Policy & Compliance
I n conjunction with the Association’s partner, Pledge, a survey was conducted to evaluate Members’ views on measuring carbon emissions. Undoubtedly there has been a growing awareness of the importance of this issue, tempered by some scepticism. There were four straightforward questions which yielded some interesting results. Only a couple of years ago, if the Association had run a survey on environmental issues, the response would have The BIFA survey found, perhaps surprisingly, that it is not just legislation that is driving change. Client pressure and internal initiatives are also increasingly signi fi cant factors Summary of BIFA survey on carbon emissions “ The
successful recording and reporting of carbon emissions. This is the first step to considering how to reduce these emissions, potentially via modal shift and, where that is not practical, via measures such as carbon offsetting. Programme funding The final question concerned funding of programmes designed to calculate carbon emissions. Whilst 22.62% of respondents had an annual budget of less than a £1,000 to spend on carbon emissions calculation, a much healthier 30.95% had between £1,000 and £9,000 to spend. The financial budgets of a further 14.29% of Members exceeded £20,000. The balance preferred not to say. The conclusion of the survey is that there has been growing awareness of environmental issues amongst the membership and, to some extent, a growing awareness of the need to measure carbon emissions and provide that information to clients. It will be particularly challenging for SMEs to determine how they will use this data and what they can actually do to reduce their carbon emissions – the general consensus is that significant changes will be required. Although what these will be are not clear at the moment.
showed that for 69.05% of the respondents, calculating emissions was playing some sort of role within their day-to-day activities, whilst for 15.48% it was deeply rooted in their business activities. The answer to “what factors were driving this change?” produced an unexpected response - the perceived wisdom has always been that regulation would drive change and for 15.48% this was still the case. However, for 28.57% of Members, client pressure is the main contributor, whilst even more surprising, internal initiatives accounted for 30.95% of replies to this question. The use of IT systems to facilitate the integration of transport management with carbon calculation systems is key to the
conclusion of the survey is that there has been growing awareness of environ - mental issues amongst the membership
been negligible. A healthy 84 responses were received, the second highest number ever received to a BIFA survey. Growing awareness The outcome can be summarised as indicating that there is growing awareness of measuring carbon emissions from freight shipping amongst Members. The results
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