Once your environmental commitment or policy has been adopted, the next step is to begin the process of developing an environmental strategy or action plan. The breadth and depth of your environmental strategy will be greatly influenced by the scope of your environmental policy. Some policies may be focused narrowly on preventing pollution, recycling, and reducing resource use for example, while others may include a more catalytic role in terms of engaging suppliers, employees, members, clients or customers, the industry, and the broader community or public on overall environmental footprint reduction. In either case, the following measures will be important in developing your environmental strategy or action plan. The order in which the measures are presented need not be strictly adhered to. Co-operatives should choose the approach that makes the most sense for their organization. The order of the measure below is a hypothetical critical path that could be tailored to accommodate unique circumstances.
It is expected that your board and staff will have already been engaged in your environmental initiative through the process of developing your environmental commitment. However, the strategy or action-planning phase is a critical next juncture for engaging your internal stakeholders. A few initial tasks could include providing environmental training for board or staff members, perhaps in a webinar or day-long format, and agreeing on the business case and rationale for implementing an environmental initiative. Key business benefits can include:
Opportunity for cost savings and operational efficiencies;
Improved ability to recruit, retain, and motivate staff;
Increased innovation;
Improved brand and reputation; and
Enhanced risk management.
(See the link to Business Case for Sustainability in the Appendix.).
This would be a good time to recruit a steering committee of staff and possibly other stakeholders such as directors and co-op members to guide your strategic or action plan process.
After you have pulled your steering or planning committee together, the next step is to conduct research to identify your areas of strength and weakness, and complete a gap and opportunity analysis. The size, resource base, and environmental commitment of your co-operative will have a bearing on the extent of your environmental plan or strategy. You may select from the following menu of activities those research projects that will best help to build out your environmental plan in a manner consistent with the unique characteristics of your co-operative.
2.2.1 Assess Your Baseline
A critical first step is to conduct a baseline assessment of your co-op's environmental impacts. The companion guide, CCA Sustainability Toolkit Part Two: Operational Framework to Improve Environmental Performance for Canadian Co-operatives, provides details on how to go about this (see especially Section 1.3: Conducting an Environmental Assessment). Most typically, co-ops will prioritize their environmental footprint in the following impact areas (each is reviewed in detail in the companion guide):
When designing your sustainability initiative it can be helpful to see what others have done, particularly leading organizations. This is usually referred to as a best practice scan. Look into the environmental efforts of others in your community or sector. Typically this can be accomplished through desk research via internet searches and reviewing environmental or sustainability reports. Your research scope might include other businesses, co-ops, and organizations in your community, including your local government, your competitors, others in your industry or sector, and companies that have received national recognition for their leading environmental programs (see lists in Corporate Knights Best 50 Corporate Citizens, Jantzi-McLean's CSR Report, and McLean's Top 30 Green Employers).
The Co-operators has conducted two scans of sustainability practices at leading insurance and non-insurance companies and co-operatives since 2007; it uses this information to inform its sustainability strategy.
After reviewing about three or four websites or sustainability or environmental reports of best practice organizations, you will have a good understanding of what constitutes leading and lagging environmental practices. Many trade and sector associations have identified the environment and sustainability as key industry issues, and have taken steps to identify and share best practices in these areas. CCA's Environmental Casebookis an example of this. In addition, you may wish to check what resources your other industry associations have compiled. In some sectors, such as banking, the sector has established a set of environmental guidelines or principles that you could follow (see United Nations Environment Program Finance Initiative Principles).
It is worthwhile to understand the interests and concerns of your stakeholders. A stakeholder is a person, group, or organization that has an interest in your organization. Priority co-op stakeholders typically include staff, board, employees, members, customers or clients, and the community. Other stakeholders might include suppliers, government, media, academics, other co-operatives, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), First Nations and Aboriginal groups, trade unions, general public, etc. Getting ideas from stakeholders can start the creative wheels turning in your organization and help the process of innovation take root.
Methods to solicit ideas could include "green ideas" feedback emails, quick polls, focus groups, questionnaires, and brainstorming sessions. If your co-op seeks to engage its members or other stakeholders more substantively, you could consider launching a task force of members or stakeholders to help develop the strategy, holding a community or membership meeting to gather input, or conducting a member survey at your annual general meeting.
2.2.4 Assess Your Environmental Impact, Risk, and Opportunity Areas
The process of assessing your environmental impact, risk, and opportunity areas is an important step in developing your environmental game plan. However, good business practice suggests this should be an ongoing activity that is built into your overall risk management program, thus informing your environmental and business strategy on a regular basis. You may wish to consider some of the steps below to get a comprehensive picture of your organization's environmental position and prospects.
i) Assess your environmental impacts
Much of this work will have been completed in the baseline assessment phase referred to earlier (and further elaborated upon in the companion guide, CCA Sustainability Toolkit Part Two: Operational Framework to Improve Environmental Performance for Canadian Co-operatives). However, by revisiting your impacts, you may perceive some upstream and downstream effects of your operations that your environmental strategy could take into account.
