OMG CLIMATE — Corporate Sustainability Policy Template

This is one of a series of guest posts from OMG CLIMATE attendees, covering each of the nine sessions at OMG CLIMATE in Berlin on May 25th.

This abridged post covers the notes from the “Corporate Sustainability Policy Template” session on the day, from co-organiser Christine Lariviere.

Notes sketched up by Tiffany Conroy

One of the most self-evident ways the tech industry can address climate change is through a corporate sustainability policy. Unfortunately, most tech companies don’t have one and also don’t know where to start: There aren’t many examples of corporate sustainability policies available for replication or adaption online, or elsewhere.

What’s needed is a suite of open source corporate sustainability policy templates reflecting common tech business models that employees can easily pitch to their employers for adoption.

Therefore, the goal of this OMG Climate session was to start to map out points of intervention along a typical tech company’s business model — from raw materials to the end user — where decarbonisation might occur.

Here are some areas we identified:

• Travel: Employees are given the right to opt for ground transport over air travel for example. Another example is questioning the necessity of travel at all: Can this meeting be conducted via video conference?
• Swag production: Questioning the necessity of swag production for example. Can swag be made of recyclable materials?
• Raw materials: How might the company integrate the concept of a circular economy into its manufacturing process? E.g. produce products using only recycled materials, push back against planned obsolescence, etc.
• Energy consumption: From infrastructure to servers. Can energy be sourced from renewables? What are alternatives to AWS?
• Food and drink: Companies can be mindful of the carbon footprint of its employee sustenance. What if events were catered as vegetarian/vegan, with meat being the option instead of the other way around? Pitchers of water instead of water bottles, etc.

How to motivate your employer to adopt a sustainability policy:

• Stochastic climate modelling reveals the physical and policy risks of climate change. In short, it is not within a company’s interest, financially, to continue to run a high-carbon operation. That is because e.g. insurance rates may rise, carbon may be taxed, etc. as governments begin to pass through climate change mitigation and adaption policies and regulations.
• In many ways, climate action can reduce a company’s expenditures. By using recycled materials for example. Moreover: “The cost of renewable energy is now falling so fast that it should be a consistently cheaper source of electricity generation than traditional fossil fuels within just a few years.”
• A sustainability policy can also be smoothly integrated into a company’s culture, as upholding the values it claims to have e.g. “Don’t be evil.”

Approaches:

• Climate change mitigation and adaptation must be perceived as necessary regardless of the business model, size, etc. of a company, and not as a ‘luxury problem.’
• We must be mindful of ‘greenwashing’ and ‘burden shifting.’ Meaning, carefully examining proposed solutions and considering ‘unintended consequences.’ An example of greenwashing and burden shifting would be a country that simply exports its plastic waste to another country, yet claims to have reduced plastic waste. Remain critical of carbon offsetting programmes.
• What is the role of employee activism? Employees can form sustainability committees within their companies and routinely look for new ways to decarbonise and iterate on previous actions. Climate change mitigation and adaption is a far-reaching issue: We have seen employee activism, with “Amazon employees using their company-issued stock to pressure top executives into reducing contributions to climate change.” And, how might employees lobby for divestment? Etc.
• Share success stories. These create a sense of tangible impact, which is motivating for employees and employers. Moreover, solutions can be open-sourced and shared across tech companies for further replication and adaption.
• Employees can develop a framework for determining what actions could have the highest impact at their org.
• Employees can mirror the approach they took to other humanitarian issues, such as diversity. E.g. build committees, create a code of conduct, hold orgs accountable, etc. This must be anchored in action i.e. practicing what you preach.

What’s next?

OMG Climate was all about facilitating discussions about the role of tech employees with regards to climate change. But, there’s a real opportunity for a product to come out of this particular session: Open source corporate sustainability policy templates categorised by business model, perhaps, which employees can shop around to their employers.

I will write updates here as we progress on this project. In the meantime, please send any ideas, resources, etc. to me in a Twitter DM. Find me @cdlariviere. Thanks!