SFMI and BAM FM Launch Scope 3 FM Carbon Standard

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• SFMI and BAM FM Launch Scope 3 FM Carbon Standard

29 June 2022

The Sustainable Facilities Management Index and BAM FM have teamed up with an industry peer group of businesses to develop a standardised approach to calculating carbon emissions for the FM sector.

Through this new standard, The Sustainable Facilities Management Index (SFMI), hopes to assist the FM sector in taking responsibility for higher emission-causing activities that occur within their delivered services. This will shape their influence in the built environment as sustainable solutions providers.

SFMI’s vision aims to create a measurement tool (including Scope 3 emissions) for the sector, develop FM service level emission factors based on real-life data for more accurate reporting, and build a sectoral decarbonisation pathway.  It says that the typical FM contract is one of the key barriers to making reductions, so the SFMI and BAM FM are building the tools to help the industry overcome the challenge.

As part of the project, the SFMI has built a critical review panel that combines industry groups such as RICS, IWFM and IEMA, with in-house FM teams, and outsourced FM providers to ensure that the approach will have industry acceptance.

“An FM’s carbon impact is larger than many will report. This is exacerbated by the explosion of net-zero targets that have been announced by providers."

–Sunil Shah

Founder, SFMI

 

Driving ESG Leadership in FM

The SFMI argues that the FM industry needs to build a data set to understand what the true impacts of its emissions are for its customers. This can then be used to promote greenhouse gas (GHG) management in the operational stage of the building lifecycle, thereby promoting FM as a solution for zero-carbon buildings in the future.

This all feeds into the SFMI’s purpose to drive ESG leadership within the FM industry by delivering sustainable services that provide a positive benefit across the value chain.

Sunil Shah, SFMI’s Founder, said: “An FM’s carbon impact is larger than many will report. This is exacerbated by the explosion of net-zero targets that have been announced by providers. So, many FMs are actively or inadvertently ‘scoping out’ emissions from their inventories to make hitting an arbitrary net-zero target easier. By doing this the industry is not positioning itself as a solution to the problem we have of reducing GHG emissions”. 

The report is available via the SFMI website to download.

Picture: a photograph of Chris Havers, SFMI Programme Director, launching the report at the IWFM 2022 conference.  Image Credit: SFMI

Article written by Ella Tansley | Published 29 June 2022

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