An example of upstream effects is purchasing. Regardless of whether you are a retail co-op that sells consumer goods or a childcare co-op that provides child care services, you are sourcing goods and services in the market. The type of purchase, including the nature of the product or service and the management practices of your supplier, can have an impact on environmental conditions in your community and around the world (i.e. the transport of the good or service to your place of operation). Another upstream impact is how your employees get to work. Do they drive single-occupancy vehicles, take the bus, cycle, carpool, or walk?
You will also have environmental impacts downstream of your operations. These could include the transportation impacts of your customers (members) in getting to your place of operation, the packaging you use, the environmental impacts generated in the use of your product or service, and any disposal, reuse, or recycling considerations. When brainstorming your impacts look both upstream and downstream of your physical plant.
ii) Assess your environmental risks and opportunities
The process of risk assessment and management may or may not be an established business process within your organization. More and more organizations are implementing enterprise risk management programs to help them identify and manage their strategic, operational, reputational, regulatory, financial, emerging, and other sorts of risk. Whether or not you have such a system in place, you will want to ensure you have identified your co-op's key environmental risks when putting your environmental strategy together.
Consider the following questions:
Are there environmental trends or issues that will impact your co-operative?
Does your co-op generate environmental impacts that might come under increased regulation or under customer scrutiny?
What is the nature and degree of your exposure to those risks?
What is your tolerance or threshold for the exposure or threat of the environmental issue?
Can you manage this risk in a way that generates a competitive advantage for your co-op?
Depending on the nature of your industry or sector, some of the following environmental risks might apply (taken from a publication on environmental risk produced by The Economist; see Appendix).
Rising energy and fuel prices
Damage to reputation and brand
Failure to meet reporting obligations
Failure to comply with environmental regulation
Accessibility of raw materials due to growing resource scarcity
Impact on biodiversity
Impact of climate change over the long term
Impact of extreme weather events including business disruption in the supply chain
Suppliers' or partners' environmental performance
Food security
Soil erosion
Industrial pollution
Water pollution
Water scarcity
Use of toxic / hazardous substances
Transportation of hazardous chemicals or waste
Impact of operations on local communities
Emissions from factories, warehouses, and other facilities
Emissions from transportation
Environmental health of the workplace
Environmental reputation
Changing customer preferences
Changing employee expectations
You may need to conduct research into the environmental risks and impacts of how you manage your co-operative, and of your products and services as this information is a new area of interest and concern in environmental management. However, once you have determined your main environmental risks, you will want to decide which risks you will bear, transfer (e.g. via an insurance policy), or manage. If you choose the latter, this will become a potential component of your environmental plan or strategy, and ultimately your management system.
Other options that you may wish to consider for your strategy in light of your co-op's environmental risks include: the opportunity to develop new products or services to address or account for environmental problems; the opportunity to uncover new business ventures arising from changing public perception of environmental issues; training employees on environmental risk issues; and setting environmental standards and controls for your suppliers and future business partnerships.
Your priority environmental risks will feed into your process for setting environmental performance targets. If your options are not entirely clear to you, your co-op may benefit from scenario planning to further assess the potential impacts of environmental risks on your business.
Now that you have assessed your environmental baseline, best practice, stakeholder priorities, and impacts, risk and opportunities, you are in a position to pull this information together into a benchmarking exercise or gap and opportunity analysis. In this phase you will want to compile your research into a matrix, which will allow you to identify your co-operative's strengths and weaknesses relative to where you are today (your baseline) so you may compare them with best practice, stakeholder interests, and your key environmental impacts, risks and opportunities. Once you have completed this analysis, you will want to share it with others to verify its accuracy, relevance, and completeness. If your co-op is like most organizations, you will likely have generated a laundry list of gaps to fill and opportunities to leverage. The next step is where the rubber hits the road: setting your environmental priorities.
Conducting a Gap and Opportunity Analysis
This assessment will help you prepare for the next step. Areas of strength can be built upon as opportunities; areas of weaknesses can be prioritized in your environmental plan or strategy.
Review CCA Sustainability Toolkit Part Two: Operational Framework to Improve Environmental Performance for Canadian Co-operatives, check off which practices are in place at your co-op, and prepare a summary of practices that are not in place.
List the environmental governance and management practices you identified in your best practice review and prepare a summary of practices that are missing at your co-op.
List the issues and items your stakeholders consider important and note areas where your co-operative has strengths and weaknesses.
List the environmental risks you have flagged as important to your co-operative and summarize your approach to managing the environmental risks, noting where you do not have any risk management practices in place.
There are many means by which an organization can determine its environmental priorities. The most basic is some form of voting or show of hands for where to start. This can be a very useful approach for achieving early wins, and engaging and motivating staff and others. It can even result in cost-savings (e.g. reduced paper consumption), which can help fund other projects. However, this is not as strategic an approach to priority setting as would be preferred for a sustained program.
