register at Solutions Labs 2010 (and yes that is a photo of me from last year’s event. Don't worry, I'm not dancing!)

Naked Men in Locker Rooms and Why I Think SMART Objectives Can Undermine Sustainable Behavior

SMART Objectives are a popular management tool in business and have been for some time now. If you are not familiar with the concept, SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timebound. Typically, SMART objectives are metrics cascaded through an organization that set objectives for individual employees. They are used to manage performance and contribute towards determining pay and bonus.

SMART objectives simplify an individual’s contribution to a metric, measure performance against that metric over defined time periods and isolate the contribution of individuals independent of the whole.

If you compensate an individual according to their performance against a metric, they will get the message and focus on that metric. If it is timebound, then they will meet the objective within the time defined, losing sight of the implications on the next time period. This can make it hard to take account of the more holistic impacts of one’s activities and creates counterproductive behaviors. It reinforces a behavior that the whole doesn’t matter. And isolating the individual’s performance to their metrics distracts from seeing the bigger picture.

Employees are pretty savvy – after all, that’s why we picked them. At its worst, if you judge an employee based solely on performance against an individual metric the individual will find a way to meet and exceed the specific achievement of that metric perhaps even at the expense of the underlying intent.

In a post back in February, “Legal doesn’t equal sustainable”, I commented that sustainable thinking requires seeing both sides of an issue, resolving problems holistically and looking for solutions that none of the participants may have conceived of alone. I think SMART objectives, overzealously applied, undermine this approach and companies need to get smarter at how they are applied.

Of course I understand that the opposite end of the spectrum – judging everyone by the performance of the whole - can lead to mediocrity. But I think companies have gone too far the other way. I wrote a piece recently for GE’s 2008 Citizenship report on metrics and particularly the role of ROI in sustainability. In that post I stated that I believe ROI has role to play to inform, but not to lead our business sustainability decisions. I think the same of SMART objectives. They have a role to play to inform, but not to lead our actions.

And as for “naked men in locker rooms?” Well, I keep getting asked about the hit rate on my blog. Apparently that’s an important measure of how successful it is. I heard once through the grapevine that ‘naked men in locker rooms’ is a popular search term and I figured if I added that term to the title, I’d see a boost in traffic.

Just goes to show, that if you only focus on one metric, you could jeopardize the value that you bring as a whole.

Guest Post: Inter-Business Network - Sustainability Lessons from Japan

Shizuo Fukada has developed a response to my April 09 post “Sustainability Lessons From Japan” Fukada-san is a colleague on the Global Leadership Network of AccountAbility. http://www.accountability21.net/

Shizuo (Ricky) Fukada is President of Inter-Business Network (IBN), a Japanese company specializing in CSR and Sustainability. Until June 30^th ‘09 he was corporate advisor to the Board of Directors Office at Omron Corporation , which he joined in 1994 as associate director of the Corporate Communications Headquarters. He has a total of 34 years experience in business, including 23 years of overseas assignments to the United States. He has been involved in many CSR initiatives including being Chair of Keidanren’s(JBF) Council for Better Corporate Citizenship since 2000.

Corporate management and governance style in each developed country is based on many factors and elements, but in my opinion, cultures and history are the biggest elements. The characteristics of Japanese corporate management style are largely based on historical agricultural background and wisdom in team work and collaboration, and in harmonious relations and equality in sharing harvested grains. Those are the basis to consider, when you discuss about employer/employee relations and about a smaller gap of income between the employer and employee. In Japan we have an "equality of the result" philosophy rather than "equality of opportunity" (like in the States). For a successful outcome, one shouldn’t be in conflict with the cultural philosophy. The more I experience in business, the more I believe that you cannot just imitate other's style or methods to manage a company: The challenge then is, what methodology to use, when you make investment overseas like from Japan into the US?

