What Role Does Your Organization Play?
Sometimes it can be very easy to determine what impact your organization has. With a quick look at your financial records last year, you can fairly easily come up with how much you contributed to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or you might be able to say a certain quantity of people were supported through your charitable activities. You can probably even quickly determine what your power or water usage levels were. However, measuring your impact on the climate or environment can quite often be a bit less straight forward and difficult to quantify. So is it really feasible to try and do in the first place?
Now, you don’t really need me to answer that question, do you? And while everyone may have different thresholds for the level of importance regarding climate/environmental issues, we are living in an age where the results of human behavior are becoming both more understood and quantifiable. You could in theory go on and do nothing for a while, but the likelihood is that at some point even if you do nothing now the regulatory end of society will catch up with things and force the changes. So whatever your reasoning, getting a grasp of how your company, government, association, family or even just you contributes to the environmental changes occurring around you is a logical choice.
Of course painting the complete picture will be an involved task, so the let’s focus today on how to get started. These steps will help you get underway, and when repeated can move you towards a more thorough understanding.
- Pick a single item – don’t try to do this all in the once. Now if your organization is big enough to either give someone full responsibility or even hire help in this process that is great, but reality for most will be this will be an ancillary item / part-time task to begin with. So start by thinking about a single question like – ‘how much waste water do we produce?’
- Start small – even once you pick a question you want to answer it might be best to either answer it only for a portion of your organization or for certain activities to get your hands the process of effective measurement. For instance understanding the power usage for lighting only or in an average office, is something you can measure and then extrapolate without having to directly measure across an entire location or facilities in different parts of the world.
- Measurable directly – do not try to pick something that you can not easily measure yourself. While there are tools and calculators for measuring things like your *Carbon Footprint*, measuring something like this actually can be less explicit and usually less meaningful for your organization. You are better off understanding what you do that does contribute and measuring that directly. Like knowing that all your power comes from a coal power plant and therefore measuring your power usage is much easier for you and is something that is also more familiar and useful.
- Think multi-beneficial items – even if you could measure the level of nitrates you are putting into the water supply through fertilizers in your green spaces, it is likely best to start with areas where you can also benefit your organization in other ways. For instance understanding the power consumption through the use of incandescent light bulbs can help you in the process of understanding your carbon dioxide outputs, but also with how you can save on your power bill. Of course the bigger the potential the results the more organizational buy in their is likely to be.
- Input from others – do not hesitate to look to other organizations that are tied to yours for help or information. They may have either have tools or people that can help you in the process, or they may have undertaken similar tasks as well and have valuable recommendations of do’s and dont’s.
- Understand and act – the absolute worse thing you can do in all this is just to go into it without really thinking about how it fits into both your short-term and long-term plans. It is also wise to spend some time in understanding how your direct actions influence climate and the environment. And maybe the most important aspect in answering your question(s) of choice is acting upon the answers to make change within your organization.
Hopefully once you try these steps for one item, you can use them again and again for additional items. Then when there is a comfort level you can proceed to a more in depth process and plan. I realize you might also need some help just getting out of the starting block, so here are a couple of websites that can help in sparking some of those initial questions for you – The Nature Conservancy, David Suzuki Foundation and The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). If you really want to dig into this topic with some additional reading, I recommend “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” by Thomas L. Friedman. The book provides a good large scale overview of the challenges and opportunities in this ‘greening’ world (I will caution that while the book is informative, the lack of siting sources in some cases means read it for thought provoking not firm answers).
Next time we will look at a very visual example of how we humans do indeed impact the environment through direct and indirect actions. Given the difficulties in really understanding our contributions as we have discussed today, sometimes only the blatantly obvious can really jog our systems. Until then, learn and act in a responsible and meaningful way!