By: Tiffany Richmond

With policy development and analysis of environmental performance data complete, it’s now time to clearly outline goals and targets of the sustainability program.

To be consistent in terminology, this article defines goals and targets in the following manner:

• Goals are high level statements that provide overall context for what the program is trying to achieve. Goals should be aligned with a company’s overall business goals.
• Targets are specific, tangible and quantifiable deliverables that the program will deliver.

When developing goals and targets many organizations are faced with challenges, such as lack of expertise to clearly define deliverables, insufficient information about current performance measures to know what goals and targets are realistic and ensuring goals are aligned with the company’s overall business objectives.

This article will outline best practices, factors to consider when setting goals and targets and examples of goals and targets that companies have publicly stated today.

The first thing to remember when outlining goals and targets is to ensure they are:

• Specific. A specific goal and/or target has a better chance of being accomplished than a general one; will better align members of the organization; and makes it easier to measure success.
• Measurable. There has to be a definitive yardstick to measure progress with.
• Achievable. The goal and/or target needs to be challenging but practical and achievable.
• Relevant. The goal and/or target should focus on the greatest impact of the organization.
• Time-Sensitive. The goal and/or target should have a definite deadline.

Goals and targets should be categorized in the three sustainability buckets identified in the first article (Developing a Sustainability Program) – environmental, social and economic performance. Example goals and targets in each category include:

• Environmental – reducing water use, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, reducing waste, implementing recycling programs, minimizing packaging
• Social – increasing employment opportunities, eliminating child labour in the supply chain
• Economic performance – increasing profitability, geographic expansion of business operations

A few examples of goals and targets that companies have publicly stated include:

Environmental
Oxford Properties
“Reducing GHG from properties we directly own and manage, on a per square foot basis, by 20% by the year 2012” (target)
Cisco Systems
“Increase renewable energy purchases by buying Renewable Energy Certificates and entering into green power contracts with various electricity suppliers” (goal)

Social
Wal-Mart Canada
“Continue to provide Canadians with opportunities for employment by creating 4,500 new jobs. Increase female representation in senior management from 31% to 33%” (target)
Coca Cola
“Sustain investment in locally relevant projects that focus on water protection, conservation, and providing access to clean water and sanitation for communities in need” (goal)

Economic Performance
BASF
“Dividend per share to be increased annually or at least to remain at the previous year’s level” (target)
Best Buy
“Best Buy intends to deliver consumer electronics products and services to more people than any other company in the world” (goal)

In addition to categorizing your company’s goals and targets, a few important factors to consider include:

• Past Performance. Review past goal and target performance levels and understand their success and/or failure rates. Understanding what has and has not worked in the past will help distinguish between practical and non-practical targets.
• Available Resources. Does your company have internal and external resources available to meet the program’s goals and targets? Not having the proper resources available can affect the success of the program.
• Legislated Targets. If existing and/or forecasted regulatory targets are issued, it’s important to align goals and targets to meet those set forth by regulating bodies.
• Competitive Performance. Review your organization’s performance to that of its competitors. Knowing what your competitors are doing and their success rate will help you determine what may or may not work for your company, and what you will have to do to stay ahead.
• Stakeholder Requirements. Ensure stakeholder requirements are considered during the development of goals and targets.

Once you’ve outlined goals and targets it’s important to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure and report performance against. Environmental KPIs are a measure of a particular environmental impact (e.g. emissions, water usage), sometimes normalized by a financial measure (e.g. floor area, revenue, production, sales). Examples include total water use and tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per tonne of product. Social KPIs are likewise a measure of progress on social issues, such as percent of suppliers that have undergone auditing for compliance with labour standards and average hours or training provided to employees. Economic KPIs might include items found in a traditional financial report, such as profit and loss and retained earnings.

Once goals and targets are completed it’s now time to identify measures for improvement.

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Tiffany Richmond has over five years of experience as a marketing professional and is responsible for online marketing strategies at Energy Advantage Inc.

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By: Randi Kruse

December is often a time of reflection. Maybe it’s the long, dark nights or the prospect of another year passing. Perhaps our work has become less inspired or the international news has caused us to pause and wonder: is there reason for hope in the world?

I’d like to highlight a project that should give us all reason to hope, and more than that, new inspiration to push through perceived barriers and strive for excellence. The Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability, CIRS, is a building that transforms the way we design and build urban structures. CIRS is all about accelerating sustainability through experimentation and creative partnerships. It is a project that hopes to spark new ideas about how to make cities more sustainable, and because its goal is to promote dialogue, I’m going to need your help spreading the word.

