Where should I start with sustainability in my business?
Kevin: Again, another great question and to a degree, we probably don't know. But my philosophy has always been exactly the same, which is to keep it simple. Start simple. Start with stuff that you are in control of at the beginning. Hopefully organisations are familiar with the term 'scopes'. If they're not, that's something organisations need to understand:
Scope one and scope two are emissions that are within your control, so they should be things that you are collecting. It's information that you'll get on your energy bills and you can build that up.
Scope three is something that I would take in steps. Like all things, when you look at the project at the beginning, it looks like a beast. It's how do you eat the elephant scenario. You do things that you can actually be in control of - Water, for instance; what are the scope three emissions with water and waste? and build from there.
But this is an opportunity for you to engage with your supply chain as well. So you can be asking your suppliers what they are doing. It might be that you learn from them or learn with them or even help and support them. But the more you can interact and the more information you can provide and get from them, the easier it will be to build up your scope three emissions.
Nobody's got a great handle on their scope three emissions at the moment.
You could have a whole team of sustainability experts in your organisation - you could be at the top of the leaderboard - but you still won't have accurate scope three emissions.
So just taking little steps on that journey (it's never going to be perfect) but you can just improve and improve. And that whole process of continuous improvement will just help you get better as an organisation.
When we do get definite guidelines or standards or whatever it's going to look like; at that point, you'll be much better prepared. It won't be as much of a leap to make the final tweaks to that reporting standard.
But this is no more difficult than doing your financial accounts. You're just operating in a slightly different currency. You're collecting the same information. You're just changing the conversion factors.
So start simple.
Build up.
Get your confidence.
Engage with your own supply chain.
Look up your supply chain as well, and it might be that you can get help up and down.
And obviously the Wadi experts are the people that are here to help.