The UK’s mandatory carbon reporting system for big companies doesn’t yet recognise emissions-cutting endeavours
Numbers can sometimes mask what’s really going on. They can, for instance, draw a misleading picture of an organisation that is in the midst of investing in low energy technology but has yet to reap the rewards of its efforts.
Hard-won environmental stewardship reputations are at stake – and their undoing may be the UK’s mandatory carbon reporting system known as the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme.
Directed at large (but relatively low energy intensive) companies and governmental organisations using more than 6,000MWh per year of electricity, the CRC aims to drive energy efficiency through the compilation of a metrics score whose totals will be published in public league tables.
“I absolutely do think the reputational driver of the published league table is likely to change behaviour,” says Kate Levick, head of government relations at the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP).
The CDP has witnessed the positive impact of its own reporting and monitoring indices and, Levick says, the CRC scheme is quite innovative in this regard. League data won’t merely be published, but will be made available in easily downloadable formats.
Broadly speaking, it is important to have more companies publishing verified and consistent data. But is the data in itself creating an accurate picture of climate leaders and laggards?
Early learning centres
In this first reporting year, observers say the answer is clearly no. The tables aren’t so much measuring carbon performance as they are ranking organisations on the steps they have taken to install smart meters and comply with Carbon Trust standards of energy management.
At the inaugural launch in November, ranking 2,000 organisations, notable brands included the Big Four supermarkets Asda (ranked 37th), Morrisons (56th), Tesco (93rd), and Sainsbury’s (164th).
In all, 22 organisations shared first position, while 803 organisations – a full 40% – scored zero points in “early action” metrics. Early action metrics are intended to reward leaders that have already lowered their emissions but now face significantly greater costs in implementing further reductions in relation to inefficient companies that face an easier time picking off the low-hanging fruit.
These metrics will be zeroed out by 2014, by which time an absolute measure of carbon emissions will account for 75% of a company’s rankings.
The scheme tries to balance this with a “growth metric”, but this 25% weighting is too small, according to Andrew Raingold, executive director of the Aldersgate Group, a cross-sector alliance advocating stronger green economics policies.
“If a company has 50% growth over the year and manages to cut its carbon emissions as a proportion by say 20%, you can see pretty quickly their energy use will be going up,” Raingold says, “even though they’ve done some very significant improvements in environmental performance.”
David Powell, an economics campaigner at Friends of the Earth, is equally cautious, saying: “There is a danger with the CRC that people get too simplistic a picture of what’s actually happening.”
Yet the league tables are, in fact, spurring on companies to take action.
“We see that the CRC is bringing many companies to the table in addressing energy efficiency for the first time – and we see this particularly with smaller and midsized organisations where energy spend is not a material part of their cost base,” says James Ramsay, commercial director at Carbon Clear, a consultancy now working with more than two dozen CRC clients.
On a case-by-case basis the numbers may be small but in the aggregate there are considerable benefits both for the climate and UK business: more than 61m tonnes of carbon dioxide – or about 10% of the UK emissions – are at play in the scheme.
An estimated £6bn a year in savings are in the offing for participating organisations.