The Environment, Climate Change, and Contact Centers

| Contact Center/CRM Views and Analysis

The Environment, Climate Change, and Contact Centers


How do environment and climate change issues impact business functions like contact centers? Easily and painfully. For if harmful substances are pumped and dumped into the environment: air, on the ground, and in the water your health and finances, that of your family, your employees and their families, and your customers will suffer.

These impacts also includes higher healthcare costs that shift spending away from other items (like yours), decreased productivity via absenteeism hikes and resulting increased staffing/training expenses, growing disaster risks, and losses.

Here is just one example of how environmental damage hits home. The Canadian Medical Association issued a groundbreaking report last year, No Breathing Room: National Illness Costs of Air Pollution which reports that by 2031 almost 90,000 people will have died from the acute effects of air pollution while some 710,000 will die due to long-term exposure to air pollution. The economic costs: healthcare expenses, loss of productivity and destruction of quality of life resulting from air pollution will have topped $8 billion in 2008. By 2031, they will have accumulated to over $250 billion.

To put that in American terms (Canada's population is 34 million compared with 305 million in the U.S.) the corresponding figures are approximately 720,000 deaths from acute air pollution, 5.7 million from long term exposure at costs of $64 billion in 2008 and $2 trillion by 2031. Who is going to pay the ultimate and financial prices? The same person that always does: the one in the mirror.

Even seemingly benign activities like building a house or an office or buying or leasing one that beautiful piece of land does serious and costly harm.

--The David Suzuki Foundation quantified per hectare/year losses: in erosion control, wildlife habitat, water quality from sprawl: from $12,000 for farmland to $30,000 for wetlands

--The Fiscal Cost of Sprawl: How Sprawl Contributes to Local Governments' Budget Woes by the Environment Colorado Research and Policy Center, Colorado State University, reports that $1 in revenues from sprawl is outweighed by $1.65 in additional service expenditures


That is why the environment, including climate change matters, even to contact centers and their owning or client customers. This isn't a 'free lunch', folks. Crap up our surroundings i.e. our nest, and we all foot the bill.

On climate change the consequences, reports a Wikipedia article, citing UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data, could include more extreme weather e.g. droughts, torrential rains, fewer but more intense storms that pose increase direct and indirect (such as transportation network blockages) disaster risks. Droughts, combined with snowpack retreats may mean water shortages that prompt stringent and expense conservation measures.

Other consequences are more insidious and longer-term, like the rise of sea levels that threaten to inundate coastal communities, reduced agricultural yields and other food chain disruptions, and more diseases. These impacts may be partially offset by milder winters and longer growing seasons in some parts of the world, such as in northern Canada.

The climate change impacts are being quantified, which also illustrates how much damage it is causing to each of us financially directly and indirectly. Says the Wikipedia entry: "The IPCC reports the aggregate net economic costs of damages from climate change globally (discounted to the specified year). In 2005, the average social cost of carbon from 100 peer-reviewed estimates is US$12 per [metric] tonne of CO2, but range -$3 to $95/tCO2.

The IPCC's gives these cost estimates with the caveats, "Aggregate estimates of costs mask significant differences in impacts across sectors, regions and populations and very likely underestimate damage costs because they cannot include many non-quantifiable impacts."

Naturally there are industries that would be harmed by crackdowns on environmental damage like the industries (and vehicle manufacturers) that have dragged their feet on emissions standards, developers who fight against measures to protect open space, and the coal and oil/gas producers on global warming and fouling land and water resources through blowing up mountains and tailing ponds.

And when companies' bottom lines are affected one of the first weapons that come out of their arsenal is junk science backed by misleading and expensive PR campaigns, a technique used for decades by the tobacco lobby and asbestos producers.

That profit-protecting disinformation has long been underway with climate change. As reported in the Green Tech blog, James Hoggan, a Canadian PR executive, has made that charge in his book "Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming" And if his book is to be believed it casts doubt on the validity of the arguments and the basis of them that such man-made destruction is not underway.

Hoggan cited in a story carried last week by Canwest News Service a recent letter-writing campaign, supposedly from various seniors and community organizations protesting the potential increase in energy costs from new U.S. climate-change legislation but which was funded by a coal industry association and managed by Bonner and Associates. A Congressional panel has launched an investigation after discovering the letters were not authentic.

"It's not even so much about climate change for me," said Hoggan, who chairs the desmogblog.com climate-change website. "It's more about the deception and the PR. It was just taken too far."

The industries that benefit i.e. the energy sector especially from sticking the bills to others are not going to suddenly change their ways to become good corporate citizens. They need stiff prodding by governments who need an overwhelming force of harmed citizens and employers to give them the backbone they need to deal with their lobbyists.

These companies also require users to become less so, hurting them where it really counts. Fortunately there are at the contact centers disposal a vast range of solutions to enable them to do just that. They include:

* Switching from premise-working to home-working, from onsite to hosted solutions powered from ultraefficient data centers that cuts energy demand, and environmental damage from transportation and power generation, and e-waste

* Using audio/data/video/web conferencing rather than travel, and cycling, walking, taking mass transit, buses, rail, and in coastal areas walk aboard ferries rather than driving and flying

* Making homes, must-need facilities and remaining offices energy-efficient

* Locating facilities (and homes) on transit routes, in existing buildings and brownfield sites rather than on sprawl developments

* Going paperless

* Switching to more efficient rail and marine from less efficient truck and air for freight

Environmental action is more than 'thinking globally/acting locally'. It is about acting in our true best interests.


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