Has the Environment Got Lost In Carbon Issues

With the current focus on carbon emission trading and greenhouse gas reporting, unfortunately "green business" has become all about emissions and emission trading for a high proportion of our business population. There is a decreased awareness of the need to care for other aspects of the environment and many businesses that were considering an environmental management system or EMS are opting instead for carbon management alone.

An environmental management system or EMS is about managing the environment in a systematic way and starts by identifying all the environmental aspects of the business operation that could cause a significant impact. The next stage is to look at the risk and identify how significant that risk is before setting objectives, targets and the resources needed to reduce the risk of harm. The EMS then builds in monitoring, review and continual improvement.

The two major problems with the current political approach are that firstly greenhouse gas emissions commonly referred to as "carbon" have overridden all the other environmental impacts and the other is the emphasis on financial accounting associated with these greenhouse gas emissions rather than managing and reducing them.

Climate change caused by atmospheric pollution is a very real problem and we must reduce our greenhouse emissions and do so urgently, but this is not the only environmental impact that should be considered. There is a real danger of ignoring other environmental issues as we concentrate on one thing alone.

Where a business uses a systematic EMS approach to reducing their greenhouse emissions, carbon reduction can be thought of as a subset of EMS but this is becoming increasingly rare and is not included in the political framework at this stage. A systematic approach to identifying and monitoring the carbon equivalents through a business can be set up within an EMS so that the business is prepared to cope with the accounting side of the political trading scheme if they find themselves in a supply chain and need to produce figures.

It may be a fair criticism that energy management and greenhouse emissions were not considered as seriously as was needed in some of the earlier environmental management plans. It was easy for people to become locked into their current energy use and regard this as essential where there is a more critical look at this in more recent systems as a result of the greater awareness of the problem.

Unfortunately at present there is a lot of confusion and misinformation about how we, as a society and as individuals should manage our energy needs. The accounting frameworks are not yet fully established and many of the so called carbon neutral auditing schemes are less than robust. Some in fact are almost meaningless. The embodied energy in buildings and equipment in particular are often totally omitted as inexperienced auditors focus on a limited list of easily measurable emissions.

Many businesses now claim to now be a green business because they are buying carbon credits and paying to pollute. A typical scenario is that someone, often the Office Manager, has organised a carbon audit and the business has paid the first of many bills for offsets without changing anything in their business. They are paying to pollute although hopefully this practice will decrease as it becomes increasingly expensive; because raise the price of this pollution using Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is designed as an incentive to greenhouse gas emission reduction. You do not achieve behavioural change within and organization when you simply pay to pollute.

Carbon offsets are traded for a wide variety of and while some of very effective in reducing greenhouse emissions, others are harder to verify and measure and can be considered as more questionable. Tree plant is what immediately comes to many people's minds when they read about trading carbon offsets but other activities can be more measurable. Insulating houses is being subsidised using carbon offsets which does provide for a reduction in carbon emissions associated with heating and cooling those houses. Another activity funded by offsets is replacing incandescent globes with compact fluorescent (CFL) ones although there is concern here that the facilities for correct disposal of those CFL globes is not being provided because mercury going to landfill is not included in the trading scheme. It is a pity about that significant environmental impact. Householders having the globes changed are not being advised of the need for correct disposal now where to dispose of them. One of the helpful offsets is the capture of methane gas from landfill and also the diversion of organic waster to composting.

There are some serious issues that should be considered with tree schemes and these include the most appropriate use of fertile farmland, the difficulties in accurate accounting of the carbon in seedling trees, the ongoing maintenance of the plantations, the increasing risk involved with fire management and last but no means least, biodiversity issues associated with the choice of plantings. It makes more sense to pay land owners to retain existing vegetation. Some of the significant environmental impacts of tree planting are being ignored.

At present carbon is certainly competing with the environment for publicity and for government support but the best way for an individual business to implement a sensible carbon management plan and prepare for carbon accounting is to include careful energy management into a comprehensive environmental management system so that they are able to get real business benefits and rewards from their EMS rather than merely paying to continue polluting. In that case, good carbon management is a subset of EMS.