One way to turn the results from your research and benchmarking exercise into a set of strategic priorities-and ultimately an environmental plan or strategy-is to connect your list of gaps and opportunities to your environmental commitment and vision. With your commitment and vision in hand, consider which of your opportunity areas will help you fulfil your commitment and move you toward your vision. In a spreadsheet, you could list in one column where your co-op is on a given environmental measure and in another column where you would be if your organization was environmentally sustainable in fulfilling your commitment and achieving your vision. You will likely have some of the following categories.
For co-operatives just starting out, and even those that have established environmental programs, the list of opportunities to pursue can be overwhelming. Below are a few rules of thumb to keep in mind when deciding where to spend time and invest resources.
Can this initiative align with other existing business priorities (e.g. a building, fleet, product, brand, or website upgrade)?
Is this a top priority for one of your key stakeholder groups?
Is there a champion in your organization who has the energy and capacity to lead this initiative?
Does this address a key risk or impact area?
Are there opportunities for cost savings?
To what degree do you wish to be an industry or sector leader in this area, or is it possible / desirable to manage this environmental aspect minimally in basic compliance with environmental regulations or norms?
Where can you have the biggest impact / make the biggest difference?
Will you lose out to your competitors if you do not address this environmental issue?
Do you have the opportunity to gain competitive or business advantage?
Is this an efficient investment to move you toward your commitment / vision?
Can you do this on our own, or do you need outside actors (e.g. governments or others in your industry or supply chain)?
Consider adopting an ABC program: Above and Beyond Compliance.
As you determine your priorities, it is good to have a mix of longer term strategic initiatives, some early wins, and projects that require cross-departmental coordination and delivery in order to engage the whole organization in the implementation and sharing of responsibility.
Your organization's leadership orientation or aspiration is a critical determinant of your strategic priorities. Having conducted the scan of where you are today and where your threats and opportunities lie (in light of your commitment and vision, and given limited resources), you will now need to identify the best prospect for leading, being a fast follower, satisfying some minimal standard, or lagging in your environmental performance. The areas in which you wish to lead will be those where you will want to invest your resources for the longer term.
However, for the first few years you may wish to focus on getting your house in order. Typically, organizations prefer to establish a basic framework to measure and reduce their direct environmental impacts before becoming a catalyst for change within society. In order to be credible, you need to walk your talk before engaging others in what they can do for the environment.
The companion guide (CCA Sustainability Toolkit Part Two: Operational Framework to Improve Environmental Performance for Canadian Co-operatives) provides details on setting goals and targets for your environmental strategy (see Section 1: Management Systems). A key consideration at this point is to develop quantifiable measures by which you can assess your co-op's performance against its goals and targets. Some of your priorities and goals will lend themselves to targets and others may not. Either way, at this point in the process you should determine the measurement methodology by which you will assess progress. These are often referred to as performance indicators or key performance indicators (KPIs). Small organizations may have only a handful of KPIs, such as their annual greenhouse gas emissions, the percent of waste that is recycled, or the number of green products they have available. Larger organizations will have many more. What is important to understand is that your co-op should determine your one-to-three year goals and have quantifiable measures in place to monitor and track your performance. (See Sustainability Solutions Group and Vancity Credit Union as examples of two co-operatives that have developed key performance indicators to track their progress.)
As with any strategy or plan, the next step is to assign budget and human resources, a detailed time line, and set of actions steps-this is a basic of good planning with which any co-operative will be familiar.
This then constitutes your environmental strategy or plan. While you can keep it as a stand-alone document, you are advised to incorporate it into your overall business plan or corporate strategy. Depending on the degree of detail included in your co-op's business plan or strategy, some or all of your environmental goals, targets, and measures could be incorporated into the plan. It is possible that your business plan requires you to develop a high-order KPI or performance measure to be tracked by your executive and board of directors. If this is the case, choose to report on one of your goals that will be representative of your overall progress; or find a means to incorporate your environmental goals into other areas of the business plan, such as fleet management, marketing, product development, or facilities.
Once management and the board of directors have adopted your environmental strategy or plan, the focus will be on implementation and integration, described in the next section.
The Use of Consultants in Developing Your Strategy
Some organizations hire outside consultants to assist with vision and strategy development. A few consulting models you may wish to consider include:
Hire experts to help you measure your environmental footprint.
Hire strategic planners to assist you and your co-op to develop your vision statement and three-year strategic priorities.
Hire sustainability coaches or advisors who can provide mentoring services to help build your co-op's internal environmental management capacity.
Hire researchers to conduct best practice research and industry scans.
Hire sustainability trainers to educate your co-operative's board, management, and staff on key sustainability issues and trends that affect your co-op and its sector.
It is expected that your board and staff will have already been engaged in your environmental initiative through the process of developing your environmental commitment. However, the strategy or action-planning phase is a critical next juncture for engaging your internal stakeholders. A few initial tasks could include providing environmental training for board or staff members, perhaps in a webinar or day-long format, and agreeing on the business case and rationale for implementing an environmental initiative. Key business benefits can include:
Conducting a Gap and Opportunity Analysis
