An Industrial Safety family business: Design and Operationalize an ESG Strategy
Context
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Green washing is harming the reputation of many companies who claim that they are offsetting carbon emissions by buying carbon credits based on environmental projects such as clean cooking stoves, reforestation initatives etc. However, there is no real data to prove that this model really offsets carbon
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Our client, asked us to develop a ESG strategy with a strong focus on measurement and tracking.
Approach
We started by speaking with a number of internal stakeholders (CSR, Supply chain) and external stakeholders such as regulators, carbon auditors, carbon experts, startups that are working in this space. Our study revealed that we needed to focus on two types of projects to offset the carbon footprint. They are clean cooking stoves and reforestation projects. Our study also revealed that data collection is indeed very hard and many companies don’t have a structured approach to measuring the impact of their carbon and green projects
We worked with two of our partners in India and Kenya to test two models - a cooking stove project in the north eastern part of India and a reforestation project in Kenya. We developed a mobile application and created a ‘tracking’ model that will enable a rural entrepreneur to track progress every two weeks. This rural entrepreneur will collect data, take pictures and share that into a database. We ran a pilot for 6 months in collaboration with our partners and the client was satisfied with the tracking mechanism and the reporting outcomes