It’s raining water tanks

It’s raining water tanks: top tips for keeping them healthy and efficient

Article published by CSIRO 11 February 2015 Author:

Australia is the driest populated continent in the world, and yet our water consumption per person is among the highest on the planet. For Australians, water is scarce and how we manage this resource is a concern for us all.

It’s no surprise that people are looking to install some form of water catchment for their property. Recent data shows that 26 per cent of Australian homes have already installed a rainwater tank and an overwhelming majority reported that they are positive about the tanks.

From saving money on your water bills to the conservation of a valuable natural resource, there is a lot to like about the humble rainwater tank.

raining water tanksMore than a quarter of Australian households have a rainwater tank. Picture credit: ABC.net.au

They can even have other positive flow-on effects for the community. For example, the use of rainwater tanks in urban areas can relieve pressure on public infrastructure because of reduced stormwater runoff. We’ve also seen the popularity of rainwater tanks increase year on year, with the ABS reporting that the total storage capacity in Australia has gone up by 30 per cent between 2006 and 2011.

This is all very encouraging news for the environment – but, it’s not all drinking water and skittles. Just like buying a puppy dog or a Tamagotchi, owning a rainwater tank comes with its own responsibilities.

A recent study we conducted with the Smart Water Fund has shown that households may not be aware of some of the maintenance requirements that come with rainwater tank ownership.

In the report, Survey of savings and conditions of rainwater tanks, we conducted extensive research into rainwater systems across Melbourne, looking at the efficiency of the tanks and the water savings that can be generated at an individual household level.

One of the most interesting findings was lack of awareness around maintenance. Only 58 per cent of Melbournians indicated that they have conducted some form of maintenance on their system.

It’s important to know that the installation of a rainwater tank isn’t a set-and-forget scenario. There are some maintenance tasks that are unavoidable if you want to keep the tank healthy and efficient.

Read full CSIRO article here.

New ASX guidelines to force sustainability reporting

By Kylar Loussikian, The Conversation

Publicly listed companies will need to disclose exposure to economic, environmental and social sustainability risks for the first time under new corporate governance guidelines released today.

The principles, issued by the ASX Corporate Governance Council, are the first since the global financial crisis. Companies have previously not been required to disclose non-financial risk.

Sara Bice, a research fellow at the Melbourne School of Government, said the changes were a “big move”, particularly in the absence of government regulation. She said the changes fits with the new guidelines’ increased focus on transparency and disclosure.

“These are risks that many companies identify through regular auditing processes, but previously they may have taken them into account for decision making but not publicly discussed or disclosed them.”

“The majority of ASX companies already produce sustainability reports, and if you look across the globe, 95% of the top 250 listed firms produce them too,” she said.

However Thomas Clarke, director of the Centre for Corporate Governance at UTS, said that while some very large Australian corporations had world-class reporting in these fields, “the majority of listed Australian corporations are lagging behind international best practice”.

He said successive federal governments had declined to regulate mandatory social and environmental risk reporting, even after it was recommended by a parliamentary inquiry and the Corporations and Market Advisory Committee.

“In the past social and environmental risks were dismissed by companies as externalities,” Professor Clarke said.

“What this meant simply is that while corporations were free to pursue profit, it was the wider community that picked up the bill for any social or environmental harm they caused.”

Companies listed on the ASX are required to comply with the principles or must give detailed reasons for their non-compliance. A failure to do so could ultimately lead to a company being delisted.

Originally developed in the wake of a series of corporate collapses in 2001, the guidelines were first released in 2003.

Citing “increasing calls globally for the business community to address matters of economic, environmental and social sustainability”, the guidelines require a listed firm to outline how it intends to manage those risks.

Other changes, which come after an extended consultation period, include a relaxation on requirements for independent directors.

Suzanne Le Mire, a corporate law academic at the University of Adelaide, said it’s possible that older standards requiring majority independent board members could have forced companies to accept directors with less expertise.

“These new changes have responded to those concerns by increasing the emphasis on obtaining expertise when directors are appointed to the board, and disclosing the presence or absence of expertise,” she said.

“One of the most controversial proposed changes was the refinement of the definition of independence to provide that directors who had been on board for more than nine years lacked independence.”

Dr Le Mire said it was “disappointing” this requirement had been removed. The new guidelines simply require the length of a director’s tenure “be considered”.

But she said an emphasis on diversity demonstrated a view that a “commitment to equity and diversity will enhance financial performance and board deliberations”.

“It’s interesting to see the conception of diversity has been shifted from an exclusive emphasis on gender diversity to a broader notion including age, disability, ethnicity, marital or family status, religious or cultural background, sexual orientation and gender identity.”

The new rules come into effect in July.

The ConversationThis article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Webinar – Sustainability Reporting…Coming Soon

The Association for Sustainability in Business will be scheduling a Sustainability Reporting Webinar shortly, the webinar will be free to our members. To  find out more about the Association for Sustainability in Business please visit the website www.sustainability.asn.au or click on this link to join the Association.

Climate impacts– analysing infrastructure interconnectivity and flow-on effects for Australian cities

Manidis Roberts, KPMG and The Climate Institute (TCI) collaborated to undertake an exercise to credibly identify, quantify and cost, climate impacts on city infrastructure (Melbourne) as a result of extreme heat event. We modelled the impacts on infrastructure and their interdependencies under a specified climate event.

