Capgemini North America Launches Positive Planet

Capgemini North America has committed to supporting a new, holistic brand for our Environmental Sustainability Program. This program, Positive Planet, launches this week!

Positive Planet aims to engage the business:

• to meet our headline target to cut carbon emissions by 20% per employee by 2020; and 
• to support the work we do to enable our clients, suppliers, and people to meet today’s sustainability challenges. The implications of climate change simultaneously present risk and opportunity throughout our business. For example, we must be aware of and mitigate the risks posed by extreme weather events at our data centers, thereby ensuring that our clients have continuous service no matter the weather conditions. We also recognize the opportunities, both current and potential, to use technology to assist our clients with their own climate change challenges. We are resourceful – in our business travel Business travel is an important area of focus for Capgemini in North America, making up approximately 80% of our greenhouse gas emissions, while also posing a significant cost to the business. We promote smart, safe travel through our North America Travel program. The NA Travel team facilitates the reduction of business travel and employee commuting emissions, ensuring that the right tools are in place for every employee to make informed, sustainable decisions when it comes to travel. Advances in video conferencing technology have radically changed the way businesses operate, reducing the need for time consuming and carbon intensive business travel. To enable a reduction in non-essential travel we have implemented remote working and video conferencing technologies in all of our office show you can get involved.

This element of Positive Planet guides our approach to managing our key environmental impact areas – business travel, energy use, and waste management.

We Are Resourceful

• Positive Planet is built on three core elements: Resourceful, Accountable, and Impactful. Below, you can read in more detail about each, and how they enable and focus our sustainability efforts to make a difference where it counts.
• Positive Planet is a holistic program that we can all engage with. Our headline target has been approved by the Science Based Target Initiative – and we are the first in the IT Services sector to achieve this. But to meet this target, and contribute to the global effort on climate change, will require action. It’s the equivalent of each person opting not to fly from New York to Paris every year, or replacing two round trip flights from Houston to Atlanta with video conferences. We are all accountable, and through our actions we must be resourceful. By working together and with our networks we can be truly impactful.
• Consider replacing 1 in 5 domestic flights with an alternative mode of transportation, like rail.
• Consider ride-sharing when traveling to client site.
• Consider replacing your face-to-face meeting with a video conference or Skype call when appropriate.  
• To ensure we manage our office waste responsibly and recycle as much as possible, we have installed central waste recycling points in all of our offices.
• During office renovations, we consider the disposal of office furniture and equipment, looking for creative ways to extend their lifespan.

How you can get involved

Office Waste

• For the past 5 years, we have invested in upgrading the infrastructure of our buildings in order to improve their energy efficiency. Wherever possible, we have implemented lighting, cooling, and heating to further increase efficiency. When making new real estate acquisitions, efficiency and sustainability certifications such as LEED are considered heavily in the decision process, as is accessibility to mass-transit.

We are resourceful – in our office energy use

• Simple actions, such as switching off lights when leaving meeting rooms and not leaving laptop chargers plugged in all day, can have a significant impact on our combined energy consumption
• Take care when disposing of your waste in the office, making sure to recycle properly – why not try generating less waste by using one of the available reusable coffee mugs instead of a disposable one?

We Are Accountable

This element of Positive Planet ensures that we are accountable for managing our impacts to ensure we meet our ambitious targets and leave the world in better shape than we found it.

We have a world class carbon accounting system which enables us to measure, analyze, and transparently report on our environmental impacts. We measure our carbon footprint globally, capturing millions of data points every month from over 500 facilities and covering the travel patterns of over 180,000 people.In order to streamline and optimize this process, we have developed an innovative carbon accounting team as part of our global Sustainability Center of Excellence based in India. The team is responsible for ensuring the consistency and comparability of our carbon reporting across the Capgemini Group.

An award winning approach

Carbon data is also of growing interest to investors and our clients with voluntary disclosure schemes such as CDP, Ecovadis, and Vigeo-Eiris. Our world class carbon management approach has been helped us score A- in our CDP Climate Change disclosure in 2017, placing us in the top 23% of companies in our sector.

We Are Impactful

This element ensure that we also focus on our biggest area of environmental influence – the work we do with our people, our suppliers and particularly our clients.

The growing global population combined with increasing levels of consumption is also placing significant pressures on our planet’s natural resources and ecosystems. Climate change has become one of the most critical issues for this generation, with the impacts being increasingly felt by communities around the world. Indeed, information and communications technology (ICT) could enable a 20% reduction of global CO2e emissions by 2030.  Digital solutions could play a critical role in more than 50% of the 169 targets of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, digital technologies could unlock 9 trillion dollars in our global economies, and save over 251,000 billion liters of water through smarter agriculture. By 2030, ICT could deliver E-Health to 1.6 billion people. Our major clients such as Coca Cola, Cisco, Disney, Hydro One, and GE have made public commitments to sustainability in ways that matter to their business success. Awareness of the power of digital and technology to deliver these commitments is now growing. However, a digital service does not function in a vacuum; it is reliant on a complex digital infrastructure bounded by physical limits. It is estimated that data centers utilize upwards of 2% of total electricity generation in the US, and another 0.5% of US electricity is consumed by tech companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook. Estimates of the carbon impact of IT range from 2% to 10% of global emissions. We must ask what these services and relationships with clients would look like in a low carbon, resource constrained, and uncertain future to ensure we can continue to deliver Capgemini’s vision and mission. The Global Sustainability team is investigating what Digital Sustainability means for Capgemini and our clients. We need your input to do this. Whether you are a technology, digital, or sector specialist, or a client facing delivery or account manager please get in touch with Chris Hodgson from the UK CR team to discuss.

Summing Up

We launched Positive Planet, the next phase of our strategy to deliver on our ambitious environmental targets, while working to enable our clients, suppliers, and people to achieve theirs. This builds on the excellent work we have carried out to date in this space.

To make this program a success we need every team member in Capgemini to engage, so if you haven’t had the opportunity to look at this week’s Talent NA articles, then take a look at the program overview below.

There are three core elements to our new program designed to help us meet our target to cut carbon emissions by 20% per employee by 2020, and by 30% by 2030:

1. Resourceful

We are driving efficiency and innovation across our key impact areas of business travel, office and data center energy use, and waste.

2. Impactful

We want to make a big difference outside our operations and enable others, including our clients and suppliers, to reduce their environmental impact. Watch out for more on our client and partner engagement plan and details on how you can get involved, later this year.

3. Accountable

We will continue to monitor and report our impacts using a world class carbon accounting system to ensure we meet our targets.

If you are based in Chicago, Atlanta, New York, Toronto, San Francisco, Burbank, Dallas, or Houston, keep your eye out for the large Positive Planet posters; in our other offices, look out for new Positive Planet signage in the coming months!

Throughout the year, we will run focused campaigns to help you and your teams to be resourceful, impactful and accountable so we achieve our ambitious targets. Our campaign will need your input, ideas, and action to drive this forward and put Capgemini North America at the forefront of sustainable excellence. We will share the details of our approach and strategies from office energy to business travel to our intent to have a Net Positive impact.

Positive Planet will ensure we are on track to reduce our impacts whilst supporting our clients and society at large. But without you, the individual, this won’t be possible.

Watch Talent and other communication channels this week and in the coming months for more information.

Credits:

Andrew Peterson, Capgemini North America Environmental Sustainability Manager

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-d-peterson/