What inspired you to head up IMC's environmental initiatives?

Each year, I present a number of statistics to the team. One of the statistics is the amount of power we consumed in our Data Centers in APAC. To add a bit more colour to that number, I figured out that the power we consumed at the time was roughly equivalent to the power produced by one wind turbine. Knowing that, I realised that doing something about our footprint could be within our reach and we should do something with this. I then started to work on a proposal for the Management Board, and while doing the research for that, I started to understand much better how big the climate change problem is and how this is clearly a human-generated problem. The more I learned about it, the more I wanted to do something about it.

The other thing that motivates me is that working on this issue is very similar to other things we do at IMC. We try to analyse a problem down to its basics, and then try to come up with solutions from the ground up based on clear, simple logic.

In a short time, you’ve achieved something that is pretty much unheard of… You led IMC to offset our carbon footprint by two lifetimes! How did you make that happen?

Luckily, I have been with IMC for a while, so I know what appeals to people. Having good data for making decisions works well at IMC. So, the first step was making sure that we had good data for our own carbon footprint and the different factors that drive that footprint – such as the CO2/kWh for each country we operate in.

Second, was having good data to show people in a simple but powerful way the overall problem with climate change. I found a graph that shows the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere over the last 1 million years that clearly shows an increase of at least 50% over the average. This was a shock for people to see. I also thought it was important to add a personal connection to the issue, so in a number of presentations we used a picture of the kids of one of our employees playing cricket on the beach with a massive bush fire burning in the background.

The best thing, however, was that there was already widespread support in the company to do something about climate change. I think this stems from our overall desire to improve the communities and the world that we work in. The initiative to double the offsets we purchase to be carbon neutral actually came from the Management Board. The idea had not even occurred to me!

What do you see as our current biggest challenges?

Most of our footprint comes from ‘indirect emissions’, which means the footprint generated by our consumption of products or services from suppliers. We don’t have direct influence over that part of the footprint; it’s the suppliers that can work to reduce the footprint. We can only influence this by talking to these providers, or switch to providers that do a better job in reducing their footprint. Not all suppliers are enthusiastic about reducing their footprint because it often increases costs. Switching suppliers can be difficult as well, for example, when you want to go from one data centre to another. To reach the Paris Agreement climate goals of being carbon zero by 2050, we are mostly dependent on what others do.

How will we overcome this?

There are a few things we can do. We can switch to providers with a lower footprint where possible. We are developing plans to move out of certain high-footprint data centres in APAC. We will continue to raise our concerns with our major vendors, including the exchanges we trade on and from which we get data centre space. We will also continue coming up with new ideas to reduce our own footprint. For example, our travel footprint has become bigger and it’s important we try to minimise as much as we can, while still enabling the building of strong relationships and getting new projects off the ground.

The second category of things we can do is to stimulate the market of low-emission energy, and to stimulate a market for carbon removal. Stimulating these markets make these things more attractive for others, like our vendors. As an example, we started buying permanent carbon removal offsets as part our goal to be carbon neutral, even though the technology isn’t fully developed yet. By buying those carbon removal offsets now, we can help accelerate the development of these technologies so that it becomes cheaper and more scalable over time.

How can more employees get involved?

We’re always open to new ideas. It’s such a complex topic that it’s hard to follow everything or even understand everything. We may be overlooking some important aspects that other people can help us with.

On top of that, if you are in a role where you work with suppliers, you can help by making it clear to them that being carbon neutral is important to us, and that we expect to see plans and actions from each of our vendors towards that goal.