Fight or flight? The most powerful response is making the business case for sustainability  

The challenges of meeting new corporate sustainability reporting requirements are creating concerns across industries, but Schneider Electric’s Lisa Zembrodt says organisations should focus on the positives of compliance.

Zembrodt leads Schneider Electric’s Sustainability Business division, which assists many of Australia’s leading corporations to increase energy efficiency, reduce costs, adopt renewables and map their energy transition pathway.

Speaking to corporate leaders at Schneider Electric’s Innovation Summit in Sydney, Zembrodt said there was too much negativity in current debates over energy and sustainability, including focusing on the complexity and costs of compliance.

“We should turn these perspectives around and look at the opportunities in companies understanding their energy consumption and processes and using technology to drive efficiency. With compliance should come cost savings.”

The new Australian Sustainability Reporting Standards are mandatory and comprehensive, described by ASIC chair Joe Longo as the biggest change to corporate reporting in a generation. They carry penalties for non-compliance and will be closely monitored by investors and stakeholders.

The requirements came into effect for major companies from January and will be gradually rolled out. It involves more than putting data into a report and committing to emissions cuts, said Zembrodt.

“It’s about understanding the impact that climate has on an organisation, its markets and its supply chain. It’s putting in place plans to mitigate the risks, adapt and take advantage of the opportunities.

“Many entities today don’t have a transition plan; simply by requiring a plan to be created, the laws encourage companies to act,” said Zembrodt. “Organisations can gain competitive advantage from complying with the standards and set their strategies to capture the opportunity.

“Sustainability Business has been advising our customers on many areas of energy and sustainability for over 25 years, globally we work with 40% of the Fortune 500, working on everything from ESG reporting and disclosures to decarbonisation strategies and their implementation.

“Improving energy and resource efficiency creates cost savings,” she said. “Investing in renewable generation, storage, microgrids and demand response ensures the security and resilience of power supplies and can reduce energy costs in the long term.

“We’re advising companies on how to be more efficient, how to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in their fleets and their operations and, of course, we advise on how to switch to renewables.”

She points out that new technology and the evolution of power generation create opportunities and risks around energy sourcing. The influx of renewable projects in Australia has made buying renewables much easier than it was a decade ago.

Increased scrutiny and knowledge of business operations can bring additional and unexpected benefits.

“We’ve found that management of energy and energy supply contracts brings cost savings — these are often low-hanging fruit,” said Zembrodt.

“In 2024 we identified $6.7 million of errors in energy invoices for our clients. There’s absolutely no reason any company should overpay for energy.”

She also observed the increasing pressure from stakeholders and investors to progress sustainability, with a real impact on a corporation’s capacity to raise capital if it was not seen to be taking a positive approach.

Zembrodt acknowledged the sometimes-contentious issue of carbon offsets and emphasised they should not be used by companies to avoid actual emissions reduction in their operations. Some organisations were rightly walking away from dubious, generic offset schemes, she said.

However, targeted and documented offset programs had a vital role to play in hard to abate sectors where it was impractical to immediately cut emissions, she said.

“In Australia, the government has put a requirement called the safeguard mechanism on the highest-emitting facilities to buy carbon offsets if they can’t reduce their emissions. We can help to ensure the offsets procured have a positive impact on people and ecosystems.

“Did you know we supported the Paris Olympics with carbon offsets? Part of this included choosing three projects to support through carbon offset purchase for the Paris Olympics. People at the equator are most affected by climate change, so projects in that region are incredibly impactful in a positive way and that’s where we focused our attention.

“The first is mangrove restoration in Senegal, which involved 350 villages and 100,000 people. The second is water well restoration in Rwanda, which gives people safe drinking water nearby but also means emissions from burning wood to boil water are reduced. The third project is a 50 MW solar farm in Vietnam.

“However, we urgently need real emissions reductions. While it is positively impactful that companies invest in gold-standard carbon offset projects, it cannot come at the expense of action to decarbonise.”

Zembrodt pointed to recent extreme weather events as demonstrating how critical taking action on emissions was. “We’ve just seen the Queensland and NSW coastlines buffeted by a major cyclone, while in LA, this year’s devastating bushfires caused an estimated cost bill of more than $250 billion. And it’s not just the physical damage; medical and social costs follow, and let’s see the impact on insurance costs.”

Across the nation, we need to electrify processes wherever possible, and maximise renewable generation, she said. Those electrified processes also need to be made as efficient and optimised as possible through digitisation, monitoring and AI.

“The time to act is now,” she said. “70% of emissions can be eliminated today with the technologies we already have available to us.”

Image caption: Lisa Zembrodt, Principal and Senior Director, Schneider Electric Sustainability Business.

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