Obviously, there are pros and cons of the style and management systems of different companies in different countries. As we all experience at this time, global financial crisis and business turmoil, caused largely by lack of financial international systems to manage flow of money and other corporate activities. So, we are now in an era where it is not the case of US vs. Japanese corporate governance - which is better or not. We need to learn more about those differences, to wise up, to come up with new innovative management systems to bring corporate operations under control. Global competition is becoming more complex and we need Harvard-type wisdom and epoch-making innovations.

The role of Metrics and ROI in Corporate Responsibility

“Metrics, metrics and more metrics. In many ways metrics drive the success of business. Multiple variables can be condensed to the common denominator of dollars and cents, pounds and pence. Many business failures could have been avoided for want of a business case.

But, the specificity of metrics also allow us to persuade ourselves that there is more science and more certainty than there may really be and that we fully understand the complex interactions of the real world. There are solid business cases behind some of the most spectacular business failures - perhaps those where metrics were allowed to lead decisions rather than inform them.

This dilemma is magnified when viewed through the lens of corporate responsibility.”

This post is an external perspective I was invited to write on the topic of ROI and metrics, for GE's just published 2008 Citizenship Report "Resetting Responsibilities."

The rest of the piece follows:

“If we allow them to, metrics can divorce us from the human impact of our decisions. Corporate responsibility addresses exactly those issues that are the biggest challenge for metrics. Corporate responsibility involves taking account of human well being, of impact on communities outside of the normal expertise of the business, of complex interactions, of shared responsibility and of long-term cumulative effects.

But corporate responsibility will be relegated to the fringes if it does not add value to the core business. The biggest impact of most companies on society and on the environment is through the products and services they put into the market. To engage here, we need to be able to articulate compelling and sound rationales of the benefit for the business as well as for the good achieved in the community. And to remain relevant we need to be able to demonstrate this value using the same tools of quantification as the mainstream business, including return on investment.

Perhaps this is amplified most when the return on investment for the business and the benefit for the community are in conflict. Responsible businesses must have the courage to identify, articulate and quantify both sides of that conflict. In these situations though, to implement corporate responsibility fully is to embrace that our decision-making will not be conveniently packaged in a return on investment calculation captured in a spreadsheet and some metrics. As with business as a whole, metrics must not lead our decisions, they must inform them."

Why Weren't We at the Top ?

C-suite executives are becoming increasingly interested in how their organization fares in sustainability awards and rankings.

In the last few weeks I have participated in discussions on various rankings and methodologies for assessing the sustainability credentials of a company. The context varies considerably from a closed group of corporations developing a scorecard type methodology for their own use to a media company and investor analyst who work together to publish a yearly ranking. With such a broad scope out there, where should the C-suite and the sustainability team be focusing their attention ?

BT has faired fairly well in these various recognition initiatives. Last Wednesday, November 25th, BT won the ‘Green Award’ at this year’s World Communications Awards (WCA) in London. As I posted in October, Gartner included BT very favorably in a report on the greenest IT vendors worldwide. In September the company won one of Oracle’s 2008 'Empower The Green Enterprise' awards and earlier in that same month was named Global Super Sector Leader for the telecommunications sector of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the eighth year running. This alone illustrates the broad scope of organizations running such initiatives.

The interest in rankings is considerable right now. In speaking with colleagues in other companies, I know that c-suite executives in many companies want to know why their company is sometimes overlooked or further down the rankings than they expected. But even some large companies are finding it hard to resource all the different requests for information required by some of these ranking programs.

The different awards and rankings programs serve different purposes and over the Thanksgiving break I had some time to reflect on the differences. In some forthcoming posts I plan to comment on some thoughts from my involvement.

False Economies

Cynics say that corporate sustainability strategies are all very well when times are good. But, they ask, how long will firms continue these policies now that the financial downturn is hitting us harder? Actually, I believe these strategies becomes more, not less important. I've recently written an article on this topic for GreenBiz.com. Read more here.

Also, you may want to check out my previous post, Is the Economic Downturn Good or Bad for Sustainability?

