Exclusive: Capgemini preps carbon consultancy push

Consultancy giant Capgemini is preparing a range of new carbon accounting and management services designed to tap growing demand from firms attempting to comply with the government's imminent Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) scheme.

The company has already developed its own internal dashboard for monitoring environmental performance metrics such as carbon emissions and energy use and is currently working on how some of its carbon management technologies and techniques could be used by corporate customers.

Speaking to BusinessGreen.com, James Robey, head of corporate sustainability at the company, predicted that growing numbers of firms will turn to consultancies to help manage their response to the CRC's carbon accounting and reporting requirements.

"Carbon accounting imposes some of the hardest data and reporting requirements organisations will ever have to deal with," he observed. "There is a huge amount of carbon and energy data coming in from different sources, in different formats and at different frequencies that you have to collect, rehash, and then distribute back to the relevant people. It is an enormous data management challenge."

He added that those firms wanting to get a full understanding of their carbon footprint, including travel and supply chain emissions, will probably have to tweak contracts to ensure suppliers provide accurate and timely emissions data.

Jon Hampson, head of Capgemini's environment programme, said firms will also face a huge challenge working out how best to use carbon data they have collected. "The [carbon consultancy] market is a bit like the Wild West at the moment, with new carbon management tools coming out every day," he said. "But our belief is the key issue will not be the data itself, it is what you do with it and how you use it – that is where we are focusing."

This proposed focus on how to use carbon data appears sensible, given Capgemini will be attempting to address a carbon accounting and services market that has become fiercely competitive ahead of the launch next month of the CRC.

Capgemini is reluctant to provide precise details of what its new services will entail, but in a thinly veiled swipe at some of the company's rivals, Robey insisted that they would not be housed in a specialist sustainability division.

"Some companies have set up specialist units, but our conclusion was that sustainability is a thread that should run through all existing services," he said. "Sustainability translates into a business change problem, which is where consultancies have always sat – it is not necessarily a case of inventing new management processes and methodologies, but a case of introducing new objectives such as carbon minimisation to existing methodologies."

Picking up on the same theme, Hampson argued that the long-term aim for any organisation should be to normalise sustainable processes. "Sustainability will not be dissimilar to health and safety in the 70s and quality assurance in the 80s and 90s," he observed. "You used to have huge departments in both those areas, but they have now become an integrated part of the business."