Too few companies consider the impact of business growth when developing programmes to reduce their carbon emissions.
The warning is given in a best practice guide on carbon management practices produced by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and the information technology multinational IBM. The guide says that companies need to develop their carbon strategies ‘in line with growth prospects’ so that ‘targets that relate to increases in output and scale of operations allow a company to grow and cut emissions simultaneously’.
The advice was drawn up following in-depth interviews with representatives from Aviva, Centrica, HBOS, IBM, Lloyds TSB, Scottish and Southern Energy, Tesco, Thomson Reuters, TNT, Unilever and United Utilities. Questions concentrated on their existing carbon management schemes and their plans.
The CDP is an eight-year-old collaboration of 385 institutional investors with combined assets of $57trillion (£30.6tn). Every year it asks more than 3000 companies for data on their carbon emissions.
