Exclusive: UK firms to pioneer employee carbon cap and trade

A small group of UK firms is poised to trial an innovative personal carbon trading scheme that promises to slash employees' carbon emissions by offering the greenest members of staff financial bonuses.

The initiative, known as the personal allowance carbon tracking scheme, is being organised by environmental consultancy WSP Environment & Energy, which has successfully trialled its own employee carbon trading scheme for the past two years.

Speaking to BusinessGreen.com, David Symons, director at WSP Environment & Energy, said the voluntary initiative mirrored economy-wide emission cap-and-trade schemes, providing employees who sign up with an emissions target for their domestic and transport emissions, and imposing a small financial penalty on those who exceed the target while offering a bonus to those who come in under the cap.

About 650 WSP staff have signed up to the scheme and Symons said that early indicators suggested that it has helped people cut their carbon emissions by 10 per cent. He added that the penalties and bonuses were capped at £100 – a sum large enough to motivate people to curb their emissions, but not so high as to discourage employees from joining the scheme.

WSP has now signed up a number of firms, including engineering giant Invensys Rail and event organiser Green Power Conference, to begin trialling similar schemes from March. It also aims to get about 30 firms involved in the initial trial throughout the rest of the year with a number of multinationals, small and medium-sized businesses and public sector bodies currently expressing interest in adopting the model.

Symons said the firms involved would each trial slightly different personal carbon trading schemes, with Invensys Rail for example proposing to scrap penalties and simply offer bonuses to the best-performing staff. He added that an unnamed academic body would assess the success of each of the schemes to try to establish which provides the most effective means of curbing emissions.

Many environmental groups have long argued that personal carbon trading offers one of the most effective and equitable means of encouraging people to switch to lower-carbon lifestyles.

However, the concept has been largely on hold since the government shelved proposals for a series of voluntary trials two years ago.