Businesses thinking about climate change

Jeff Herlick the president of Bonafide Construction Solutions is showing how his business tracks the idle time of work vehicles.

It’s one way where the business can track their CO2 emissions and aim to bring them down.

“We actually have the greenest driver of the month incentive. We give our employees a gift card, whoever has the least amount of CO2 emissions that month will get that, and will be our greenest driver,” said Herlick.

Since 2018, Bonafide Construction Solutions has upgraded its lighting and furnaces within the office and on work sites tracking how much garbage goes to landfills.

“Our emissions have dropped probably by 50 per cent since we started monitoring back in 2018.”

More businesses may be going this route, after accounting firm KPMG found that 89 per cent of respondents to a recent survey, they did are looking to reduce their impact on the environment while 88 per cent of respondents say they plan on making investments aimed at achieving climate-related goals.

The survey asked 350 Canadian business owners and executives about their feelings on climate change.

It also found that 90 per cent of respondents say they expect extreme weather could happen at any time and that their organization will be hit by a climate-related event this year.

“We are seeing an increase in companies starting to do what we call a climate risk assessment. They are starting to understand what exposures we might have to our business across our value chain,” said Roopa Davé, a partner and climate risk leader for KPMG.

Herlick added, “We are definitely seeing the level of interest and the level of concern has been steadily increasing.”

Derek Earl, the founder of BizforClimate says while some businesses do face the challenge of wondering where to start if they want to start combating their emissions, he says they do have an advantage being in Manitoba.

“We already have quite clean electricity, which is one of the bigger sources of energy,” Earl said. “As a business owner as a leader of a company it’s really important to become more educated and aware about these new risks and opportunities associated with climate change,” said Earl.