2Sustain

In the wake of rising energy prices, businesses around the country are constantly searching for ways to cut costs and improve efficiencies. In fact, researchers estimate the energy consumption management industry is now a $5.2 billion industry in the US –and it’s growing at an astonishing 40 percent per year. However, the steady introduction of new vendors, each with its own version of “energy management” software, has generated a high level confusion and propelled the need for thoughtful analysis on current offerings.

Fortunately, Groom Energy Solutions provides some needed clarification with its new report, The Enterprise Smart Grid – a Corporate Buyer’s Guide for Energy Management Software. Responses from 65 interviews with corporate energy, facility and sustainability managers and vendors offering Enterprise Smart Grid related technologies identified 11 distinct functional areas and categorized the range of vendor solutions to assist companies as they develop their own energy management strategy.

For example, Groom Energy found that: (more…)

Corporate sustainability programs aren’t typically integrated with tax departments, and that could be costing companies valuable financial opportunities, according to new research from Ernst & Young LLP.

The survey, entitled Working Together: Linking sustainability and tax to reduce the cost of implementing sustainability initiatives, included responses from 223 senior executives at companies predominantly in the US. 19 percent of those polled were Chief Sustainability Officer (CSOs), while the remaining 81 percent were tax directors or their equivalent. Responses from each group were vastly different, highlighting the lack of coordination between the two groups. For example, only 28 percent of tax directors believe their company has a sustainability strategy or is developing one, compared to 90 percent of CSOs surveyed. In addition, the survey results showed that: (more…)

Sea level rise due to global warming has already doubled the annual risk of coastal flooding across widespread areas of the United States, according to a new report from Climate Central, a climate and energy focused non-profit research and journalism organization.

The report, Surging Seas, is not only the first to analyze how sea level rise caused by global warming is compounding the risk from storm surges throughout the coastal contiguous US, but also it’s the first to generate local and national estimates of the land, housing and population in vulnerable low-lying areas and associate this information with flood risk timelines.

Here are a few of the report’s sobering conclusions: (more…)

The risk of natural resource shortages, coupled with changing customer and employee expectations, is likely to impact core business objectives in the coming years. Exactly how global companies have been addressing impacts like these has been somewhat murky –at least until now.

Results from a 2011 Ernst & Young LLP/GreenBiz Group comparative survey, “Six Growing Trends in Corporate Sustainability,” determined an increasing financial focus by executives on corporate sustainability efforts affecting core business objectives.

For example, the replies of 272 sustainability executives from 24 industry sectors provided several illuminating statistics centered on six major trends: (more…)

Even though investors and companies increasingly agree on which corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues affect a company’s financial value, there are still disconnects regarding metrics and disclosure. A new study, Finding Common Ground on the Metrics that Matter, released by the Investor Responsibility Research Center (IRRC) Institute, deep dives into these concerns and provides the first comprehensive analysis of which corporate ESG information is tracked by companies and how it is –or isn’t –consistent with analogous information sought by investors, researchers and other stakeholders.

In broad terms, the study revealed that:

• There is agreement on key corporate sustainability issues, but not on the metrics used to measure the management of them, nor on the purposes served by examining corporate ESG information.
• Though ESG metrics routinely are reported on request by many companies, few report all the ESG information they collect internally.ESG researchers, investors and corporate representatives approach ESG issues from a risk mitigation perspective, not a value creation perspective.

In addition, key data from the study concluded that: (more…)