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A Sustainability Journey
Step 3: Boundaries and Scope
With stakeholder input received and documented, you will be prepared to establish what is “out-of-bounds” of your sustainability journey and what is “in-bounds” and will be addressed. We call this “setting boundaries”. Your organization is not expected to manage issues outside its sphere of influence or “out-of-bounds”. For example, while your organization may have control over its fleet of vehicles and emissions, it may have less control over emissions of employee commuting and the uptake of electric vehicles. What is “in-bounds” or within boundaries? Boundaries can have several dimensions including organizational, operational, geographic, business unit, and target boundaries. For example, your company may decide it will start its sustainability journey with its US operations but declare its operations in Asia as out-of-bounds at this time. Alternatively declare that a joint venture operation is “out-of- bounds” due to the level of control it has over that venture. Therefore, boundaries at different levels can include: a) Territorial Level: a physically defined territory, such as a country, region, county, city or other administrative unit. b) Sectoral Level: a commercial or industrial sector, such as events only in the food sector, or events where only exhibit construction is required of your company. c) Organizational Level: a legally defined entity, such as an entire company.
d) Portfolio Level: a non-physically defined activity such as a division that is not limited to sectors. e) Asset Level: related to the life-cycle emissions of a physically defined unit, such as a building.
It is up to your organization to define its boundaries: You may choose to implement this Guidance throughout the entire organization for those aspects impacting events, or only in specific part(s) of the organization. Regardless, senior management must have operational control over what is included in the boundary. The scope of your company’s event sustainability efforts provides clarity on what is covered by the company’s efforts, defining the operational boundaries of environmental impacts on events. Scoping should not exclude areas of operations which significantly contribute to the organization's environmental impact on events. For example, a company may declare that its current inventory of unsustainable carpeting has a predicted remaining life cycle of two years and, therefore, flooring will not be in scope while the company seeks a supplier of environmentally friendly carpeting. As carpet reaches the end of its useful life, it is replaced with “sustainable” carpeting. As sustainable carpeting increases, the company may declare that carpeting is in scope.
Both “Boundary” and “Scope” shall be transparently declared as part of the organization's master sustainability plan.
REFERENCE GUIDE: Greenhouse Gas Protocol, A Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard https://www.accountability.org/standards/aa1000-stakeholder-engagement-standard/
The Sustainability Guidance for Exhibition Stand Construction is a collaboration between:
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Version 1, 2024-5-15
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