Operating in more than 30 countries, and with headquarters in Paris, Capgemini employs over 90,000 people globally. The company’s work is divided into three distinct focus areas: consulting; technology, and; outsourcing.

Operating through a strict set of environmental principles, Capgemini has been recognised with a number of awards and ratings for its work on sustainability: Capgemini UK achieved a Gold Ranking in Business in the Community’s 2008 and 2009 Corporate Responsibility Index of top performing companies, and the company was listed in The Sunday Times Best Green Companies in both 2009 and 2010.

James Robey is Head of Corporate Sustainability for Capgemini UK.

What does your role as Head of Corporate Sustainability involve?

Providing leadership to our focus on sustainability. After undertaking an initial piece of strategy work completed in 2007 looking at sustainability, I was asked to put in place a formal programme to drive sustainability into “the DNA of the business.” The first thing we did was establish a specific sustainability board – CEOs and executives from across the business who meet monthly and provide governance. The programme has three key threads / objectives:

Minimising our environmental impacts;
Optimising our impact on the communities we operate in; and Engaging our 8,000 people.

In addition I’m increasingly spending time working with our client teams looking at developing client offers in the sustainability space. Essentially, for companies, sustainability is becoming a business change problem – potentially the world’s biggest business change problem over the next decade. The heart of our business – what Capgemini does for our clients – is to help them transform, so there’s great synergy here.

Please tell us about Capgemini’s Environment Programme and its main objectives:

We’ve had a CSR programme with a strong sense of community, which has been around for probably two decades. However, our formal environment programme has been running since the beginning of 2008.

We started by identifying our impacts, and then quantifying them in terms of our carbon footprint. Predominantly, our footprint relates to the energy we use in our business, particularly the energy we use in our data-centres, and then business travel is the other large component.

Having completed the environmental review and understanding our impacts, we were able to set ourselves five environmental objectives. Three of those focused on C02, one focused on waste and the final one around gaining ISO 14001 accreditation, which we achieved a year ago.

The four remaining objectives are:
- Reducing our C02 footprint by 20% by 2014
- Improving the energy efficiency of our datacentres by 20% by 2014
- Reducing business travel by 30% by 2014
- Sending zero waste to landfill by 2014

These recognise that datacentres are the largest single item in our carbon footprint and also the significant part that travel plays in our footprint.

How is the company’s Corporate Sustainability programme addressing these issues?

In terms of how we operate, we structured the programme around our objectives, so we’ve got specific teams looking at energy efficiency, looking at business travel, and looking at waste and procurement. A key part of the programme is around engagement – getting our 8,000 employees engaged with the programme is going to be critical to achieving the objectives.

We also have an active community programme around the themes of ‘skills for the future’, education, and inclusion. We focus this locally around our offices, nationally by working with the Prince’s Trust, and then also globally. As we have over 20,000 employees in India, we have partnered with the Naandi Foundation (which focuses on getting girls into education in India). This programme has been very enthusiastically adopted by our UK people.

Technology is obviously a key element of Capgemini’s work: what part can the information technology industry play in lowering global carbon emissions?

There are two dimensions to this. It’s often quoted that IT contributes around 2% to global carbon emissions, so there are two angles: what can the IT industry do to reduce that 2%, and secondly how can we use IT to address the remaining 98%?

In terms of the 2%, there are a range of things we can do and are doing from a technology perspective. One is that we’re building a new datacentre, which will be fully launched later in the year. The site selection was based on detailed weather analysis to enable fresh air cooling and eliminate the need for air conditioning. In a traditional datacentre you can use as much energy on the air-conditioning as you do on the actual equipment. That’s one example of how we’re absolutely committed to driving down the footprint of the IT that we provide.

With regards to the remaining 98%, this is perhaps the bigger opportunity for the industry, in terms of how we can deploy IT to eliminate other forms of carbon. One simple example is using video conferencing, or other IT solutions like instant messaging and web conferencing to reduce travel.

Equally, a lot of organisations are eliminating the need for paper-based forms and are switching to online forms. I recently came across a courier company that is able to take your documents electronically and then, rather than shipping those documents around the world, they print them out in a local bureau, close to where they are needed, and deliver them the last mile. There are lots of different ways of using IT to tackle that 98% of the footprint.

What have been your proudest low carbon achievements at Capgemini?

It’s many small steps.

As a business we decided not to go down the carbon offsetting route. Instead we have invested the budget we would have spent on offsetting on creating a carbon fund, which is then invested in reducing our carbon emissions.

Last year we invested heavily to improve the energy efficiency of the lighting across three of our major sites. In doing so, we effectively switched out around 10,000 light fittings, which is going to drive down our energy use significantly, and will also save about 270 tons of carbon a year.

If there was one aspect of your job that you could change, what would it be?

It would be great to have more time. Sustainability is such a broad topic and there are so many dimensions to it, it would be great to have more hours in the day to focus on it, particularly around employee engagement. It’s great when you sit down with just one or two people and discuss the issues, and people get really fired up and interested in what we’re doing and why. But you can’t have those one-on-one conversations with 8,000 people.

