More than the 'iGen', Part 1

This blog post is written by Maggie Zeh, a senior at Rock Canyon High School that is working with Lotus as part of her senior career exploration coursework. Maggie is passionate about the environment and interested in pursuing a career in sustainability.

 Today’s youth is the generation predicted to face the worst effects of climate change. While people working professionally in the fields of sustainability and climate action are driving many efforts on this impending issue, there are extensive examples of children and teens around the world taking matters into their own hands. Our impact can be seen on a local, national, and global scale. Our generation has lots of passion regarding climate change, and with the older, more experienced population as mentors, much can be achieved. It is imperative for all age groups to work together to address environmental concerns.

School Actions Inspire Students

 Action can be seen even on a local scale. Many high schools have some form of Eco Clubs, where students who are passionate about sustainability meet to help their schools reduce their environmental impact. These clubs can help their schools effectively recycle, obtain grant money for larger projects, and inspire other students to get involved. My own high school has made great progress towards being more sustainable. In the past few years, our biggest accomplishments include switching all lights in our gymnasium to LED bulbs and tinting all of the windows to reduce the need for heating and air conditioning. Currently, we are working on a project to compost in the cafeteria during lunchtime. These actions may seem small, but their impact is extremely positive.

Many teens are also inspired in their schools after learning about climate change in the classroom. AP Environmental Science is a very popular course among my peers, and it has inspired many students to act on climate change. This class was one of the major reasons why I personally became passionate about the environment and have begun to explore a career in sustainability. The other big component that inspired my passion was a safari trip to South Africa. This was a great learning experience for me on initiatives that must be taken and why environmental action is so important.

This is Zero Hour

 In today’s day and age, many young people are inspired by the momentum of other movements, such as the #NeverAgain campaign and the Women’s March, which seems to be drawing larger and larger crowds every year. One of the most outstanding groups of youth who have been inspired to take meaningful action is united under their coalition named Zero Hour. Their founders, who are all high school students, met at a summer program at Princeton University and instantly bonded over their dissatisfaction regarding lawmaker’s current initiatives to address climate change. They were determined to do something big that adults could not ignore. Since their beginning, they have been overwhelmed by the support they have received from people of all ages as well as various nonprofits group willing to sponsor their efforts. On the rainy day of July 21, 2018, hundreds of teens marched with Zero Hour on the National Mall to express their dedication to this cause. Their force was felt around the world as many sister marches also took place spanning from Denver to Kenya. They received lots of attention from the press, including the New York Times and even Teen Vogue. Zero Hour has made it clear that this was not a one-and-done production; they intend to continue speaking out until their platform has been satisfied.

Judicial Action

 Another driven group of young people have come together under the legal body Our Children’s Trust. These individuals are suing the federal government for allegedly violating their right to life, liberty, and prosperity. Their argument is that the government’s support for the fossil fuel industry is creating a future for younger generations that will put them in far worse situations than anyone has experienced before. Their ambitious demand includes a climate recovery plan that will bring the atmosphere down to 350 parts per million of carbon. Their belief is that young people currently have the most at stake because we will be the ones to witness any effects of climate change. This platform has inspired many young people from around the country to get involved and take a stand against climate change for the good of their own, and future, generations. The most recent court decision that has been made in this case is the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ grant to the young plaintiffs’ motion to expedite briefing. This court case, Julianna v. United States, began in 2015. It has been a long journey with many obstacles, but in 2019 they are still making progress towards their goal.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this blog and Maggie’s further thoughts on how to engage youth in climate action.

Bringing Stakeholders to the Table

When developing a climate action plan, or when embarking on any community or organizational planning process, engaging stakeholders in a meaningful way ensures that the most relevant groups and individuals are aware and supportive of your process. When done correctly, stakeholder engagement processes may reveal new opportunities for implementing impactful strategies, programs, and projects.

Use the questions below to guide the development of your stakeholder engagement plan and determine the best tools and tactics for stakeholder engagement. Throughout the process of answering these questions, keep in mind what the end result of your project will be—Are you developing a public-facing document that will guide future community planning? Are you developing internal guidelines that will help define employee policy over the coming years? Do you need stakeholder accountability for successful implementation? Knowing where you are going helps to determine the most direct and productive path to get there.

1) Why are you engaging your stakeholders?

What is the goal of stakeholder engagement? If you are developing a public-facing plan, you may want to ensure that your stakeholder engagement includes opportunities for public comment or feedback on draft plans or provides transparency into the planning process. You may want to use the stakeholder engagement process to update your organization’s leadership team on planning progress and ensure that they are able to support the elements and strategies included in the plan. Additionally, you may want to learn from stakeholders that are experts in certain sectors in order to guide the development of strategies and goals within the plan itself. Ultimately, the stakeholder process should ensure that your plan and the goals, strategies, and actions within it remain relevant to your organization or community and can be supported by your employees, leadership, partners, and the general public.

