CSR in Europe, Middle East and Africa : WWF

WWF video: ‘Let the clean economy begin’

ulrikehaug — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:32:00 GMT

I just came across a video by WWF called 'Let the clean economy begin'. It talks about the business opportunities that arise for companies that strive to be leaders in a low carbon economy. They also highlight the companies that have joined ‘Climate Savers’, a programme by WWF that encourages large companies to reduce their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Collectively, the companies have pledged to reduce 50 million tonnes of CO2 emissions by next year.

Some of you might also recognize my colleague Pierre Delforge, who appears in a brief interview.

Have a look at the video and let me know what you think. There’s also a website about the Clean Economy campaign with case studies by the companies that joined ‘Climate Savers’.

Ulrike Haug, CSR Stakeholder Programmes, HP EMEA

(Please visit the site to view this media)

New WWF study: Go where the jobs are. Go green

jeanne2007 — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:42:00 GMT

In economic hard times reports about layoffs and wage-cutting dominate the news agenda. A new WWF study, however, provides much more positive news and shows real opportunities. The report actually discusses how ’green industries’ such as renewable energy, green transport and energy-efficient goods and services are creating jobs. Currently, there are more jobs in those industries than in industries such as mining, gas or steel. The prospects, therefore, are that jobs in the former industries will rise, whilst jobs in the latter are falling.

To read the summary of the report click here and to read the full report, click here.

WWF does great work and publishes frequent reports on important issues. Last year, for example, WWF published a report entitled ’The potential global CO2 reductions from ICT use: Identifying and assessing the opportunities to reduce the first billion tonnes of CO2’ which addresses the need for and potential of energy efficient ICT solutions.

Jeannette Weisschuh, Director Global Citizenship, HP EMEA

Let’s power up a green IT strategy!

jeanne2007 — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:51:00 GMT

I just have seen the most recent announcement made by the European Commission to power up a green IT strategy in Europe.

At HP, we have already been working on offering climate smart solutions for our customers. In 2008, together with WWF, we published a customer report to demonstrate how 1 billion tonnes of CO2 can be reduced with the help of IT solutions.

Currently, we work with Ashridge Business School and EABIS to invite students from major business schools and universities to submit their innovative ideas on how to set up management structures and internal processes to facilitate the implementation of green IT solutions within a company.

A significant number of customers are already working on green company strategies. So the support of the EU to power up green IT strategies is well connected to significant industry efforts that are already on their way.

Jeannette Weisschuh, Director of Global Citizenship, HP EMEA

WWF movie on Sustainable Innovation supports Ashridge Award

ulrikehaug — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:06:00 GMT

WWF has just published a great video to support the Ashridge Sustainable Innovation Award. The video aims get students participating in the essay award to think differently about satisfying our needs in tomorrow’s low-carbon economy.

In his blog, Dennis Pamlin, Global Policy Advisor at WWF, says that this is probably the first ever movie that demonstrates the need to move from a product perspective to a service perspective and to drive innovation from a sustainability perspective. I think it’s very nicely done and captures well what we want students to think about when writing their essays on Sustainable Innovation. See for yourself here:

The Ashridge Sustainable Innovation Award is run by Ashridge Business School and supported by EABIS, WWF and HP. It’s open to all MBA students in Europe, the Middle East and Africa as well as all master-level students at HP-linked universities. We just postponed the deadline for award entries until 3 May 2009 to allow for more Sustainable Innovation Workshops to be held by WWF across the region. To see which business schools and universities Dennis Pamlin will be visiting, go to the Ashridge website.

I attended one of the workshops at the University of St. Gallen last month. It was great to see how the MBA students in St. Gallen got very excited about the topic of sustainable innovation and started discussing their ideas of what it takes to for businesses to thrive in a low-carbon economy.

You can receive regular updates about the award by signing up to our Facebook Fan Page.Post your comments or questions about the award here!

Ulrike Haug CSR Communications, HP EMEA

Join a live webcast with WWF and Gartner on Low Carbon and Environmental Sustainability Leadership

jeanne2007 — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:00:00 GMT

I would like to provide you with details of an up-and-coming live webcast with Dennis Pamlin of World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Simon Mingay of Gartner Research. They will be discussing the results of research on Low Carbon and Environmental Sustainability in the Information and Communications Technology Sector.