CIRS is a spectacularly beautiful structure. With streaming light from the surrounding windows and pine beetle wood beams, it feels more like a cathedral than a university research building. Beyond the aesthetic, CIRS has shattered the leading environmental LEED building standards and has achieved a net-positive energy performance. By harvesting renewable and waste energy, CIRS is able to supply not only its own energy needs but also a portion of the needs of an adjacent building. The end result is that the addition of CIRS to the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus – a 4-storey, 61,085 square feet building – actually reduces UBC’s overall energy consumption by over 1 million kilowatt hours per year. Imagine! This is a building that improves the surrounding environment.

With such impressive technical achievements, you might think that CIRS is an architectural snob; that guy at the party who is so fully aware of his own success that he can’t be bothered to engage in conversation. Rather than relying on its display case of design medals, CIRS is active in the community and has developed numerous partnerships across public and private sectors. It is also a “living laboratory”, testing the effect that highly efficient design has on the usability of the space. Occupants of the building are asked for feedback about what it’s like to have the temperature centrally controlled, or how they would suggest adjusting the on-site waste water treatment system to reduce noise disruption.

Most of you are probably in the business of improving the performance of existing buildings, and a project like CIRS can offer numerous options that you may want to integrate into future retrofit plans. Have a look at the lighting features and think about how you can replicate the system design in your own context, or consider the energy sourcing and monitoring framework. These kinds of innovations can be adapted to fit into an existing structure – and they’ll have to be if we are truly serious about conserving resources and operations costs.

There are so many innovative design components to the building that I couldn’t fit them all into this short space, but I encourage you to take a virtual tour in the near future – or better yet, visit the place. A project like CIRS takes years to develop, and along the way there were many challenges and setbacks. Rather than giving in to the barriers, the leaders behind the project, particularly the principal John Robinson, strengthened the partnerships they had with key supporters.

Now I’ll ask you to join the conversation: What are you going to do differently in the New Year to bring more inspiration to your work? How can you draw from the incredible advances in building technology that CIRS demonstrates to significantly improve the performance of the buildings you manage? Talk amongst yourselves.

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Randi is a social marketing and corporate sustainability planner with ten years of communications management experience.

By: Brian Plumb

I’d like to congratulate the first annual “Race to Reduce” award winners for their commitment to reduce energy use in commercial office buildings of all sizes across the Toronto region. The Race is a unique initiative spearheaded by the Greening Greater Toronto Civic Action Alliance that brings together commercial landlords and tenants in a collaborative effort to reduce energy use in the Toronto region. To date, 25 per cent of the Toronto region’s office space is now registered including more than 380 landlord and tenant participants within 117 buildings representing 51.6 million square feet of office space.

On November 30th, 69 awards were presented in categories of Participation, Performance, and Action & Innovation. I am proud to note that a number of the award winners are customers of Energy Advantage and I applaud their efforts along with all the participants for their actions each and every day to reduce their energy consumption. Award winners included:

Action & Innovation

• Building Team: Cadillac Fairview & TD Centre Green Council
• Landlord: Oxford Properties Group (Royal Bank Plaza)

Building Performance (under 500,000 sq. ft)

• Whiterock REIT
• GWL Realty Advisors

About Greening Greater Toronto’s “Race to Reduce”

Launched in May 2011 by Greening Greater Toronto, the Race to Reduce challenges Toronto region landlords and tenants from office buildings of all types, sizes and ages to publicly commit to work together to reduce energy use in their buildings and to reduce the total energy use in participating office buildings by at least 10 per cent over four years. The aim is to improve air quality in the Toronto region and achieve sustained carbon emission reductions in the office building sector, which now contributes close to 20% of the region’s carbon emissions.

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Brian has over 25 years of experience in marketing and sales and is Energy Advantage’s Vice President, Marketing & Strategy.

By: Tiffany Richmond

This is a short video interview with Abbas Chagani, Manager of Electricity at Energy Advantage, discussing the volatile electricity market in Alberta, Canada.

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Tiffany Richmond is an enthusiastic marketing professional and is responsible for online marketing strategies at Energy Advantage Inc.

By: Tiffany Richmond

Do you know what’s impacting your company’s energy and environmental use? Do you have a reporting regime in place today? Does your company have a policy statement? Do you know how your organization compares to competitors? The industry? Do you know what best practices to follow?

Questions like these are the type of questions that are answered in the first step of a sustainability program. This article will outline how to develop a policy statement, how to analyze your current energy and environmental data and identifies industry best practices.