Is the Economic Downturn Good or Bad for Sustainability?

When the economy takes a dive, companies take a serious look at their resources and cut down on non-essential spending. Will sustainability programs be considered as an area to cut back on?

The value of sustainability programs are clear - reduced energy costs, increased productivity and efficiencies. I believe companies that are serious about sustainability will continue, if not step up, their focus. At BT, being green has reduced our energy costs, especially so when it comes to energy efficiency, and increased our energy security – so why wouldn’t we step up our efforts? The corporate customers I work with see the same benefits.

At a more strategic level, it is important to consider the impact this crisis will have on the willingness of shareholders to take a longer term perspective of corporate success. Whether considering social or environmental sustainability, I have always felt that taking only a short term perspective on investment is generally to the detriment of substantive sustainability strategies. Just the term ‘sustainability’ really says it all. I believe long-term sustainability initiatives reap true value for a company and its investors.

So a key question is will this economic downturn will act as a catalyst for investors to take a longer term view that gives more support to sustainable practices in the companies in which they invest? In my mind the jury is out on this one. I welcome your thoughts on the topic.

A Week Where Solar was in the Ascendant

From my perspective, last week was a good week for the sun.

We are in the process of picking vendors for a BT Americas employee solar program. As recently as last Wednesday, conversations with the short listed vendors reflected the prevailing view that the expired Investment Tax Credit (ITC) would not be renewed until some time next year. ITC offers residential solar customers an offset against income tax. By Friday morning, the credits were not only renewed, but were significantly expanded as part of the bailout bill signed into law.

Meanwhile, despite the economic situation facing the country, both the key providers in our corporate implementation at our head office in El Segundo were the beneficiaries of major investments. Our integrator, EI Solutions was acquired by Suntech, one of the largest solar panel manufacturers in the world and our finance provider, Solar Power Partners (SPP), announced that it has closed $100M in financing and all this before the ITC extension was announced on Friday morning.

Visible construction began on the installation in our headquarters parking lot (previous work was below ground on the foundations). You can see it here. Select ‘previous week’ in the ‘animation viewer’ to see the supporting pillars going in at the far end of the lot towards the end of the animation.

And closer to home (my home at least), was the annual Metro Washington DC tour of Solar Homes. We are certainly no California, but it was an impressive event with over 50 homes displayed in Maryland, Virginia and DC over two days. I visited a couple of the houses in Virginia where there were dozens of people walking through. Some were clearly dedicated environmentalists, but many regular folks attended who are starting to consider solar for their homes and wanted to see it in practice.

How Many Mobile Phone Users Does it Take to Power a Light Bulb?

It depends on the screen technology and the type of light bulb.

I spoke at the Green ICT Workshop of the European American Business Council last week. The main theme was how the role of ICT in the environment should inform government policy. It was interesting being in a forum that included both European and American perspectives. Although there are some contrasts in approach, the overwhelming sense was of the common ground of the potential for the industry to help drive energy efficiency and reduce emissions.

In the process, speakers shared some interesting statistics that show how much potential there is for our industry to continually reduce emissions. For example, Jennifer Sanford of Cisco noted that the carbon emissions of a single plane flight are equivalent to 97 telepresence sessions.

What about the mobile phone users to whom I first referred?

Asfaw Negeri from Ericsson said that today’s mobile phones produce about 24kg of CO2 per year – already a significant order of magnitude decrease on older generations of handsets, and forecast to continue decreasing. 24kg CO2 for the year is about the same as driving a mid-sized car for an hour.

Cheryl Schwartzman, speaking for Qualcomm, described one way some of those future reductions might be achieved. Their new Mirasol display screens for mobile phones and hand-held devices consume 1mW to operate, compared with 240 mW for the standard screens that we have on our phones today. Cheryl explained that screens are such a significant part of the drain on displays that the benefits can increase battery life by 30%.

And where do the light bulbs come into it ?