This provided a case study of the flow-on impacts of the damage to infrastructure from future climate events. We explored the interdependencies that play out between businesses and infrastructure owners and operators under future climatic conditions, such as an extreme heat, sea level rise or extreme rainfall events. The exercise identified nodes of interconnectivity and interdependency and where there are critical infrastructure vulnerabilities to future climatic events. It also analysed flow-on effects throughout the economy of any resulting disruption to services and performance of assets as a consequence of these events. There have been very few exercises of this nature carried out to date, and this now forms an important body of research for the TCI Resilience Flagship Project and more widely.

An analysis found businesses and organisations are largely unprepared for a heatwave event of magnitude. 2030 predictions doubling both frequency and severity of impacts would severely overstretch budgets, infrastructure capacity, coping ranges and system interactions and would be unmanageable. The potential impact on individual businesses in terms of effect on total revenue was calculated. The exercise also shows that the responsibility for planning and actions to reduce vulnerabilities lies with multiple parties and not just those initially impacted. Systems resilience rather than sector resilience is required.

Ms Nicki Hutlley, Chief Economist, KPMG, will present at the combined Liveable Cities and Sustainability Conferences in Melbourne in June 2013

Two Conferences! Three Days! One Location!

The Sustainability Conference: “Taking Care of Business: Sustainable Transformation 2” will be held in conjunction with the 6th Making Cities Liveable Conference, in a new era of collaboration, information sharing and professional networking. The conference is being held from the 17th – 19th June 2013 at Novotel Melbourne St Kilda.

Integrated reporting “the next step”

FSinsight editor Jeroen Derwall, Assistant Professor at the Tilburg Center for Sustainability and at Maastricht University, talks about the upward trend that more companies are reporting on their sustainability practices. However, the quality of the reporting differs. He calls integrated reporting “the next step.”

Positive Carbon Management: The Buck Starts with the Environmental Data

What separates leaders from followers in the area of energy and carbon management?  Bigger cost reductions and better operating performance.  How do they achieve these results? By outperforming followers with executive sponsored programs and investing in technology to manage and analyse data.

That’s the message to take away from a recent energy and carbon management report by research firm Aberdeen Group. What can be inferred from this report is that delivering improved business performance will, in the long term, only be achieved by a systematic and consistent approach to energy and carbon, which will accommodate the increasing complexity and quantity of the underlying data.

The challenges of (environmental) data management   Data management is a common problem across many areas of business in different industries, and carbon management is no exception. However, managing carbon suffers from a lack of maturity, driven by insufficient business attention. The good news is that data practises from more mature industries can be applied.   Receiving data from your supply chain in a timely and easy to manage format is the first major obstacle for most organisations. Leaders are 50% more likely to have supplier data transferred directly into a software application*. Some organisations choose a single supplier to simplify this although this is not always the best commercial decision.

The concept of a Network of Exchange is used by industries such as aviation and automotive and allows the collection of disparate data and subsequent standardisation for communication to reporting platforms. Such a Network now exists for the flow of environmental data from utility supplier to organisations.   Consistency and completeness of data are the next challenges for effective carbon management. Environmental data is usually fragmented and decentralised as it resides with multiple stakeholders across the business. There is also a wide variety of environmental data collected such as energy cost, Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions and consumption at an activity and asset level.   To overcome this, it’s important to accept that data comes from many sources, and equally important to avoid the temptation to ‘turn off’ any data source. The concept of data pedigree priority allows the ‘ranking’ of data based on quality and value to your business. Business decisions can be made on the best available data at the time (which is better than no data), and your carbon management system can automatically substitute higher value data as it becomes available.

Why you need more than a spreadsheet for environmental data management   Spreadsheets are fine for calculation. However, for sustained carbon management you need more than calculation of your co?-e. When the big data flows arrive a spreadsheet will drown you in a mass of numbers. Granularity in your data will lead to improved decision making but only if you have a system that can manage the data and present information in a manner that your stakeholders can relate to.

Environmental data programs need to be managed in the same way a Sales or HR program would be managed, with a scalable software solution that allows you to forecast and set and track against targets.   Making the most of environmental data management processes   With a platform of robust and complete data behind you, you are now in a position to deliver ongoing value to your business. Leading organisations deliver this by ensuring metrics are linked to operational and financial elements that are already embedded into the organisation*. A system that allows the linking of carbon data to other business benchmarks such as output, revenue or inventory can provide indicators and benchmarks that are easily understood. Overlaying this information with technology elements such as analytics, dashboard and mobility provides the visibility across the business to effect change.

What does your business stand to gain from good environmental data and effective carbon management?   Accessibility to reliable environmental data allows businesses to make fast decisions that reduce costs. For example, manufacturing plants are using energy data to contextualise real-time events to minimise production, improve energy efficiency and minimise emissions*.

Consistency of data allows organisations to benchmark and identify best practices that can be shared. Equally poor performing areas of the business can take responsibility and make improvements. There is much that can be applied from the fundamentals of good data management to improve environmental data. The sooner you start the sooner you can benefit from cost reductions and process efficiencies.

*Energy and Carbon Management: A Roadmap for Sustainable Production July 2012 | Aberdeen Group

Simon McCabe is the resident Green Crusader and the Business Relations Director for Intelligent Pathways.