Key issues for countries and the businesses that operate within them to address in terms of climate change unfolded at the recent 28^th UN Climate Change Conference (COP28). These issues urge immediate and significant action to be taken on fossil fuels and clean energy, national adaptation and climate finance, methane reduction, land use and more.

What does environmental sustainability in business mean?

Environmental sustainability in business is the operation of a business that does not compromise the environment. A business that has considered environmental sustainability prioritises the environment’s best interest, with society and its ecosystems coming before making a profit. It involves responsible decision-making that minimizes carbon footprint or waste while simultaneously improving the quality of life for humankind and the natural world alike.

Unfortunately, however, operating businesses as usual has had an increasingly detrimental impact on our planet. According to the latest State of the Global Climate report by the WMO, 2023 was the warmest year on record at about 1.4C,increasing pressure to shift their operations to more environmentally sustainable practices. This inevitably causes businesses to consider—where do we start? How do we begin making a difference?

What is the importance of environmental sustainability in business?

According to an article published by Maryville University, businesses that do not act responsibly will result in “the majority of many species not surviving past the 21st century”, reiterating how critical it is for businesses within every industry to take part in improving their environmental surroundings.

Although companies have a way to go before fully grasping the repercussions of ever-growing carbon footprints, those willing to tackle this challenge early on will get a head start on reshaping perspectives and realities.

Environmental sustainability in business practices

Businesses can rely on the three R’s– reduce, reuse and recycle– to begin reducing their environmental impact. However, there are several other examples of practices that businesses can incorporate into their operations amplify their reduction, including:

• Life cycle assessments
• Designing environmentally friendly products/services
• Optimising product efficiency
• Decreasing supply chain carbon footprint
• Re-evaluating CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) expenses

Benefits of environmental sustainability in business

Reduces the impact of business costs

While the cost-of-living crisis is skyrocketing, improving the energy efficiency of business operations and decreasing waste will go a long a way in bracing for the impact of unexpected business costs. Using more energy efficient lighting or reusing existing resources can be quick-fix solutions for lowering costs.

Improves a business’ reputation

Environmentally sustainable businesses are viewed as a plus, and companies are eager to highlight this fact. Companies that can go “green” show that they’re serious about making a difference in the environment and are interested in more than just profitability. Businesses that can market themselves and develop their identity around their commitment to the betterment of the planet will notice incredible results in terms of their reputation.

Who is responsible for improving environmental sustainability in a business?

Businesses have been expected to pave the way towards environmental sustainability due to their notably significant contribution towards polluting the environment through waste, gas emissions and plastics generated. The responsibility does not necessarily begin with one individual within a business though– employees at every level of the business must work together to bring about change. A few examples include:

• Business owners and leaders: Business owners and leaders are typically capable of leading strategic decision-making that influences the wider business. They can develop effective sustainability strategies and initiatives that have the power to change policy and induce change.
• Business managers and supervisors: Managers and supervisors can supply valuable insights due to their more hands-on roles. They also typically have different perspectives and understandings as to how to improve business sustainability.
• Employees: Employees can supply valuable contributions when encouraged to voice their opinions and concerns on how the business can become more sustainable.

Impact of environmental sustainability in business

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is striving to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. It’s going to take strong leadership, business-wide alignment on operations and an engaged corporate culture to successfully execute and maintain environmentally sustainable business practices. Businesses that start addressing these issues and challenge existing business processes will find themselves making a breakthrough towards becoming more environmentally sustainable while protecting the world around them.

How can CACI help you overcome these obstacles?

Our newly developed Mood Environmental Hub helps track all of your assets across multiple geographic locations and assess the environmental impact of your business.

With a single click, users can drill down from multi-site, business-level functions, to departments or even individual teams to determine asset types and locations, enabling a quick assessment of priority focus areas for improvement. It can also visualise existing data through user-friendly dashboards that show carbon impact, consumption and cost at an enterprise level.

The advanced modelling feature also outlines potential improvements, indicating ROI and carbon reduction impact. Additionally, you can easily check performance against carbon commitments such as Social Value through the initiatives tracker.

Producing carbon reduction target tracking reports or modelling for a business case is now a click away – to see how it works, you can book a demo here.

Met Office are responsible for collecting and processing observation data, used to analyse the country’s weather and climate, at weather stations around the world and coast. The observations are valuable to several different consumers, from meteorologists forecasting the weather to climate scientists trying to predict global trends resulting from global warming.

Met Office and CACI’s SurfaceNet

Met Office have been looking to build a replacement observations platform that is more efficient and appropriate for their current needs. CACI have been working with Met Office for the last two years to deliver the next generation system: ‘SurfaceNet’, with the primary requirements being that it is cost effective and scalable.

Given Met Office’s ethos of adopting a ‘Cloud First’ approach, and its partnership with AWS, it was an obvious choice to build the system in AWS’ Cloud.  The first important decision was to select what would be our main compute resource. The observation data would be arriving once a minute and, given this spiky arrival time, Lambda proved to be the most cost-effective solution, allowing us to only pay for small periods where compute was required. The platform processes several observations from roughly 400 stations every minute – equating to 15 billion observations per month – so any marginal improvements on compute cost would soon add up.

Choosing Lambda complemented our desire to have a largely serverless system to minimise maintenance costs, using other serverless AWS resources such as S3, Aurora Serverless, DynamoDB and SQS. This approach avoided the need to provision and manage servers and the associated costs involved with this. Serverless resources are highly available by design; Aurora Serverless mandates at least two Availability Zones that the database is deployed into, while DynamoDB and S3 resources have their data intrinsically spread over multiple data centres.

Most of the data ingest occurs by remote data loggers communicating via MQTT with the platform; AWS IoT Core was the ideal resource for managing this. Using API gateway, we developed a simple API on top of IoT Core allowing those administering the system to onboard new loggers, manage their certificates and monitor their statuses. The Simple Email Service (SES) allows ingestion of data from marine buoys and ships that transmit their data via Iridium Satellite. Both IoT Core and SES are fully managed by AWS, supplying an easy method of handling data from a range of protocols with minimal operational management.

From a development perspective, the stand-out benefit of working in the cloud has been having the ability to deploy fully representative environments to test against. Our infrastructure is defined using CloudFormation, enabling each developer to stand up their own copy of the system when adding a new feature.

Eliminating the classic ‘works on my machine’ problems that plague local development allowed for rapid iteration cycles and far fewer bugs during testing. The process means constantly exercising the ability to deploy the system from scratch, which will come in handy when an unforeseen problem occurs in the future.

Whilst this suggests a flawless venture into the Cloud sector, the journey hasn’t been without problems. CloudFormation has been incredibly useful, but given the scale and the number of resources, it has become cumbersome. Despite our best mitigation efforts there is still a large amount of repetition, and the cumulative lines of YAML we have committed is on par with the number of lines of python. We would consider using the newer AWS CDK if we were to approach the project again.

Additionally, we started off making new repositories for each new Lambda, but this has ended up limiting our ability to share code effectively across components, not to mention having to update ~40 repositories when we want to update buildspecs to use a new version of python.

It has been a fascinating couple of years and a main takeaway has been that large organisations such as Met Office, with large-scale bespoke data problems, see the cloud as a desired environment for building solutions.

The maturity of the AWS platform has shown the cloud to be both robust and cheap enough to satisfy the requirements of complex systems, such as SurfaceNet, and will certainly play a big part in the future of both CACI and the Met Office.