Environment and Sustainability

Implementing environmentally-friendly and sustainable solutions for ports and container terminals has never been more important than in today’s climate

We can support clients to commission and deliver various environmental permits, licenses & consents, EIA Reports (with relevant specialist input), Construction Site Licenses, Pollution Prevention Plans, Environmental Management Plans (EMPs), Site Waste Management Plans, Construction Environmental Management Plans (CEMPs), Environmental Permit documentation, Sustainability Roadmaps, Net Zero Roadmaps, Energy Efficiency and Management Systems (including to the ISO suite of standards).

Environment Due Diligence

Our environmental due diligence and feasibility typically covers all relevant environmental aspects of a project such as soil and groundwater, permitting, emissions, compliance with national and international legislation and regulations.

We take a pragmatic view looking at the key significant risk associated with mergers and acquisitions or indeed feasibility for projects/developments providing our client with a clear and concise understanding of the financial and reputational risks involved with their development.

We offer a bespoke service to better facilitate our client’s particular requirements as well as more traditional Equator Principle protocols, often assessing these hand in hand with our Environment and Social Governance services.

Environment and Social Governance

IPC can assist responsible investors to evaluate companies using ESG criteria as either a framework to screen investments or to assess risks in investment decision-making. Various factors determine a company’s management of the environment such as impacts on waste and pollution, resource depletion, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, deforestation, and climate change. Social factors look at how a company treats people and focuses on employee relations and diversity, working conditions, local communities, health and safety, and conflict. The governance factors analyse corporate policies and how a company is governed. They can focus on tax strategy, executive remuneration, donations and political lobbying, corruption and bribery, and board diversity and structure.

ESG can be viewed as an investment philosophy or an examination of a company’s core values. When a business is perceived as acting sustainably, it will engage in these areas of interest characterised by ESG in order to give value to its investors. IPC can utilise ESG to outline the main areas that a company should consider when investing.

IPC can also assist companies wanting to improve their own ESG position, with plans and strategies, including improving ESG rating scores and assistance with the submission process. Finally, IPC can undertake ESG validation as an independent party, where an organisation needs to have an independent review of claims and data.

Port Environment Review

The various activities associated with shipping and handling of goods in ports have the potential to harm both human health and the environment. These activities often include different (mostly diesel-fuelled) machinery used in ports, resulting in air emissions including GHG, NOx, SOx, PM₁₀, etc. As well as having an effect on noise, light, and odour emissions, waste management issues and water pollution. IPC can help a port operator to identify solutions that can deliver multiple benefits such as business resilience and climate change mitigation/adaptation/disaster preparedness. The port review can lead to further strategies for

Increased operational efficiency
Energy efficiency
GHG Emissions/Air Quality
Climate change adaptation and mitigation
Biosecurity and biodiversity
Marine water quality management
Waste management
Light and noise pollution management and control
Emergency Environment Protection/Disaster preparedness

Climate Change Resilience

The ports sector is critical to global transport and trade, resilience to climate change and extreme weather events is increasingly essential, both for the ports and those services that are relied upon (for example transport networks and utilities). Resilient infrastructure should be able to withstand the demands, both physically and digitally of maritime transport and landside logistics, proactively responding to changes in climate and weather conditions whilst at the same time developing in harmony with local communities, nature and heritage.

Within a port environment there is some scope to impact on international climate change / resilience. However, as a local and national influencer (in particular coordination with clients and vessels) there are greater local changes that can take place to influence and contribute towards climate change resilience; the most immediately visible is the ability to facilitate clean fuel opportunities and onshore power supplies for shipping traffic. Port priorities continue to evolve, with many ports now directly addressing climate change resiliency within their infrastructure and moving towards a low carbon economy and ultimately carbon neutrality. By working with you to understand your climate resilience needs, IPC can help deliver this:

Climate change risk assessments (both for assets and cargo profile)
Climate Change opportunities and threats analysis (both for assets and cargo profile)
Incorporate climate change resilience into both decision-making and the planning process
Increase awareness of risks and reduce vulnerabilities as well as identifying actions to mitigate those risks
Highlight new business opportunities
Enhance the robustness, resourcefulness, and recovery capacity for port operations

Sustainable Policies

As businesses partners and regulators now demand more environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments and customers increasingly expect ports to take action, it befits a port operation to demonstrate that they are focused on sustainability, adhere to standards and operate responsibly.

IPC are able to help ports embed sustainability into their operations to create new sources of value and to deliver on these values. When we have multiple sustainability indicators within a port that collectively represent sustainability, we can assess how well a port does with regards to each sustainability goal. Then we can statistically combine these results into a composite index to rank them (where multiple port facilities are involved). This way, we can use data to compare ports for many different sustainability targets.

Management Systems

IPC can assist with the development, construction or the assessment of many different management systems standards. The most popular tend to be the suite of ISO standards, for example ISO14000 (Environment) ISO45000 (Safety and Wellbeing) and ISO50000 (Energy). Each of these have a variety of sub-standards.

The ISO suite of standards is generally seen as the global benchmark. In addition to these the Greenhouse Gas Protocol presents approaches to manage GHG data and reporting, for Scopes 1, 2 and 3. Increasingly there is validity to avoided emissions, or ‘carbon leverage’, which is where the emissions from a port are compared (usually by ratio) to the emissions avoided through the choice of moving goods by sea through that port, rather than via alternative means. These are tasks that IPC can undertake for ports, or advise on approaches for in-house teams to work on using advisory and validation services.