Bill Morin from Applied Materials referred to the potential future energy reductions from LED-based light bulbs, according to the Next-Generation Lighting Industry Alliance. LEDs are anticipated to be twice as efficient as even CFLs.

Loads of potential from known technologies, let alone from what is yet to come.

Why Value the Green IT Market ? It's All About Timing

I am frequently asked what I think the green ICT market is worth. This question has always troubled me.

Market value is determined by the number of potential customers and how much they are prepared to pay. However, a company that holds that catastrophic climate change will occur if emissions are not kept below very challenging thresholds must believe that close to 100% of the market needs to go green to abate those emissions and minimize that risk.

That said, it is a necessary step in business to put a value on a market. At a strategic level, it is a contributing factor towards assessing if that market is a priority compared to others you could serve. At the operational level, it allows you to make determinations on business cases bidding for limited investment money available for individual products and services.

By articulating a green market value smaller than its total market value, a company is accepting that not all customers buy with green criteria taken into account. What troubles me is the implication that it isn’t necessary to plan energy efficiency into all product design right now. From a business perspective, if you make the investment and develop the products and services ahead of their time, you may not gain enough business to cover the investment and so lose money or even go under, albeit in a blaze of moral glory. Someone else copies you a few months later when the market is ready and reaps the benefits as the second mover. If we all leave it too long though, or if the market realizes too late, then we get catastrophic climate change, and we all lose.

This dilemma is reflected in a recent report by The Register - “Dell: We went green too early”.

Floating Data Centers

There are some creative data center ideas floating around. Google has apparently applied for a patent for a “water-based data center” that uses the ocean to provide power and cooling.

Bill St. Arnaud has been arguing for some time in his blog that, rather than bring the electricity from where it is generated to where the data center need is, we should instead bring the data center to where the electricity is generated. The underlying principle is that it is more energy-efficient to transport data over optical networks than to transport energy over power networks, so you minimize the distance you transport the power, and extend the distance you transport the data.

Perhaps we could combine these two ideas and position floating data centers underneath offshore wind turbines.

Of course, we also need to ensure we pay attention to unintended consequences. While discussing the Google floating data center idea recently at a sustainability meeting, I was asked whether data center equipment "buzzed" and, if so, would a floating data center interfere with the communications of whales. As the proposed barges use seawater for cooling, the average temperature around the barge would be higher than that of the surrounding water. Perhaps, someone speculated, that would attract algae and create a coating on the barge which would act as a sound absorber, so the whales would be OK!

Although I have presented these ideas in a light-hearted spirit, I think they, and the subsequent exchange, illustrate both the immense scope of the possibilities ahead of us to reduce emissions if we allow ourselves to think outside of the box. But, also the complex interactions that result, and which need to be taken into account as we move forward.

Global Super Sector Leader

The 2008 results of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index came out on September 6th. BT is the Global Super Sector Leader for the Telecommunications sector of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. For eight years running. And it is a grand sounding title if ever I heard one, per the supporting commentary on BT from the DJSI team.

Criteria for the award cover economic, social and environmental sustainability dimensions. Of the 12 primary criteria, BT was the lead company in the sector on only four, so we cannot rest on our laurels as that leaves 8 criteria where at least one other company in the sector is ahead of us – just not the same company for each criterion.

In fact, I recall from last year that the DJSI commentary mentioned the competition was heating up (my words not theirs) and other players were narrowing our lead. This is all healthy competition, of course, because it means that the industry is forging ahead on sustainability. But, if sustainability is aligned with business benefit (and I believe it is), then it is a competitive advantage, too, and we want to stay ahead of our competitors.

On that note, I don’t see any American headquartered companies in the telecommunications sector. I assume that means they didn’t apply, but I don’t know why that would be. I see plenty in the technology sector including Cisco, Dell, HP, Intel and IBM (Intel is the Super Sector Leader).