What is a sustainability policy?
A sustainability policy serves as a company’s public statement for its management and employees, plus a communication tool for its customers, vendors, and other interested parties. It is the heart and soul of a program as it explicitly states the value, commitment, and goals of an organization. The policy needs to be integrated into a set of parameters to make decisions on products/services it will manufacture, technology that will be used for production, and all supporting activities such as maintenance, transportation, energy, etc.

Some key questions to consider when developing or reviewing a policy for sustainability:

• What is driving the former/current sustainability program?
• Who are/were the key participants?
• What was accomplished with respect to the initial plan/policies?
• What gaps existed in the current/former policy?
• What successes do we need to build on?
• What setbacks serve as guidance on how to launch a new/modify the existing program?

It is also important to understand a policy can address other elements deemed important by the company. The policy must be constructed in such a manner that it addresses the following items:

• Be focused. The most important aspect of the policy is that it needs to clearly state the company’s vision statement and present core values and principles. The policy is meant to provide inspired leadership that establishes the framework for the policies and procedures that will be implemented to meet the stated objectives.
• Contain relevant content. If the policy’s content is not relevant to the company’s existing culture and operation, it might do more harm than good.
• Be signed and dated. The policy statement should be signed and dated at the very least by the owner or a responsible corporate official. Signatures demonstrate a personal commitment by the highest company official on the premises. If the names change, they should be updated by the new responsible officials as quickly as possible.
• Be posted. The policy statement should be posted on the company’s website and at the facility in a place where all employees and visitors can readily see it.

It’s important to have management commitment and support during the development of the policy and program. A committee should also be assigned to the development, with representatives from key operational areas.

In addition to the policy development a thorough review of available energy and environmental performance data should be completed. This will rely primarily on data in the form of electricity, natural gas, water and other utility data, but where available should also take advantage of additional data sources including:

• Waste and waste diversion data
• Refrigerants
• Transportation fuels
• Pollution release data (if applicable)
• Process impacts as they relate to pollutant release or ecosystem impact (this will vary by industry and organization)

At this point having an accurate reporting regime in place is extremely important. This will ensure that data is accurate, transparent and complete. Reviewing current energy and environmental performance data will also help set a baseline to compare against industry benchmarks and future performance. Once this data is collected some analysis can be performed on it.

• Benchmark Analysis. The benchmark analysis will compare a company’s energy and environmental performance data to industry benchmarked data.
• Quantile Distribution. This involves dividing ordered data into equal sized data subsets for analysis. The objective is to group the data into logical buckets or ‘bins’ to better understand how data (such as energy intensity performance) is distributed over a population.
• Trend Analysis. Analysis in the change in a data set over time (‘time series data’) in an effort to spot a pattern or ‘trend’ over the analysis period. The analysis focuses on the direction of the data in terms of its velocity and/or momentum, for example is it decreasing over time or increasing exponentially over time. It can sometimes be used in predictive modeling.
• Baseline Analysis Comparison. The baseline analysis will provide an overview of the current state of a company’s energy and environmental performance.

During this stage it’s important to outline best practices to follow in the development of the sustainability program. Some sources of best practices to consider include:

• Global Reporting Initiative
• United Nations Global Compact
• World Business Council for Sustainable Development and World Resources Institute’s Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative
• ISO 146064 Standards
• American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE)
• Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)

Industry associations are also excellent sources of sector specific best practice guidance.

Once the sustainability policy has been developed and an analysis of existing energy and environmental performance is complete, it’s time to move to the second stage – goal and target development.

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Tiffany Richmond is an enthusiastic marketing guru and is responsible for online marketing strategies at Energy Advantage Inc.

By: Tiffany Richmond

The word sustainability is often used, but what does sustainability really mean? Is it a motto, an ideal, a way to do business, a way to live life or a call to action?

The Natural Step defines sustainability as:

In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing;

• Concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust;
• Concentrations of substances produced by society;
• Degradation by physical means and, in that society; and
• People are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs.

The United Nations defines sustainability as:

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

However, with no universally agreed definition of sustainability every individual, company or community defines sustainability in their environment.

Today, many individuals, companies and communities are faced with growing pressures to produce sustainable products, to run businesses in a sustainable manner and to build sustainable communities. This creates many challenges, such as defining what sustainability means, understanding current environmental performance, developing goals, and learning best practices to follow.

This Sustainability Series is focused on unraveling these challenges for organizations and developing a road map that is simple, focused and realistic.

There are three main areas to consider – economic performance, social responsibility and environmental stewardship. Often referred to as the triple bottom line, shaping a sustainability program includes measuring and reporting in these three spheres.