What does ‘sustainability’ mean to you?

This is quite a hard question. The best way I can answer it is in one word: ‘balance’.

If you look at nature, nature tends to work in balance and doesn’t create waste – by-products from one process (say, leaves falling from a tree) become the inputs for another – nourishment for the forest floor. It seems to me that, in terms of sustainability, we ignore that balance at our peril. Rising C02 levels and climate change are the most obvious examples, but we could also talk about the huge quantities of plastic in the ocean or the ever-increasing levels of medicine residues turning up in tap water.

So, for me, sustainability is about finding a way of balancing the needs of people and our global economic system with the planet that we inhabit and depend on.

What are the three key pieces of advice you would offer to others on the carbon reduction journey?

First of all, you absolutely have to have data in order to understand your impacts and to prioritise where you’re going to focus. The second thing is linked to the first – don’t underestimate just how challenging it is to get that data. This has been a real learning curve for us over the last two years of just how difficult it is to get accurate and reliable data.

Finally, I’d say that governance is key. One of the first things we did in our programme was to establish a sustainability board, comprising of a number of our CEOs and senior executives. They provide the governance for the programme and without them we wouldn’t have been able to make the steps forward that we have with the business.

ENDS Report comment: Osborne’s carbon tax identity crisis

Article reproduced with permission of The ENDS Report.

By Paul Hatchwell.

During the count-down to George Osborne’s emergency budget of June 22 a real sense of expectation grew that the chancellor would announce concrete new policies on energy and climate change. In the event, nothing of the sort happened.

Yes there were fleeting references to new policies. But in each case there was no advance on details already set out in the coalition’s sketchy programme for government. The further delays are doing little for investor confidence.

Especially frustrating is the lack of progress on the most radical policy – replacement of the electricity component of the Climate Change Levy (CCL) by a “top-up” carbon tax on power generators.

The tax would kick in whenever emission allowances in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme drop below an as yet unspecified threshold. This would effectively set a carbon floor price, providing a more consistent signal in favour of low carbon investment.

The plan remains on the table, but now looks set to be seriously delayed.

Instead of including the carbon floor price measures in the Energy Security and Green Economy Bill announced in the Queen’s Speech as had been expected, the chancellor confirmed we will now have to wait for the Finance Bill in spring 2011.

Moreover there are major political and legal issues to resolve. And the loss of direction in European discussions about a possible carbon tax doesn’t help either. Lack of action at EU level will make it harder for the UK to move unilaterally.

A key policy conundrum is this. How can the government switch the electricity component of the CCL to a tax on generators without undermining climate change agreements? – a key feature of the CCL under which participants can win large discounts on the levy by signing agreements to reduce their emissions.

Many CCAs have only just been renegotiated. These could end up needing to be fundamentally rewritten again before the ink is even dry on the page. Far from assuring the future of CCAs, the reforms could plunge them into a serious identity crisis.

Electricity accounts for the majority of CCL revenue, which can also cover coal and gas consumption, and actions to reduce power consumption is the key element in many CCAs. Why would such organisations seek to continue with CCAs if electricity is stripped out?

A second issue is how the government would continue to provide rebate, perhaps through recycling, once generators rather than their major energy consuming customers are paying additional tax. Before the election the Conservatives promised to make the carbon tax revenue neutral.

The coalition recognises that most or all of the costs of the top-up tax would be passed through to energy consumers. That’s what utilities have done in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. And that’s why recycling revenues via rebates is seen as vital for the tax to be politically acceptable.

But again, it’s far from clear what rebates would achieve. Unless they are made conditional on committed change towards less carbon-intensive and more energy efficient behaviour – as is currently the case with CCAs – then the whole exercise would be utterly pointless.

If the government were instead to selectively channel rebates just to organisations that have deliberately taken steps to only buy in low-carbon electricity then the main effect would likely be to favour greater nuclear generation and could look dangerously like a nuclear subsidy.

Alternatively, carbon tax revenues could be recycled into the proposed Green Investment Bank, which could choose to channel this money into initiatives and ventures that will boost industrial energy efficiency. But in this case there would be no guarantee that funds would flow back to organisations that currently benefit from CCL discounts through having signed climate change agreements. And if these revenues funded new nuclear plants it would again look like a subsidy, and could rob energy consumers of large parts of their rebate.

There are other ways funds could be recycled, for example through enhanced capital allowances. It is even conceivable that the role of CCAs could be enhanced and that they could ultimately be scaled up and extended to cover additional swathes of UK business. And the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme both offer a means of rewarding good practice, through benchmarking and league tables for example, though this could be complex.

For now, though, huge questions hang over what the carbon tax proposal will mean for agreements. The coalition needs to work out what it wants from CCAs, and how these may need to be rewritten – again.

All of which means it looks as if George Osborne is going to have his work cut out if he is to make environmental sense of CCL reforms and avoid a policy conundrum at the heart of the Coalition’s climate policy. The policy needs to be thought through far better – is it meant to boost new generating capacity or energy efficient industry? Or both? We wish him well in this venture – but get ready for a bumpy ride.