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A small group of UK firms is poised to trial an innovative
personal carbon trading scheme that promises to slash employees'
carbon emissions by offering the greenest members of staff
financial bonuses.
The initiative, known as the personal allowance carbon tracking
scheme, is being organised by environmental consultancy WSP
Environment & Energy, which has successfully trialled
its own employee carbon trading scheme for the past two years.
Speaking to BusinessGreen.com, David Symons, director
at WSP Environment & Energy, said the voluntary initiative
mirrored economy-wide emission cap-and-trade schemes, providing
employees who sign up with an emissions target for their domestic
and transport emissions and imposing a small financial penalty
on those who exceed the target, while offering a bonus to
those who come in under the cap.
About 650 WSP staff have signed up to the scheme and Symons
said that early indicators suggested that it has helped people
cut their carbon emissions by 10 per cent. He added that the
penalties and bonuses were capped at £100 - a sum large enough
to motivate people to curb their emissions, but not so high
as to discourage employees from joining the scheme.
WSP has now signed up a number of firms - including engineering
giant Invensys Rail and event organiser Green Power Conference
- to begin trialling similar schemes from March. It also aims
to get about 30 firms involved in the initial trial throughout
the rest of the year with a number of multinationals, small
and medium-sized businesses and public sector bodies currently
expressing interest in adopting the model.
Symons said the firms involved would each trial slightly
different personal carbon trading schemes - with Invensys
Rail, for example, proposing to scrap penalties and simply
offer bonuses to the best-performing staff. He added that
an unnamed academic body would assess the success of each
of the schemes to try to establish which provides the most
effective means of curbing emissions.
Many environmental groups have long argued that personal
carbon trading offers one of the most effective and equitable
means of encouraging people to switch to lower-carbon lifestyles.
However, the concept has been largely on hold since the UK
government shelved proposals for a series of voluntary trials
two years ago.
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