Servicing brand requirements, thought-leaders in the marketing and advertising sectors already see a combined low-carbon consumer and business driver-mix starting to trend.
BBH London is an agency that has recently committed to developing a new sustainability-related client offering, headed up by strategic director Kirsty Saddler, who outlines the reasons and timing for the launch. “A rapid increase of available information and transparency, in large part thanks to digital, has lead people to question the role of business much more heavily and the impact of their decisions as consumers,” she says. “It has also prompted businesses to be more accountable.”
She continues: “Simultaneously, there is increasing understanding and awareness of limits to world resources. Now is a time when both people and business have a motivation, opportunity and need to create change. Government can create the conditions for that change through regulation, but positive lasting change will happen when people and business play a willing part too.”
In the wider global marketplace, there is already strong evidence of demand for lower-carbon goods and services, putting pressure on company performance. Recent research for the Carbon Trust has shown carbon-reduction and associated transparency concerns scored significantly higher among consumers in emerging economies, such as China and Brazil, than the US and UK. The message to companies with export aspirations in these areas is clear: low-carbon is the number-one business model for future growth.
The temptation is to assume that engagement patterns are pretty much the same everywhere, for consumers and companies alike, and that, effectively, all is relative. However, this is not the case. In Australia, while the waters of public perception have very much been muddied by party politics, interestingly, the business community does not share the same view.
Now is a time when both people and business have a motivation, opportunity and need to create change
Co-founder and partner at Sydney-based sustainability strategists and communicators Republic of Everyone, Ben Peacock, observes: “Much of the conversation has been defined by introduction of the carbon tax. What started as a quality attempt at leadership has become a political hot potato, with the opposition blaming its introduction for raising prices on everything from beer to school lunches. This has led to confusion and suspicion from consumers.
“In short, carbon has become politicised. But it’s not all bad news. While the conversation has become messy for politicians and consumers, it is much clearer in the business community. We’re seeing quality leadership from banking and the built environment in particular, measuring, reducing, managing and offsetting their impact as part of sustainability and corporate social responsibility programmes.”
In the UK, while purchasing has come under pressure and suppliers under scrutiny from an increasingly aware and active consumer community, as well as from commercial buyers, the two customer groups have different demands.
Group marketing director at leading hard-landscaping supplier Marshalls, Chris Harrop, explains: “Whereas our trade customers might more typically be concerned with managing risk – as associated with such high-profile supply-chain issues as child labour – the consumer is really looking for benefit. This benefit comes with knowing and feeling that, through their decision-making, they have done ‘good’ as a purchaser.
“Consumers have become far more discerning, exercising their right to choose the ‘best’ deal, balancing cost and benefit. They are looking at ethical, environmental, sustainability credentials much more closely than ever before. We have seen more and more using our online carbon calculator to estimate footprints of products and projects, with this proving a trend across the board – all geo-demographic groups. Put simply, carbon is not an elitist issue; everyone has a footprint, everyone has spending power – given the right information, everyone can make a choice.”
This “feel-good” benefit, as consumer-pull-through force for reducing emissions, does not easily find correlation in cost and efficiency models on the business-push side of the counter. A successful, established market movement offers a useful analogy to help understand how the two might one day become one – Fairtrade.
With Fairtrade, reputational risk provides the company flip-side of the coin to consumer-wellbeing benefit. Historically, however, Fairtrade has worn a human face, seen as directly connected to livelihoods of people, whereas the story of carbon has been wrapped up in impersonal complexities of climate-change science and macroeconomics. The picture, though, is changing.
The more the world comes to appreciate the human cost of climate change, the more carbon becomes a people and a personal issue, and the more high-carbon lifestyles and consumerism appear “unfair” to others. Is it possible to conceive of low-carbon business as the Fairtrade of the future? If so, the sustainable revolution may well be brought about by putting a face, not a price, on carbon.
DATA CENTRES
Big data and smart energy
Data management is business-critical in the modern world. The physical footprint of virtual lives lived online and in the cloud is real and growing. Energy use and emissions reduction in data centres are becoming the focus of significant commercial investment and intense public scrutiny.
There is growing pressure from green NGOs and activists on environmental performance, and the motivation for action is now about a combination of efficiency, cost-saving and “greening” reputations.
Brands involved in “green” data centres are a roll-call of global giants, ranging from Amazon and Apple, to Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and IBM. Of course, performance is mixed. For “renewables and advocacy”, Greenpeace recently scored Google an “A”, Apple a “D” (subsequently raised to a “C”) and Amazon an “F”.
First Verne Global, then Green Mountain, have developed zero-carbon new-build data centres, in Iceland and Norway respectively, taking advantage of cheap renewable energy, plus low ambient temperatures for “free” cooling. However, just as population growth relies on retrofit of existing housing to meet demand, so growth in the digital universe calls for investment in operational facilities, services and software for better measurement and management of data to optimise performance.
The future for sustainable low-carbon business is plain to see: data can only get bigger, so energy has got to get smarter.