The webcast takes place on Tuesday 24 February from 17:00 to 18:00 CET. You can find more information about the webcast and register here

I would be happy to hear your feedback of the webcast after the event.

Jeannette Weisschuh, Director of Global Citizenship, HP EMEA

2008 – strong partnerships are a key success factor

jeanne2007 — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:10:00 GMT

Wow, time goes by quickly! As I look back on an exciting year, I would like to review some highlights of CSR at HP EMEA and I would also be keen to hear about your 2008 highlights. I think we can be particularly proud of what we have achieved with our partners in the areas of education and environment this year.

We have worked with WWF for more than a year now to investigate how information and communication technology (ICT) can help to combat climate change. This summer we published the ‘Low Carbon IT Solutions’ guide which summarises how carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions can be reduced by using HP products.

A second environmental highlight is our e-waste project in Africa. ICT products can help to reduce carbon emissions but, at the end of their lifecycle, reuse or recycling is a critical factor in reducing the environmental burden. During the year we joined forces with the Global Digital Solidarity Fund (DSF), the Swiss Institute for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) and Recover-e-Alliance, Wasteplan and the Salesian Institute to investigate state-of-the-art recycling practices of electronic equipment and to evaluate further methods of how recycling processes can be approved. This is an exciting project and I hope to share updates with you early next year.

Talking about Africa, I would also like to highlight our collaboration with UNESCO. We have been working with UNESCO for a couple of years to alleviate brain drain in Africa. My colleage Arnaud introduced you to this programme some time ago. We are working with five universities in Algeria, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Zimbabwe to connect researchers who have left Africa with researchers who are still on the African continent to exchange knowledge and foster relationships.

Let me turn to our education highlights, which are also the result of strong partnerships. Our GET-IT (Graduate Entrepreneurship Training through IT) programme has really flourished in 2008. In addition to a successful partnership with MEA-I, we have also been working with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) since May to expand our GET-IT programme in Africa. With such a strong and reliable partner at hand, I am sure we can provide a lot of young graduates in African countries with useful business and IT skills which will help them to establish their own small enterprises and develop their job careers.

In the Autumn we successfully organised our first annual GET-IT conference in Brussels. As Daniela has summarized, the conference was a great success and we received valuable feedback from GET-IT participants, our partners and local non-governmental organisations. We have set high targets regarding GET-IT for the coming year. I am eager to reach all of them and I promise to share our achievements with you.

These are just a few of our highlights for 2008. If you would like to read more about our 2008 achievements, please go here.

I hope you have enjoyed our blogs in 2008 and I would like to invite you to send me any suggestions of what you would like to read more about in 2009.

Jeannette Weisschuh, Head of Global Citizenship, HP EMEA

Challenging tomorrow's leaders on Sustainable Innovation

ulrikehaug — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:36:00 GMT

At the end of last week I attended the European Academy in Society (EABIS) Annual Colloquium at Cranfield University where HP and Ashridge Business School jointly launched the Ashridge Sustainable Innovation Award. The Award is an essay competition aimed at MBA and other postgraduate students across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and is organised by Ashridge in collaboration with EABIS and supported by us and WWF.

The aim of the competition is to find the best ideas from management and other post-graduate students about how organisations can innovate to create value from the shift to a low carbon economy. The theme builds nicely on the work that we've been doing with WWF in EMEA over the past year around how IT can assist the shift to a low carbon economy. We support this Award because we want to bring our work to the academic world by encouraging students to change their mindset from seeing climate change as a risk, to seeing it as a business opportunity.

During the coming months, WWF plans to visit 10 universities across the region to promote this Award. These visits can range from stand alone events to lectures and learning sessions that can be integrated directly into educational programmes. Dennis Pamlin, Global Policy Advisor, WWF will be the one to visit the universities and as you can read on his blog, he's already looking forward to it.

We're really excited about collaborating with our three partners on this project and are looking forward to receiving essays from students about different areas of innovation. We've also created a Facebook page where students can connect with each other and start a discussion. This page can only be as good as users will make it, so if you are interested in the topic of the Award, join us on Facebook and help us start the discussion. To find us on Facebook, search for “Ashridge Award”.

