For more than 20 years, banking group Nedbank has been involved in environmental and climate change matters. One of Nedbank’s key climate change disclosures is the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) that Nedbank has participated in since 2007. The CDP believes that systemic change – a real transformation of the global economic system – is required to achieve the scale of change that will limit global warming and prevent catastrophic climate change.
Nedbank sustainability carbon specialist Dr Marco Lotz says rising energy demands are competing for a limited supply of fossil fuels and that energy security and a clean energy revolution have never been more important.
Lotz won the South African Energy Efficiency Association Patron Award last year for his significant contributions to the field of reducing energy consumption in the Southern Africa region.
“The CDP system has helped move climate change and energy efficiency onto the business radar and into mainstream business thinking. Companies are better able to understand how to protect themselves from the impacts of climate change and become more energy efficient. This said, the CDP needs to keep on evolving to capture the ever evolving sustainability space,” he says.
Lotz adds that Nedbank’s approach has also helped the investment community become more aware of the risk to their portfolios and more proactive in attempting to achieve more sustainable and stronger shareholder returns.
Initiatives, such as energy management and carbon emissions reduction, gives Nedbank an opportunity to manage its pollution and benefit from cost reductions while taking sound business principles into account, he points out.
Lotz notes that Nedbank was the first financial services institution to achieve carbon-neutral status in 2010.
“That propelled us into the next important phase of our environmental sustainability journey. The achievement also added momentum to our realisation of becoming a leader and driver of sustainability in South Africa.”
In the years since Nedbank achieved carbon neutrality, it has leveraged this status to enhance its client value proposition and contribute to the development of South Africa’s green economy, as well as unlock numerous synergies and partnerships by collaborating closely with like-minded organisations.
“Our approach to carbon neutrality is to reduce our impact as much as possible first and then offset the remainder of the carbon footprint,” Lotz says, adding that carbon footprint reductions are achieved through a variety of initiatives, including internal behavioural change and working towards clear reduction targets in terms of paper, water, electricity, waste, travel and carbon emissions.
Lotz states that challenges linked to achieving carbon reduction includes obtaining the correct data required, such as electricity use in kWh. All the information is logged somewhere, but getting it into a single database can be an issue, he adds.
“The correct emissions factor must be allocated to each source of pollution. For example, the emissions factor for paper should be known to calculate how much pollution is associated with a box of paper.”
Lotz cites that a clear and in-depth understanding is required of the applicable reporting protocols to sensibly disclose greenhouse-gas information.
Nedbank sponsored the Carbon Footprinting Guide, written by Lotz and Stellenbosch University Professor Alan Brent, to freely share best practice examples and get information on how to compile and evaluate a carbon footprint onto the market.
The guide was published by the university’s Sustainability Institute in February 2014 and it has been downloaded more than 53 000 times in about 7 months from its launch. Subsequently, the authors were awarded the South African National Energy Association Education Award.