Thursday 21 January 2021
‘Social pressure is building for businesses to leave future generations with a better world’
That's the suggestion from ENGIE's Energy & Sustainability Manager Richard Sulley, who spoke to future Net Zero Editor Jonny Bairstow about why it is so important for all businesses to consider their journey towards net zero and how to start working to make it a reality.
He said: "The UK has set into legislation targets to be net zero by 2050 and recently in December 2020, we set an interim target of a 68% reduction by 2030, so the government has two tools that they can use to try and get to this target - they can incentivise or they can tax, and generally it will be a combination of both.
"Companies will need to look at it from that point of view - also they'll need to consider how they can remain competitive in the marketplace, as we've often seen with other kinds of improvements, such as quality standards or environmental standards, it becomes incumbent on businesses to adopt those standards for reasons such as to remain competitive, to be invited to tender and those kinds of things."
Richard stressed data and information are vital for a business to adequately understand their carbon footprint and go about setting a strategy to reduce their impacts. He said that organisations should look to quantify a minimum of 95% of their total emissions sources when building up a footprint and to identify any source that represents more than 1% of the total.