I'll keep you updated on further developments with this project on our blog. To find out more about eligibility, deadlines, the high profile jury and our thoughts on the award theme, visit www.ashridge.org.uk/SustainableInnovation.

Let me know what you think about this initiative and leave a comment below.

Ulrike Haug; CSR Communications; HP EMEA

We need social entrepreneurs and social intrapreneurs

jeanne2007 — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:04:00 GMT

I have invited my colleague Ulrike Haug to share some thoughts around an interesting report she read on social intrapreneurship.

Regards,

Jeannette

We need social entrepreneurs and social intrapreneurs

I am sure all of you have already come across the term “social entrepreneur”. Social entrepreneurs address societal problems and aim at solving them through entrepreneurial business practices. But have you also heard about the “social intrapreneur”? I have to admit I only recently came across that expression in a report by SustainAbility . A social intrapreneur is an employee of a large corporation who uses entrepreneurial principles to address social and environmental challenges. She or he does so by delivering solutions or products that add both value to society as well as to the company’s bottom line.

Both concepts of social entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship really appeal to me. I’ve come across many inpiring examples of social entrepreneurship in the last few years and at HP we have various social investment programmes in place which aim at fostering social entrepreneurs. Just recently we have awarded the Austrian student company Infotainment with the HP Responsible Business Award as the student company integrated social aspects into their business model. The company developed tools to educate 8- to10-year-old students, their parents and teachers on environmental issues such as climate change. I guess you can call them already social entrepreneurs, even at their young age. Well done!

But we need both – social entrepreneurs and social intrapreneurs. While enabling societal change, social intrapreneurs are also significant for a company’s survival in an environment of rising expectations of the role of business in society. I am convinced that we will see social and environmental innovations play a bigger role for companies in the future and that those companies which foster their social intrapreneurs will be leaders in their industries.

I can think of some examples of social intrapreneurs at HP. For example, the team of HP employees from Hungary that developed a tool that allows customers to monitor and control parameters such as energy use, water consumption and sewage as well as air pollution at production sites or office buildings. The Hungarian team won our internal Sustainable Innovation Competition that we conducted with WWF.

I think it is crucial for us at HP to continue to foster our intrapreneurs and the innovations they bring to the company, and we are currently looking into ways of how we can further increase our support for them.

Have you come across social intrapreneurs in your organisations? I’d really like to hear from you. Just leave a comment.

Kind regards,

Ulrike Haug, CSR Communications

Climate change race and sprints

jeanne2007 — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 06:55:00 GMT

Climate change has been dominating the news for a long time now and it has to stay on the agenda for longer as an Allianz-commissioned WWF report illustrates: The report analyses the progress made by G8 countries in combating climate change and reducing CO2 emissions. The conclusion is quite sobering: some G8 countries are seriously lagging behind and even the best could be doing more.

The country-level conclusions of the report are quite interesting. The United Kingdom has a strong carbon markets approach while Germany focuses on renewable energy where the UK definitely could do more. Italy is performing well regarding energy efficiency but lacks the establishment of measures.

The report shows that all countries are performing well in certain areas but less well in other ones. The conclusion: none of the G8 countries meet required emission reductions. What a fact!

Climate change constitutes an immense challenge to all of us and we can only take the challenge if we work hand in hand. Governments should work with other governments and at the same time governments and the private sector can easily cooperate to fight climate change.

This summer we published a white paper Low Carbon IT Solutions which outlines how HP solutions can help to reduce CO2 emissions. The paper builds upon the report "The potential global CO2 reductions from ICT use: Identifying and assessing the opportunities to reduce the first billion tonnes of CO2" (click here for an Executive Summary) which was developed by Dennis Pamlin, global policy adviser at WWF Sweden. This report sheds light onto the strategic opportunities for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions that can help accelerate the reduction of CO2 emissions across different areas of the economy and goes beyond just looking at reducing the carbon footprint of IT. It provides an overview what can be done and stresses the importance of collaboration.

Despite the rather sobering results of the Allianz-WWF report, I am an optimist and I am confident that if all sectors work together, we can make a difference in the climate change race. It is a long race and there is still enough room for development and sprints. And like the relay shows us: Teamwork is really essential!

Jeannette Weisschuh, Head of Corporate Affairs, HP EMEA