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Enterprise Carbon and Energy Management Systems Help Achieve Corporate Sustainability

By Daniel Stouffer

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 26May2010 Word count: 498 Viewed: 332 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Organizations face pressure from all sides merely to exist these days, due to a sharply pressurized economic environment, rising costs for energy and calls for sustainability. Among these pressures it is easy to understand why the focus on environmental issues is not front and center. Indeed, four out of five organizations do not fully understand the growing threats to their existence caused by their lack of sustainability.

For an organization to be competitive in an economy that is impacted by carbon restrictions, it must first recognize the situation and consider the adoption of enterprise carbon and energy management systems. These systems enable the company to measure its initial carbon footprint, associated carbon inventories and take steps to deal with the issue.

Corporate sustainability has morphed from a topic of discussion to a priority amongst distributed organizations around the world and specialized systems are being brought into play.

Every organization needs energy to function. When energy is used it emits carbon and such greenhouse gases have been proven to cause long-term environmental damage. As we move forward, every organization must therefore take responsibility for the energy it uses and the carbon emissions it produces. There will undoubtedly be financial repercussions, as well as societal backlash.

It is difficult if not impossible for a typical organization to take steps to reduce its carbon footprint if it is not in possession of all the facts and figures. Each individual asset must be analyzed and its carbon footprint recorded. In a typical distributed and complex organization this can be a challenging prospect. Enterprise carbon and energy management systems have now been designed specifically for this purpose.

It is no longer acceptable to compose a corporate sustainability report that owes more to good public relations than hard facts. Watchdogs, the consumer groups, legislators and the media will begin to pick apart such reports and they must be accurate and based on realistic data.

In the United Kingdom, Parliament has enacted benchmark legislation that will force the largest emitters of carbon to purchase allowances from the government. A "cap and trade" trading platform will be established, the net result of which is that an organization that is not in control of its processes will flounder.

Pres. Obama has indicated his support for market based approaches to climate control. He has already forced federal agencies to begin the process through his executive order. Agencies will need to employ enterprise carbon and energy management systems as they strive to control their energy use and emissions and conform to his directive.

Within a short period of time it is likely that companies will be expected to file a corporate sustainability report, which will be of equal or greater importance to the traditional financial and executive summaries. The sustainability report will represent the company's position in relation to its peers and will have considerable impact on its ability to trade effectively. It seems certain that we are facing a quantum shift in the way that business is conducted.

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