Planning for a Sustainable Future: The Ideas That Will Shape EHS & Sustainability Management in the Year to Come

Overview

This 28-page report, published in 2014 by the National Association for Environmental Management (NAEM), was the first in what became a recurring series of trends studies. NAEM staff conducted 26 hour-long interviews, 17 with corporate environment, health, safety, and sustainability (EHS&S) leaders and 8 with outside experts from academia, consulting, and industry, and asked what was in their budgets and on their minds for the coming 12 to 16 months. The result is a qualitative snapshot of where large companies stood on the sustainability maturity curve as the economy recovered.

Key Findings

• Seven program priorities surfaced for 2014: energy and water resource management, product sustainability and chemical compliance (REACH, RoHS, conflict minerals), supply chain transparency, new external reporting under a materiality lens, employee engagement, climate change adaptation, and the next generation of corporate goals as many 2015 targets matured.
• Compliance still comes first. A patchwork of state and local rules, from California cap-and-trade to new stormwater regulations, plus global chemical rules and the GHS labeling system, keeps regulatory work at the core of the EHS function even as sustainability expands.
• The business case is easier but budgets are tight. Respondents expected no large new spending in 2014 because of a weak recovery and policy gridlock, and several described pressure to show two- to three-year paybacks. Water conservation in particular was hard to fund on cost savings alone.
• Sustainability is being embedded rather than bolted on: cross-functional teams, EHS engineers assigned to procurement, sustainability criteria in supplier scorecards, and goals written into individual performance targets.
• Climate risk has reached the board. Most participating companies had completed or planned a climate risk assessment, often at the request of the C-suite, and water availability was described as the first question in siting a new plant.
• Long horizons pay. One company recounted a $1 billion, ten-year EHS investment approved in the 1990s on a promised 30 percent return that ultimately saved more than $5 billion, and another had set a 2040 goal to eliminate manufacturing greenhouse gas emissions.
• Five themes run through the interviews, integration, engagement, transparency, collaboration, and resilience, and respondents called for systemic changes: infrastructure investment after Hurricane Sandy, balance sheets that value natural resources, and a financial system less fixated on quarterly growth.

Why It Matters for Daylighting

Energy management tops the report’s list of 2014 priorities, and several respondents describe a policy of making every new facility energy- and water-efficient from the start rather than retrofitting later. For warehouses and manufacturing plants, toplighting is the most direct way to honor that policy: prismatic skylights paired with daylight-responsive controls remove most of the daytime lighting load on day one, satisfy the daylighting provisions of current energy codes, and require no ongoing program to keep delivering. In the report’s terms, that is integration, a sustainability outcome built into the asset instead of managed alongside it.

The report’s emphasis on resilience and employee engagement points the same way. A daylit building keeps its floor usable through the storm-driven outages that respondents were beginning to plan for, and the quality of light on the work floor is one of the few sustainability measures that employees experience every hour of every shift. Skylight fall protection belongs in the same conversation, because the health-and-safety half of EHS&S owns roof-work risk as surely as the environmental half owns kilowatt-hours.

About the Source

NAEM, the National Association for Environmental Management, is a Washington, D.C. professional association for corporate EHS and sustainability decision-makers; it runs the annual EHS Management Forum and publishes benchmarking research drawn from its member companies. This inaugural trends report was written by NAEM staff with a foreword by executive director Carol Singer Neuvelt, published in 2014 at 28 pages with sponsor support, and lists its participating companies on the final page. NAEM has since published 2016 and 2018 editions; the 2014 original can be requested from NAEM’s research library.