• Economic performance – business must achieve an acceptable return on investment and a healthy bottom line.
• Social responsibility – business must treat all individuals (employees, customers, and the community) fairly.
• Environmental stewardship – business must operate in an environmentally responsible manner.

Maintaining a healthy balance between these three categories isn’t easy and its common for companies to use the balance as a criteria to measure success.

The series is broken down into four stages. These stages will outline a road map that organizations can follow to develop a sustainability program. They include:

1. Policy development and best practices
2. Goals and targets
3. Identifying measures for sustainability
4. Performance measurement plan

At the end you will learn four important steps to follow, a sample program outline and what to do after program implementation. The first stage, policy development and best practices, will be posted next week.

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Tiffany Richmond is an enthusiastic marketing professional and is responsible for online marketing strategies at Energy Advantage Inc.

By: Randi Kruse

Energy managers have it tough. They are expected to deliver significant reductions in energy use across multiple locations, often with relatively small operating budgets. Since most municipalities and leading businesses have greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets, it’s critical to their public reputation that their energy managers achieve success. But with aging infrastructure and constrained resources, what’s an energy manager to do?

I caught up with one of the most successful leaders in this field, Trevor Billy from the City of Coquitlam, BC. Trevor’s an unassuming and socially astute guy, the kind of person who is modest to a fault about his work and quick to notice my designer shoes. Trevor’s story is a good one because it offers insight into what other municipalities across Canada can be doing to dramatically cut their energy consumption, raise awareness about climate change issues, and reduce operating costs at the same time.

Population trends in Coquitlam are indicative of changes in the region. Greater Vancouver is one of the most rapidly growing areas in Canada, and Coquitlam is among the fastest growing municipalities with the population increasing by over 21% between 1986 and 1991, and again from 1991 to 1996. A further increase of 10.9% occurred between 1996 and 2001. Lots of people want to call Coquitlam home, and this is putting pressure on City staff like Trevor to address energy consumption in a meaningful way.

Trevor is a trained engineer and loves quantitative data. He is responsible for 130 municipal buildings and focuses his attention on the 20 responsible for 80% of the City’s total energy consumption. There are approximately 1600 staff working at municipal buildings across the community. What’s interesting is his approach to dealing with those top 20 buildings. Trevor prioritized social marketing projects “by accident” after a small pilot project with one building resulted in 10% energy reduction within one year – without any financial investments. He realized that behaviour change strategies aren’t “soft and fuzzy,” they have real numbers associated with them and significant dollar values attached to those savings.

About one year ago, the City of Coquitlam launched an energy conservation program using public events at municipal locations to build awareness of the City’s corporate climate change goals. The messaging was really about what individuals can do to support their community’s energy reduction commitments – inspiring, accessible, high level information that avoided any mention of kilowatt hours or other technical language. At the same time, Trevor implemented a framework for social marketing projects developed by BC Hydro which shifted the general awareness into specific behaviour targets. Trevor didn’t have a background in the social science of behaviour change, but instead relied on the resources and support from the local power authority. He says he is surprised that more energy managers don’t do the same.

“It’s almost irresponsible to ask for a couple million dollars from the City to install a new boiler before asking people to tune up their work stations,” said Trevor. Indeed.

Despite his success, the reaction from staff across the City has been mixed. About 20% were already aware of how they can save energy in their daily activities and were excited to see leadership from the City. The majority, 60%, needed more convincing but could be brought along and were generally supportive. And then there were the naysayers, those 20% social outliers who think energy conservation is inconvenient and resist change. Trevor says that at this stage, after one year of engaging, fun, and rewarding social marketing campaigns featuring new themes each month, the laggards are “getting outted” and are responding to social pressures from their colleagues to get power smart.

I asked Trevor why more energy managers aren’t focusing their attention on changing behaviour. “There is a technical focus and misperception that soft, fuzzy social programs aren’t worthy of their time.” The City of Coquitlam is effectively shattering the myth that behaviour change isn’t quantifiable, with consistently significant energy savings.

Another barrier is time. If you’re serious about reducing energy consumption in your business or municipality, you need to refocus your expertise on social marketing programs and away from data administration. Learn more about how Energy Advantage can save 10% of your time and give you the support you need to excel.

Conservation resources aren’t limited to BC municipal energy managers; a quick search online resulted tools and incentives for both public organizations and private companies in BC, Alberta and Ontario. What are you waiting for?

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Randi is a social marketing and corporate sustainability planner with ten years of communications management experience.

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