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Sustainability Initiative

Climate change is upon us. Public and private institutions recognize the role that each have in reaching sustainability goals to slow climate change as well as mitigate and adapt to the various risks that climate change is driving.

The Board of Directors for Coco pharmaceuticals has come to recognize the need for a formal sustainability program. This is a major cross-cutting initiative with many complexities that will affect many parts of the business, provide opportunities for innovation, differentiation and cost-savings over time - as well as meet commitments to shareholders, partners and regulators.

These initiatives require careful consideration, planning and collaboration - often over many years. It is important to choose a good starting point that is tangible, understandable and incrementally achievable. The board is aware of emerging regulatory reporting requirements for sustainability and decides that it would be beneficial to be proactive and start with this as a focus area.

The foundation for much of sustainability reporting is accounting for the carbon emissions (and their equivalence) by following protocols such as the GHG Protocols. This can help all stakeholders establish:

  • Coco’s direct and indirect carbon emissions baseline
  • goals and targets to reduce these emissions
  • campaigns and projects to achieve these goals
  • Progress monitoring and reporting
  • Auditable results to publish to stakeholders - governmental, financial and market.

With this mission in mind, the Coco board decides to establish a sustainability program.

Leadership

The board considered how to organize and execute the program. Through these discussions they quickly realized that this program was not only important in itself, but would also provide an opportunity for some promising, more junior staff to learn how to collaborate and lead across the business.

There were many promising candidates put forward, but at the end of the discussions, all agreed that this would be an excellent experience for Tom Tally. As Tom already had dealings with both sales and suppliers that would help her to understand and interact with external parties to gather and share key information. There were of course concerns that she was too inexperienced - and so it was quickly agreed that Tom should be paired with experienced leaders throughout the company. As a result, the following team was announced:

To provide overall guidance and oversight it was agreed that a partnership between Reggie Mint and Jules Keeper would provide executive sponsorship.

First steps

Reggie Mint and Jules Keeper call a meeting with the newly formed team of Tom, Stew and Erin. They explain the situation as related to them from the board meeting and lay out the business imperatives that they must all achieve. Reggie and Jules ask the team to put together an initial proposal for how to proceed - and to come back in a week to discuss. Tom, Stew and Erin nervously agree and depart to discuss over a working lunch.

Establishing the new domain

After some discussion, they agree that sustainability is another governance domain in their governance program. Thia will allow them to make use of many of the definitions and organizational structures already in place.

The definition of this new domain is described in the egeria-samples-api.git repository.

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