5. Multi-criteria Decision Aid (MCDA)
6.6 Differences in Climate Change Response Initiatives
6.6.1 Raising Awareness
“We also have to change the perception. South Africa has been seen as the stuck up sister down there because we are so fortunate to have infrastructure and everything. I think we need to start driving towards changing that perception that we can actually assist, rather than just coming in and taking. I think people are trying to be aggressive now saying Africa is an opportunity and they are just trying to come in and grab. But we should really take another angle to say, ‗Why can‘t we just donate where we can and help out, provide the skills, even for free?‘ So it‘s also those perceptions. We need to give people another angle that they didn‘t expect.‖
Tongaat Hulett, on the other hand, is being forced to respond to customer requirements for climate-friendly products. The influence and power of some of Tongaat Hulett‘s key customers is forcing them to comply. The pull from the supply chain, in this case as a result of a customer‘s customer requirements, means that Tongaat Hulett has to respond to keep their right to trade with the customer.
―That said, our experience last year is, a customer came to us and said we need to calculate your carbon footprint, so they asked us for a whole bunch of information and they were saying that was coming from their market, the Builders Warehouse where consumers now are trying to ensure that they are building houses that have got a low carbon footprint. I think the movement is starting but it hasn‘t become mainstream, at this point in time.‖
6.6 Differences in Climate Change Response Initiatives
doing it. So a lot of the work that has been done now in getting to understand everything about climate change, everything about the environmental impact of our business, everything about the human or our involvement as people who have lived a certain way and now we have to do a lot of change management to do things differently. There is a lot of that research going on to actually get the ground work and the foundation about why we are doing this and what we can learn from other people who have done that.‖
There are also efforts directed at the employees in order to help them understand the concept so as to build the commitment and buy-in required:
―…it is a lifestyle… we are discussing how to help all the people in the different departments to actually be able to relate what they are doing in their work environment to the climate change and environmental issues…. it has to have a meaning to an individual.‖
―We almost have to sell it to the people to say ‗it‘s not the greeny beany stuff where you just recycle and that‘s it. There is more to it‘.‖
Some of the projects underway to raise climate change response consciousness both internally and externally, include:
Internally:
―… The people are more aware of it,… we have discussed it with them. We are also going to make it a permanent agenda point in the meetings with the Senior Manager… so that the guys give us ideas from the field as well. Because many a time, we will sit around a table like this, we will come up with good ideas on how to be green but these guys out there have even nicer ideas and they are hands-on. They might be doing something at one of their sites that we are not aware of that can help. So definitely yes, people are getting more and more aware as we go along.‖
Internal and External
―We want people to adopt the lifestyle so we are planning to have road shows; we are planning to have competitions relating to the green environment. We have got one that‘s currently going on. We are designing a ―green‖ logo for the company that we can use each time we communicate about the issue. We actually have three that have been submitted. We are waiting for approval from the Marketing Department on what we can use internally and externally for the communication. We are also planning to have a communication plan for the ATNS initiative as well as the aviation initiatives like INSPIRE that can be taken across the world…‖
Tongaat Hulett, on the other hand, did not seem to have any initiatives planned around raising awareness, education and communicating with key stakeholders, except what has been posted on their website and publicly available information through the CDP or the JSE SRI reports.
When asked about the initiatives underway concerning raising awareness internally or externally, some of the executives said:
―So this is why I‘m saying there is a big consciousness in the organisation at a strategic level so we are still very much being driven by the senior executives who are putting out the tentacles and still trying to investigate and explore. This is why it hasn‘t cascaded to the level of now actually even formulating a proper response with awareness campaigns and training programs.
Because even if we say we are, for example, conserving water, I sitting here today have no clear metric from operations what exact volumes of water we use in a day, per process, in a month, in a year …‖
―… but there are no tangible metrics at this stage … but those matrices have not yet been translated into something tangible, that could be communicated to the various levels of employees so that each individual understands how they contribute exactly to the achievement of that. People generally know, look, don‘t waste water and switch off the lights if you are not using them.‖
A similar stance seems to be prevalent for the external communication and awareness raising as well.
―If I have to be honest, I don‘t think Starch Division is very big on this green concept yet. We do things to comply. We don‘t really have major strategies pushing the green thing.‖
―That is not solely a defined strategy because of climate change or green concept. So far it‘s a defined strategy because that‘s what our customers want from us, so we don‘t market that as such and we don‘t use it as a leverage point in the market. We can debate whether we should or not and there might be very good reasons why should be leveraging it, but we don‘t at the moment. It‘s a given in our organisation because that‘s a requirement from our customers.‖
One of the Tongaat Hulett executives specifically mentioned communication and raising awareness as an area where there were opportunities for them to improve the way they were handling climate change response.
―One of the questions towards the end, where you asked what we could do differently, that is an area that I have since discussed with … because there is a lot that they are doing but unless you
are involved with it you are not aware. So I said that‘s what we could be doing differently, we could be communicating more what we are doing, and blowing our own horn so to speak.‖
The differences in the level of activities regarding awareness raising could possibly be explained by the differences in the timing of climate change response between the two companies, or the motivations and drivers for climate change response. ATNS has recently embarked on the climate change response journey, having identified climate change response as a strategic priority only in 2011, while Tongaat Hulett has been a participant to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) for more than four years now. Climate change response within the aviation industry has only taken centre-stage in the last two years (see ATNS Case Introductory), implying that the need to research and understand the impacts and dynamics is still high and the level of education and awareness on the subject could still be very low, hence the need for such programmes.
Some of the key activities constituting building a brand involve communicating the brand position, which may explain the amount and level of communication and awareness building underway or planned. Tongaat Hulett, on the other hand, sees itself as a dominant player in the sugar industry and is the only local producer of starch in Southern Africa, with no excess capacity. Thus, the need to market and communicate climate change initiatives for competitive leverage is not as strong.