Business in the Environment’s tenth birthday is an anniversary worth noting, if only as an opportunity to look back and see how ‘the environment’ has changed as a business issue. Originally the Index focused on operational management (policies and processes) and only gradually added performance measures. The focus broadened too, from core operations to include backward and forward linkages such as suppliers and transportation. This year’s overall scores reflect the ‘maturity’ of development in companies, with management scoring highest at 84%, next performance at 74% and supply chain bringing up the rear at 64%.
Today it’s fair to say many companies have achieved significant improvements in their internal ‘eco-efficiency’, not least because the most obviously sensible measures have quite reasonable financial payback times. Safe to say in the next ten years operating efficiency won’t be as easy to find. But the big issue is that as consumption and thus output has increased, so companies’ impacts have grown in absolute terms. That’s why the focus in indexes like BiE must now be on the full life cycle of products and services (direct and indirect impact) and on achieving overall volume reductions.
And that’s why the developments we report above are so interesting, whether GE researching new products or HSBC and JP Morgan Chase influencing how borrowers use their money.
The note of caution is that no one company can buck the market: as Shell highlights, high oil prices make renewables more attractive, but they also make exploitation of high carbon impact oil sands more viable too. Back to our previous theme about the need for governments to set the ground rules within which individual companies can make operational decisions.
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