2) Who do you need to engage?

Once you are clear on what exactly it is that you want to gain from your stakeholders, you can now determine who those stakeholders are and what they each bring to the table in support of the overall planning process. Often, making a list of the key stakeholders that come to mind can be helpful; from there, you can look to a few key questions to help ensure that the list includes all the relevant players. As you develop the list of individuals and organizations whose input and feedback are crucial, ask yourself:

• Who will be impacted by our plan?

• What are the interests, values, and priorities of those impacted?

• Are there people or organizations indirectly affected by the plan that should be involved?

• What organizations and individuals are crucial to making sure the work and strategies in the plan are actually implemented?

• What organizations and individuals could hinder success if they aren’t supportive?

These questions may help you identify the individuals and organizations that are most important to involve in the development and roll-out of your climate action plan. You may notice certain trends or groupings that are logical within this list of stakeholders, and you may decide it is necessary to engage these groups differently.  

3) How should you engage your stakeholders?

Once you have identified the stakeholders that are important to include in your planning process and understand the resources available for stakeholder engagement, you can determine the most effective and impactful ways to engage each stakeholder group. Be sure to share stakeholder expectations and allow plenty of opportunity for stakeholder contribution; this ensures that continued dialogue occurs and your stakeholders remain engaged through the entire process.

Working with stakeholders can generally take either an engagement, informative, or communicative format. Stakeholders that you wish to engage are those that are crucial to the process of developing your plan, either because they are in a position to ensure the plan is supported or they may be involved in the actual work of the plan. Stakeholders that you wish to inform are those that you seek to provide information to, but you may not necessarily need information from in order to develop your plan. Stakeholders with whom you wish to communicate are those with whom it is useful to have a two-way dialogue, but whose feedback is not necessarily crucial to the plan’s success.

For each stakeholder group the first step is to define the strategic objectives and understand the resources available for facilitating dialogue, then make a plan of action that achieves the objectives within any applicable resource constraints. For example, perhaps there is a group of local experts working in the transportation field that may be able to identify opportunities to implement changes to the regional transportation system—they should be engaged in the process in order to share opportunities to support the goals within their work.  It may be relevant to complete research on each of the stakeholders’ organizations to focus the discussion and manage any cultural or organizational dynamics that may come up. At the time of the meeting, stakeholders are provided with an overview of why they have been asked to share their input, and then given plenty of opportunity for discussion and dialogue. For larger groups, breaking up into smaller teams gives more people an opportunity to offer ideas and insight. Before ending the meeting, review all of the ideas presented and give the stakeholders a chance to vote on which ideas they think are best, which their organization can support, and which they are skeptical of. If stakeholder action will be crucial to the implementation of the plan, establish a system of accountability and action steps that need to occur.

At other times, an informative approach may be more appropriate—this may be the case when presenting the planning process to the public in order to provide transparency into the development of a climate action plan. In such a case, a public meeting, community event, or open house may be an appropriate forum. Alternatively, it may be necessary to communicate the plan to the public and gather feedback on which elements of the plan they are most interested in seeing accomplished first; in this case, a community survey will allow members of the public to share their thoughts.

A planning process that does not consider the values, goals, and current opportunities and challenges within a broader community or organization is unlikely to yield the same results as a plan that has incorporated the feedback and ideas from a wide and relevant network of stakeholders. Our clients that embark on an inclusive and well-thought out stakeholder engagement process note that the strategies and targets within their plan are more likely to be successful precisely because they are supported by the broader community, whom take responsibility for ensuring that the goals are met.  

If you would like to learn more about how to engage your stakeholders, please contact us.

Selling Sustainability

By Emily Artale and Hillary Dobos

There are skeptics everywhere. How do we, as energy and sustainability professionals, convince them that pursuing sustainability is not only the right thing to do, but it can also be profitable?

One approach has been to share the dozens of case stories of big businesses and progressive municipalities saving money through sustainability initiatives (think Dow Chemical, Interface, City of Boulder, City of San Francisco, King County, etc…). But, for some reason these stories do not always result in a massive buy-in of sustainability and sometimes you may even lose the attention of your audience.

And why does this happen? Perhaps these stories do not provide a roadmap that is relevant to the values, demographics, location, and other unique factors of the community that you are speaking to. For instance, although the City of San Francisco may be a good example of what should or could be done (e.g., 80 percent waste diversion goal!), it may not provide the roadmap necessary to sell your audience on what they can do locally.

To recapture the attention of your audience and to convince them that sustainability does have value to them and to their stakeholders, we need to make this conversation relevant. And we can do that by basing our plans, projections, and best guesses on data that is pertinent and specific to the needs of your audience.