I'll be discussing this report and the impact of ICT on the environment on September 24 at the European-American Business Council's Smart Energy Panel on Green ICT in Washington, DC.

Good Carbon Emissions from Starbucks

I just picked up a copy of a carbon emissions leaflet from Starbucks produced by 'Good' magazine. It is the first in a series and is simply a great graphic depiction of the US carbon chain from both the producer and consumer ends. Although you can see it on the web, it is worth dropping by for a copy since it better lends itself to viewing on a large sheet of paper.

This is a strong example of a non-media company using its brand image to inform and influence the wider community on a sustainability topic. Coffee drinkers are invited to follow-up at Starbucks' social networking site. It will be interesting to see what impact it might have on customers who are climate change skeptics.

Computerworld’s Green IT Checklist: Make Room for the Biggest Opportunity

Following on from my previous post, "The IT Green Team – What’s Next?" as one of the finalists in the Computerworld Green IT Awards, BT was included in some of the real life examples in Mary Pratt’s Computerworld report “A green IT checklist: From first steps to stretch goals."

It is a great checklist, which, as the title says, is arranged in categories ranging from low-hanging fruit (limit paper use) through stretch (monitor and manage data center usage) to longer-term (build green). But, I still think it misses the biggest opportunity for the ICT vertical. Direct emissions are important at 2-3% of world emissions but, in order of magnitude, the most material contribution we can make is what I call leveraged, or indirect, emissions reductions. According to SMART 2020 these represent as much as a 15% reduction opportunity in global emissions. (And SMART 2020 is one of the most conservative reports on the topic. Others identify even higher potential for savings).

As much as IT departments should be managing and reducing direct footprint, it must not be at the expense of also thinking more strategically about the contribution their services can bring into their organizations to leverage improvements in the broader energy efficiency of the company. I therefore would have liked to have seen some reference to these included in both the stretch and long-term goals, but it’s a great start and the core premise of the report should be commended.

The IT Green Team – What’s Next ?

There are IT "Green Teams" at every one of our customers, and they are making great headway at tackling such things as vendor selection, virtualization and renewable energy.

Sustainability initiatives launched from central corporate responsibility teams made evident the synergies between sustainability and business opportunity. In response, functional business units picked up the mantle. Thus, we saw the establishment of green teams in IT and also procurement, fleet management, product design, etc.

This allowed the role of the central team to become more strategic, and less operational. It worked particularly quickly in the environmental space, where environmental results require effective action at the operational level.

So where does the IT Green Team go from here?

I think we will see the same evolution continue. As the operational benefits of the IT green team’s direct energy reduction and cost-saving initiatives prove their value to the business, they become business as usual. Energy consumption and emissions will become one of the standard criteria for decision-making for everyone within IT. The IT green team can, in turn, start to think less tactically and more strategically (thin client vs thick client; outsource or outsource data center operations; new IT technologies that will improve the energy efficiency of the core business).

The IT green team should be encouraging this evolution. Push the tactical initiatives out into the business and create some space for strategic planning.

Avoided Emissions are Just Fat-Free Equivalents

I am always suspicious of companies that quote their "emissions avoided" as the primary measure of their environmental achievements, i.e., "If we hadn’t done this or that then our emissions would have been so much worse."

As supplementary information to reduced emissions, avoided emissions can be a valuable measure to help employees, customers and other stakeholders understand the relative contribution of energy reduction activities.

We do this at BT. Our absolute emissions have been reduced from 1.2 M to 0.6M tonnes CO2 since 1996. In fact, last year we avoided 97k tonnes CO2 through our use of teleconferencing and about 50k tonnes through encouraging telecommuting. That helps employees really understand the contribution they are making to the whole, when they avoid traveling for a meeting and attend by teleconference instead – and that understanding is a great motivator. But, what really counts is the 0.6M tonnes CO2 absolute emissions. The avoided number is meaningless without the absolute reduction achieved. So, next time you see a company quote an achievement in terms of "avoided," look for the absolute number and, absent that, don’t give the avoided number any credence.

