Think beyond the carbon label
2nd July 2007 by Tim Kitchin
If we are to trade our way out of climate change, consumers are going to need to make much better environmental choices. Realistically, they will need a lot more information; honestly produced and simply presented.
With than end in mind, the recent high profile conference on carbon footprinting in the supply chain brought together most of today’s pioneers in either carbon verification or consumer labelling. The LRQA-produced podcast captures a cross-section of their views.
Amidst the excitement that market forces can save the planet, what is so striking was the extend of current confusion of ends and means. While positive and well-intentioned energy is being directed towards carbon-efficient consumerism, there is no consensus on what should be measured, how it should be measured or how it should be communicated; let alone how it should be assured.
While carbon labels are increasingly presented like a key part of the market-led solution, carbon labelling is the wild west of environmentalism. There are few standards and little consensus. Organisations cannot ignore the opportunity, but must develop an approach which minimises wasted effort and makes best use of their existing management systems assets.
Inevitably, as pioneers, many of the conference presenters have been operating as agitators and activists within their organisation - sometimes divorced from established environmental, marketing, CSR and operational processes.
But those who now choose to follow them may have more luxury to learn their lessons. Based on the evidence of this podcast, those starting out today should ask themselves why their organisation should invest in supply-chain footprinting in the first place.
Am I doing this for compliance purposes, or to give me competitive advantage?
If it’s for compliance; ask yourself is the risk really worth the candle? If supply-chain impact really your most significant sustainability impact? And is sustainability itself really a risk for you? Even if it is, is my supply-chain having a real impact or does responsibility lie elsewhere in direct emissions or waste management?
The reason to ask these ‘hard’ questions up front, is that not only can supply-chain footprinting be extremely costly and time-consuming, but it can also endanger your supplier relationships by imposing onerous data collection requirements with minimal return for them.
If you go this route you’ll need to re-integrate a variety of existing cross-cutting process into a single bespoke management system - and fully understand its impact on other business risks.
By contrast, if your aim is to gain competitive marketing advantage, then you will have a different set of questions: Do your consumers genuinely discriminate on environmental grounds? What are your competition planning? How are consumers processing the information you’re providing? Do you think you actually have a story to tell? And do your customer want to listen?
In the emerging ‘greenspace’ of environmental competitiveness the future belongs to the organisations who can do both of the above - continue to transform the sustainability of their corporation AND communicate those improvements at the point of purchase - where consumer decisions get made.
Translating high level sustainability strategy into stakeholder preferences will require a systematic learning approach where materiality principles are embedded from start to finish.
The work should start by considering to corporate risk and CSR strategy, and end with focused gathering of market intelligence.
So before you embark on building an archiceture for carbon labelling, ask yourself: ‘What assures consumers on climate change?’
Tim is a founding partner of 