Look at what initiatives may resonate with your audience by considering the values, demographics, services available, cost of services, and available resources within your community. Start by asking some simple questions, for instance:

• Does your community have a history of progressive change or do they prefer to keep things “as they always have been”? Are they willing to change?

• How willing is your utility company to work with your community in reducing energy?

• What resources exist in the community to help guide and maintain change?

Use the answers to these questions to help shape your sustainability initiatives. But, don’t stop there, do your homework and look at the performance data from the entities and individuals that have been in your shoes to help define sustainability targets. Research, analyze data, question data, interview communities and professionals, evaluate your results, and discuss with your community. From this data you can tell what worked, what didn’t, what target levels were achieved, and most importantly, how these target levels were achieved.

Based on your research, consider offering a menu of options and let your audience decide which initiates most resonate with them. Even though all initiatives may share the common theme of sustainability, people may naturally rally behind certain initiatives because they support their values.

Not sure how to create a menu of sustainability initiatives specific to your community? Contact us: emily.artale@lotussustainability.com or hillary@merrillgroupllc.com; we can help define sustainability initiatives and bring relevance and insight into setting community sustainability targets.

Storytelling with Utility Data

By Emily Artale and Hillary Dobos

One of the first steps of any successful energy management program should be an analysis and review of your building’s utility data. This is one way in which your building tells a story of its performance. We, as Energy Managers, use this story to verify personal narratives of your building’s operation, evaluate opportunities for improvement, identify patterns and trends of energy consumption, and benchmark against similar facilities. And, sometimes we can use this data to identify immediate solutions for cost savings.

How can such a seemingly simple resource provide so much valuable information? Utility data is objective and accurate; it documents actual consumption values and actual costs with an infallible memory. It can tell us when the building becomes occupied, when the building is reaching its peak demand, and when abnormalities in use and costs occur.

IMAGE COURTESY OF CLEER

For example, a building operator believes that the Administration complex “turns on” at 5:30 a.m., ahead of when most occupants will be in the building, however when reviewing real-time utility data we notice that a large spike in use begins at 4:00 a.m.! During discussions with building staff it was revealed that the building’s energy systems were turned on at 4:00 am a few months ago in advance of an early morning meeting, but the building’s systems were never reset. Changing the settings back to the original time will result in annual energy and cost savings.

In another real-life example, a review of utility data shows that a local government agency has consistently been charged for taxes over the last five years.  A summary of this data was brought to the attention of the utility company and all tax payments were refunded.

In both instances, a review and analysis of utility data resulted in annual cost savings with no upfront payment!

Likewise, you, as a manager of a building, can use utility data to encourage investments in efficiency improvements. Once building improvements have been made, you can continue to track utility data to identify energy savings from the building improvements themselves. Some organizations also use utility data as an innovative way to promote changes in occupant behavior. In lieu of sharing actual utility bills, these organizations may publicly share energy consumption through a dashboard tool in hopes that a demonstration of energy use will encourage better occupant behavior.

And, as you review your utility data be sure to benchmark it. This can give you additional insight as to how your building is performing against its peers or how several buildings compare against one another on a large campus.

For a relatively simple data analysis there are a variety of free tools from which to choose such as ENERGY STAR’s Portfolio Manager and EnergyCAP’s GreenQuest or even a simple Excel spreadsheet. For a more robust analysis consider a more sophisticated tool such as EnergyCAP or CLEER’s ultra-useful Building Energy Navigator tool.

There are hundreds of utility tools available to you. We are both experienced at selecting appropriate utility tools, implementing them, and analyzing the resulting data. Feel free to contact us at emily.artale@lotussustainability.com or hillay@merrillgroupllc.com. 

Authors

---

Emily Artale, PE, CEM, LEED AP is Principal and Owner at Lotus Engineering and Sustainability, LLC, www.lotussustainability.com. She has been working in the industry for nearly a decade and she has a background in energy management, sustainability planning, and water quality. Emily helps teams develop action-oriented solutions that will improve efficiency and integrate sustainability into current processes. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees in environmental engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is a Colorado native and spends most of her time outdoors with her family.

Hillary Dobos is Principal and Owner of Merrill Group, LLC, www.merrillgroupllc.com. Hillary brings both expertise and creative thinking to working with clients which she draws from her experience as a consultant advising public and private clients throughout the United States, as well as the one tasked with embedding sustainability throughout a 25,000+ person organization (Colorado State Government). Hillary earned her B.A. in Art History and Economics from Bowdoin College in Maine and her MBA from the University of Colorado-Boulder. Hillary was born and raised in Denver, Colorado, where she currently enjoys life with her husband, son, and moderately trained canine, Mr. Smiles.