Environmental management

We've been helping companies manage their environmental impacts since the early ‘90s, growing with them through all the successes and frustrations in between. It's tempting to think of this as ‘old hat'; surely companies have systems for this now, and have minimised everything that can be minimised? But this simply isn't true - technology and investment thresholds change all the time and projects which looked unattractive last year may now be viable. Personnel change and practices that you thought were everyday slowly fall out of use. The external pressure to do more with less - particularly energy - grows all the time.

Our top tip for this topic is to have a ruthless focus on the key impacts to manage, and to find the most important steps to help reduce them. Too many environmental initiatives fail by trying to do too much at once. It's better to tackle one or two big impacts than a list of ten.

When we set improvement targets, we like to do it based on a proper model of the business rather than simply copying the competition. We've developed some analyses for waste and carbon that allow companies to explore the impacts of growth, technology and culture change on their likely future performance. This is particularly important when companies are considering setting absolute reduction targets.

In environmental management - perhaps more than any other in CR - it is vital to bridge the gap between strategy and detail. You can't set a corporate carbon target without knowing where your carbon emissions come from, or what it might cost to reduce them. And the only way to do that is to delve into the detail. We find that we spend a lot of our time translating between facilities managers and the Board, finding ways to help decision-makers distil the details into a framework they can use.

Our work is this area is led by Simon Hodgson.