CIOs Joining Front Lines of Corporate Greenhouse Gas Management

Corporations have recently enlisted new participants to support their greenhouse gas management programs: Chief Information Officers (CIO). That point was reinforced in a recently-published article in CIO Magazine.

CIOs are now on the front lines of corporate climate change programs. That’s because manual spreadsheet accounting and disparate legacy systems are not able to support organizations’ need for accurate, verifiable carbon data for compliance under market based compliance schemes that are being considered in the U.S. and several other jurisdictions, as well as growing disclosure demands from investors, community stakeholders and activists. In order to meet those new standards, organizations will need to implement information management tools that support efficient and accurate reporting and analysis in order to address changes in greenhouse gas (GHG) management that are just around the corner. CIOs will play a central role in that process.

ESS has just published a white paper entitled, “A CIO’s Guide to Global Climate Change,” which provides a detailed discussion of this issue. It’s now available for download from our web site.

The process of building a program for evaluating, monitoring and measuring GHG emissions should begin with the development of a carbon management strategy. Managing climate risk in the context of corporate objectives starts with understanding the company’s operations. Executives need to identify which practitioners or business units need to use the data and for what purpose. Answers to these questions will provide critical direction for best practices for collection, processing and reporting of GHG information.

It’s a very complicated process, and will likely affect most businesses — including many that previously have not been required to provide GHG emissions reporting.

So GHG management is coming out of the bailiwick of environmental managers, facility managers and even the risk managers. CIOs will soon inherit responsibility for a challenge that has real bottom-line implications. That will eventually require organizations to develop a comprehensive plan for GHG management, supported by an integrated software platform.

2 comments May 7th, 2008