Project Description | Background
Sustainability reports focusing on comprehensive corporate responsibility will become more important in the future. In particular, companies are paying more attention to the production conditions of their suppliers and waste contractors. Therefore, the entire supply chain is the focus of a company’s climate protection approach. The question is this: is it possible to evaluate the climate efficiency of companies in times of outsourcing and globalisation? For instance, companies can achieve an overall positive climate rating by outsourcing environmentally damaging processes to pollution havens, even if the overall climate rating of their products is negative.
Approach
Taking this into account, the task of the research project EINBLIK, which is supported by the BMBF, is to develop an indicator in order to sum up the climate intensities of all companies along a supply chain. This indicator does not only measure the climate impact of one product, but also takes into account the climate impact of a company’s different sites and the company as a whole. This distinguishes the method from the ordinary method of Life Cycle Assessment. Thus, one can say that the cumulated climate intensity of a company shows the climate protection performance of a company’s output because the indicators of its suppliers and waste contractors are incorporated into its own indicator. This indicator of cumulative climate intensities follows a different approach from other concepts that assess climate protection performance. The indicator for every company in the supply chain is calculated in the following way: the climate intensities of all suppliers and waste contractors of a company multiplied by their share of the company’s turnover and the direct emissions of a company are set in proportion to the company’s turnover to calculate the indicator. This results in a recursive indicator system in which each supplier and waste contractor merely passes its climate rating along the supply and disposal chain. Every company has to look back by only one supplier and waste contractor step. This yields another big advantage for the realisation of the method because the necessary data for the calculation of cumulative emission intensities is easily accessible to each company in the chain.
Steps
In the first step, the methodical framework will be determined. This includes the determination of accounting principles, the examination of the data demand, and the approach for international usage and boundary rules. The second step involves the implementation of the method as an operational decision support system. Analysis and extension of the decision models must precede integration of the method in the operational decision process. The last step is the application for the project partners’ businesses. For example, Volkswagen AG will compare the climate efficiency of different sites and factories by cumulative emission intensities, while Systain Consulting GmbH calculates cumulative emission intensities along an extensive supply chain.
Aims
The aim of the research project is to advance the cumulative emissions intensities method in order to apply this concept to all companies in globalised production systems. The application of the indicator system should be independent of the industry and the size of a company. Furthermore, the method should be transferable to pollutants other than CO2-equivalents, and it should also comprise reduction chains. As a result, companies will have an incentive to minimise the climate impact of their complete product range. Thus, the method is sufficient to support comprehensive corporate responsibility. Cumulative climate intensities offer the opportunity to assess supplier connections on climate relevant emission ratings. This will enable companies to establish integrated supply chain management on climate impacts leading to mitigation of CO2-emissions. Every company will strive to achieve a low indicator value and will pass on this tendency to its suppliers and waste contractors. Moreover, mitigation of CO2-emissions can be achieved by setting target values for the indicator or by installing a mandatory benchmarking system. Furthermore, the indicator provides a new decision criterion because it connects environmental measures with business data. Because the indicator is a concrete operational number and not simply a scientific measure unfamiliar to the typical businessperson, it can be easily understood and applied by the decision makers in companies. |
Publications | Schmidt, Mario/Schwegler, Regina (2005): Wertschöpfungsbasierte Erfolgsmessung unternehmensbezogener Klimaschutzaktivitäten, hrsg. vom Institut für Angewandte Forschung der Hochschule Pforzheim (Pforzheimer Forschungsberichte: Nr. 4) [pdf-Download] |
