Sustainable Business

When it comes to carbon, impact meas- urement is fast evolving across the busi- ness landscape. Doing less environmen- tal harm, or striving for zero emissions, is no longer good enough for those companies with more mature sustain- ability programmes. They want to go one step further and work out how to engineer business growth into their green aspi- rations, by being restorative and giv- ing back more than they take from soci- ety and the environ- ment. Welcome to the Net Positive movement. Currently there are only a handful of businesses who are pushing the bar this high, and one of them is BT. Its Net Good programme revolves around a 2020 goal – to help customers reduce carbon emissions by at least three times the end-to-end carbon impact of its own business. Complex, somewhat daunting, but also a huge opportunity according to BT's head of Net Good Kevin Moss. "Net Good is a business growth strategy. This is about helping our customers meet their own requirements to reduce their environmental footprint. For many of our largest customers in the commercial and government sectors, sustainability is one of their primary challenges. This is not about making them manage their carbon emissions, this is about them wanting to manage their carbon emissions and us becoming a solutions provider to help them do it," he explains. Moss says that by working strategically with its own supply chain, BT will focus on delivering product innovation with an inherently lower carbon footprint. This coupled with what he calls "dematerialisation" – offering communication technology services that replace physical products with virtual, streamed or digitally-delivered equivalents – will help businesses not only better manage their supply chains, but cut down on unnecessary travel. The value of the Net Good philosophy is that it will enable BT to look at carbon in a more holistic way across its value chain, so it can link reduced emissions to business growth. "This is an important methodology from an investor perspective," notes Moss. "This is enhancing the whole carbon area from what it was, which I would say is risk mitigation and cost reduction through using less energy … into a growth story and a market opportunity story. That brings investors into the fold. If investors support what we are doing, it makes a massive difference to how much of it we can do." However the precise methodology around Net Positive still needs to be Business Models Carbon reduction 2/5 A positive contribution: BT head of Net Good Kevin Moss Net Good is a business growth strategy. This is about helping our customers meet their own requirements to reduce their environmental footprint.

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