So, what does that have to do with "fat-free?" It reminds me of the claims I sometimes see on food stating, "95% fat-free." It’s the emissions that count, just like it’s the 5% fat that counts. The 95% avoided, while perhaps technically accurate, only tells half the story!

Sunny Side Up

In February, we held the groundbreaking for a 2000 module solar PV installation for our American HQ in El Segundo, Calif. We had some honored guests at the groundbreaking, including HRH Prince Andrew, The Duke of York.

Once completed, the system is expected to generate approximately 917,000 kWh per year and reduce carbon emissions by 642,000 pounds annually, which represents at least 15% of the site’s emissions. You can find more details in the press release .

We have had some delays that I gather impact many building projects, and most of the work since has been on the foundation. so there has been little to see. But now, at last, panels are starting appear on the roof and there is a camera in place monitoring progress.

Click on "animation viewer" and you will see progress from the current day. Even better, select "previous week" in the animation window to see the progress over the past week. I feel like a kid with a new toy!

When the roof is done, the camera will be rotated to cover the parking lot where the tracking panels will be placed. At the moment, the vendor is working on foundation there, so not much to see yet, but I will add the occasional post when there is some especially good progress to share.

BT's Carbon Stabalization Intensity Target

Large corporations can produce long lists of great environmental initiatives and large claims of reduced emissions. Smaller companies have shorter such lists and fewer reduced emissions, but maybe their efforts are proportionately greater – how does one really know?

What really counts is how much a company contributes towards solving the problem. And the test? What would the outcome be if every company did likewise?

In the climate change space, the desired outcome is climate stabilization. From the 2007 Bali Climate Declaration by Scientists, there is pretty good consensus over the maximum allowable level of carbon in the atmosphere and the 50% reduction in absolute emission levels that needs to be achieved to get there.

It is fairly straightforward to calculate what that looks like in relation to anticipated GDP growth. An 80% reduction in global emissions per unit of GDP by 2050 is required - slightly higher for developed countries, slightly lower for developing countries. So, if we can work out our contribution to GDP, corporations should be in a position to work out what it really means to do their part.

BT has started down this path with our recently announced CSI – Carbon Stabilization Intensity target. The intensity is calculated in relation to our "value-added" as a company. Value-added is a measure of a corporation’s contribution to GDP – a published figure in the UK. Consistent with the reduction required from developed countries, our objective is to reduce emissions per unit of value-added by 80% by 2020. If everyone does the same, we should be well on-track for the reductions required.

This changes the paradigm for sustainability from one in which we judge a company’s actions by how long their list of actions or how sizable their emissions avoided, to one in which action can be planned and assessed within the context of solving the larger problem.

Postscript: August 2009 - A report from the CDC The Carbon Chasm highlights that for the most part even leading companies are not doing enough to avert catastrophic climate change.

Postscript: November 2009 - Autodesk has announced a target using a very similar approach called C-FACT - Corporate Finance Approach to Climate-stabilizing Targets. Read a guest post from Autodesk's Emma Stewart on their new target.

Rain-Powered Energy ?

In Sensing the Environment with ICT on July 7th, I noted that "We need to look towards the development of very low-cost wireless devices that can be distributed widely, last indefinitely and run independently of the electricity grid". I had sun-powered devices in mind, but it seems that there is a potential complement to this with rain-powered devices. "French scientists have built a piezoelectric material that generates voltage when it is bent by the impact of a raindrop. Large drops can generate enough power to run small outdoor sensors" (Popular Mechanics May 2008). A more scientific description can be found at Physorg.com.

Don’t think that this will bring enough power to be an alternative to solar or wind power for large scale energy use. But, if it is enough to support an outdoor sensor, it provides a complementary capability for remote sensing devices to provide monitoring of environmental and other important sustainability criteria. There might be applications to the agricultural industry and oil and gas sector, among others.