ABSTRACT
In December 2004 one of the world’s largest banks, HSBC, surprised many observers by announcing it had decided to make its operations carbon neutral. What surprised people wasn’t so much that the bank had agreed to take the issue of climate change seriously, but that it had – voluntarily – agreed to spend millions of dollars over the next ten years to minimize its contribution to the problem. As a dry run, HSBC put out a tender for projects that would offset 170,000tCO2e emitted by the bank during the last quarter of 2005. More than 100 emission reduction projects responded to HSBC’s request, and the company was able to shortlist 17 based on criteria related to project size, technology employed, country and vintage. When all was said and done, the company spent some US$750,000 buying offsets from a handful of projects in Germany, India, Australia and New Zealand (HSBC, 2005). But the process was a steep learning curve for the bank, which led environment adviser, Francis Sullivan to conclude: ‘We need a better way of finding what we want in the market.’ (The Climate Group, 2005).
