Carbon accounting: cutting air travel and calculating environmental impact at Capgemini
Head of sustainability James Robey on the services giant's successes and challenges in moving to Net Zero
James Robey, global head of sustainability at Capgemini, has been in post for nearly 11 years, previously holding down other sustainability-focused jobs at the professional services giant. He also lectures on carbon accounting at Imperial College Business school.
Fair to say, then, that Robey knows his stuff, in an area where it can sometimes be hard to separate fact from fiction, solid strategy from wishful thinking.
Capgemini promises to be carbon neutral by 2025 and Net Zero by 2030, and also offers to help its customers to become more sustainable, which is something we'll cover in a later interview.
Accountability
First, what policies does Capgemini have in place, and how is accountability managed?
"Accountability starts from office of CEO," Robey says. "We have a Net Zero board that meets on a regular basis, includes our CEO and other board members.
"Beneath that there's a series of Steering Committees looking at specific topics: environmental management performance systems, the work we're doing about embedding sustainability into work with clients,"
The company's environmental policy statement is very broad and high level, covering material impacts, and driving down those material impacts, he says, but it deliberately excludes hard targets.
"The targets are outside of the policy statement because targets can evolve, and we have science based targets at the 1.5 degree level that sit alongside and drive that transformation."
Instead, targets are set out separately and include a progress figure. For example, reducing business travel emissions by 25 per cent by 2020 and 50 per cent by 2030 (progress so far: a 5 per cent reduction), and reducing office energy consumption by 20 per cent by 2020/ 40 per cent by 2030 (progress: 42 per cent reduction).
Such clarity is important, says Robey, and that extends to definitions too: "We've spelled out exactly what carbon neutral and Net Zero mean for us. As a business, we want to be as transparent as possible, and you can agree or disagree, but I'd rather have the debate based on a data point as opposed to it being just a vanilla headline."
Cutting air travel
So, looking at air travel, consultancy is almost synonymous with air miles, how's that been going, and how is it perceived within the company?
"It's what we've been working on for a number of years and of course Covid has clearly been a massive accelerator. But even before Covid we were starting down that journey of looking at the cloud and equipping people with the right collaboration tools and the right training," he says.
"We recognise that there is clearly a value to face-to-face meetings, but I think what the Covid lockdowns have really done for us and clearly for the whole professional services industry is really shine a light on just how much can be done remotely."
Curtailing air travel has not been a sacrifice, Robey insists, rather "it's a win, win, win, win" in terms of work life balance and, health, flexibility of delivery, cost and carbon reduction, "But the key word is ‘optimising'; it's not ‘never travel again'".
Capgemini has also joined the EV100 initiative and from this year will only order hybrid and electric cars and vans for its 12,000-vehicle company fleet.
Clearly there is some way to go to reach 50 per cent by 2030, but Robey is confident the company will achieve this. However, it's a complex issue. Air travel may be a no-brainer, but what about working from home? Is that less carbon intensive than commuting on the train? It depends, Robey says: "If I live close to the office in an older leaky house, and I'm on my own and I'm running the heating system just for me, then I'd be much better off going to the office."
Nationally, WFH is probably marginally less carbon intensive, according to the company's calculations, but not enough to tip the balance either way.
Business travel and commuting fall under the category of Scope 3 emissions which also includes purchased goods and services and leased assets. This year the company has been working with its procurement team "to look at how we build models which enable us to quantify, with our supply partners, the carbon impact of the things we buy," says Robey.
Carbon calculator
Scope 3 emissions are the hardest to calculate, but Capgemini has developed a carbon accounting tool for this purpose.
"I think the data piece is quite critical," Robey says. "The need for a really solid carbon accounting system for businesses is critical. We built ours over 10 years ago now, and what we've found really powerful about that is being able to put the data in, or pull it out in a very granular, precise way."
Using the tool, which ingests data from travel agency feeds and expense accounts, it is possible to make more informed decisions about the impact of the business.
"Every time somebody generates an expense claim or travel claim for a flight or a bus journey, a car journey, a hotel night, we pull that data in, so we get a really broad spectrum. We associate that data with project codes as well. I can then do a query on our carbon accounting system to say, tell me, all the travel associated with a particular client project.
"So if a client is doing Scope 3 carbon accounting and wants to know what's the specific impact of the services that Capgemini is providing that's something that we can do. There are a number of clients which are starting to get to that level of sophistication."
Renewables
The tool can also be used to cover the use of renewable energy, generated on site or purchased from energy suppliers, which falls within the Scope 2 category.
Robey agrees there is much confusion in the renewables sector, and it's difficult matching like with like. The company is committed to using 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2025 and is part of the RE100 renewables initiative, but, says Robey, there's a real need to cut through the fluff with some hard science, which is what carbon accounting provides.
See also: Why tech needs to come clean on climate
"With energy, we try to bring in not just the not just the energy data but the cost data as well associated with all the energy associated with the building that enables us to give a really solid snapshot, in terms of the business, and use it almost as a decision-making tool."
Nevertheless, there are all sorts of challenges around renewable energy use, Robey explains.
"In some countries it's a lot easier than others. That's why we've invested in considerable solar arrays on our campuses in India, where 25 per cent of the power we're using is coming off the solar arrays in place. We're working with energy suppliers and partners in terms of building the roadmap towards 100 per cent renewable electricity, but, obviously, on site generation is great but isn't always feasible if you've only got one floor in a building."
Of course, emissions are only one area of sustainability, but carbon is a useful proxy for other areas.
"There's a live debate going there because sustainability is much broader than just climate change and carbon. So we can't forget the rest, but equally, carbon is a really helpful unit, because we can quantify so much of the environmental impacts of organisations."
We put it to Robey that Capgemini's carbon calculator might be widely beneficial to others, and asked whether the firm has considered open sourcing it.
"We are not open sourcing at the moment - but we do share the outputs with clients to help with decision-making," he says.
Issues around sustainability and partnership will be discussed in Computing 's Tech Impact Conference, coming in 2022.
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