FirstCarbon Solutions and CDP Expand Partnership

A partnership: Working together since 2011, FirstCarbon Solutions (FCS) and CDP have expanded their already strong partnership. As organizations that share a common mission and recognition that sustainability matters, FCS and CDP are focused on helping companies advance their business practices not only to improve the environment, but also to strengthen an organization’s bottom line. In fact, in 2012, 29% of the CDP reporting suppliers (about 700 companies) realized $13.7 billion in savings after implementing more sustainable business practices.

By way of background, FCS has scored more than 50% of all responses for CDP and offers companies a performance review to determine their quality of disclosure and the level of climate change performance. Today, CDP and FCS announced the expansion of a partnership to increase services that measure supply chain carbon management and extend sustainability scoring to CDP’s climate change program in the Nordic and Benelux regions, Australia, New Zealand and India. The partnership extension also includes FCS’ acknowledgement as a CDP Silver Carbon Calculation Partner, Gold Consultancy Partner and CDP Response Check provider.

Improving Climate Performance: Businesses and governments are now beginning to manage the relatively new challenge of climate change. Extreme weather events, water scarcity, biodiversity loss and other global warming-related issues in the environment have increasingly affected organizations around the world to fully recognize and mitigate the impact of climate change, and modify their current operation methods. Failure to do so will increase risk, decrease future ROI, and negatively impact a company’s reputation as being good global citizens. When adopting climate change solutions, companies should include air quality and climate change analysis to emission inventories and risk management.

Putting climate change insights at the heart of strategic business, investment and policy decisions, CDP and its programs, including the Supply Chain and the Investor programs, motivates companies to disclose their impacts on the environment and natural resources and take action to reduce them.

The CDP Supply Chain program includes climate change risks and opportunities across the supply chain. Organizations and participating suppliers develop and implement carbon and climate change approaches that help increase business innovations, improve customer relationships and drive cost savings. The CDP Investor program (backed by more than 722 institutional investors) gives investors access to a global source of year-on-year information that supports long-term objective analysis. This information comprises evidence and insight into companies’ greenhouse gas emissions, water usage and strategies for managing climate change, water and deforestation risks.

In order to protect their long term investments, business investors must act quickly to diminish the long-term risks caused from environmental externalities. CDP has gathered the largest global collection of self-reported environmental information, enabling companies around the world to measure, disclose, manage and share climate change, forest and water information. As a result, these initiatives play a critical role in driving emissions reductions, improving water and forest management and triggering corporate behavioral change.

The Importance of Transparency:

Transparency is crucial to reducing emissions, driving operational efficiencies and reinforcing business sustainability. Sustainability requires a company to look both internally and externally, because without transparency a business has no true visibility into potential risks and rewards. Sustainability efforts require the manipulation of large amounts of data from sources that are diverse and contrasting. As such, this expanded partnership will continue to bring insight and analysis to the global market that will significantly benefit companies through increasing scores and reducing environmental impact through data and information. In order to achieve transparency, there needs to be, in every organization:

1.)    Data Identification: Identify boundaries, data sources and gaps.

2.)    Data Collection: Determine what information is most important in order to prioritize sustainability efforts.

3.)    Data-Driven Decision Making: Through informed analyses, organizations can determine the most important sustainability issues and take appropriate action.

4.)    Data Monitoring: Monitoring ongoing operations allows organizations to measure results which allow them to maintain and improve sustainable practices to help manage and apply that data.

Informing Decision Making:

Accurate and timely data collection is fundamental to making correct decisions and driving efficiencies in any business. To guarantee the accuracy, quality and timeliness of environmental information, organizations need to determine what model is best for them (internally or outsourcing), and how best to manage the entire process including the preliminary, ongoing data gathering and monitoring and standardization processes. Standardization can refer to several things, but should contain consistency in: what’s measured (or normalization of data), year-over-year, and context with specific metrics used. The key is for organizations and stakeholders to align behind the critical issues and relevant data; prioritize data identification to fit company needs; collect data into standard formats; and finally find the best solutions to help manage and organize the data to continue the process of defining decision making.

With sustainability becoming an increasingly important topic, this expanded partnership is a significant leap in sustainability for global companies, the community and the environment as it will ultimately provide companies with the information they need to reduce their risks, improve ROI, and mitigate environmental impacts.

FirstCarbon Solutions helps clients save time, reduce costs, optimize resource use and drive operational efficiencies. Our team recognizes the myriad of sustainability challenges that organizations face in an increasingly regulation-cognizant world, as such we strive to give you a clear picture of your environmental performance. With more than 30 years of environmental and sustainability consulting experience, FirstCarbon Solutions has offices throughout Asia, Europe, Australia and North America to ensure we meet our clients’ ever-evolving environmental and compliance needs in energy, air and carbon management; environmental assessments and planning; supply and life cycle assessments; permitting and compliance; software and data processing. For more information, contact us: