How we track our sustainability and environmental impact at Lancia

(That’s Ben, top left in the picture above)

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Q: What is ESG? And why is it so important for LanciaConsult?
A: Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) is a broad term that covers the sustainability and impact that an organisation has on its stakeholders. It covers a range of topics from tracking our carbon footprint, to improving our inclusion and diversity and to looking at how decisions are made by our Board.  At Lancia, ESG is a core part of our strategy and how we operate every day as a business. As individuals, we are invested and care passionately about our team, our clients and the communities we operate in. We have ESG working groups in both Europe and Asia that are dedicated to ensuring we continue to maximise the impact we have as a business, whether that’s through doing more work with social impact clients, influencing our internal policies and processes, or in this case minimising our environmental impact.    

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Q: Why did you create the ESG dashboard?
A: ESG has been a key passion of mine, both in work and in my personal life, so when I joined Lancia, our ESG working group was one of the first internal teams I joined.  

Through our partnership with Ecologi we have been offsetting our personal and business carbon emissions for many years. But when I joined last year, I realised we didn’t have the full picture of where our emissions come from. I felt strongly about using the data we collect as a business to help the team understand their impact on the environment. But I also wanted to make sure that as an organisation we were accountable for our greenhouse gas emissions. We needed a tool that could help us to understand our emissions and what we can do to influence them.  

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Q: How did you build it?
A: Working with our Finance team and the Leadership team, we collated the data sources that we had available. This included Ecologi offsetting and data from our finance systems and business expenditure. Then, in line with guidance and standards from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GGP) and using reference data from official sources, we began estimating our environmental footprint.  

We developed some key metrics that we wanted to understand, such as our total carbon footprint, and by working with the data we had begun to develop data to support these metrics.  

All that was left was to begin to visualise this data so that we could review trends and identify the biggest causes of emissions – we chose PowerBI as the tool to do this.

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Q: Why did you choose PowerBI?
A: PowerBI is a highly accessible data visualisation that is part of the Microsoft 365 toolkit. We chose PowerBI because of its ability to integrate, transform and visualise multiple data sources in an intuitive and engaging way. We wanted to automate the dashboard as far as possible, and PowerBI’s pre-built connectors allowed us to do this.  

Personally, I’ve been wanting to get a better understanding of how PowerBI works and how I can bring this into my client work, and by building the dashboard I’ve taught myself some really useful skills that can be shared with the wider team.

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Q: What does the dashboard show?
A: The dashboard has grown substantially over the last year. It started showing carbon emissions for planes, trains and cars against what we offset and has now evolved to provide a more holistic view of all things ESG at Lancia. The dashboard now contains:

• Governance – how we are performing and improving against our internal governance benchmarks year on year
• ‍Greenhouse Gas emissions – how we are performing against our scope 1, 2 and 3 carbon emissions, with a particular focus on our emissions from our business travel, office spaces and purchased goods and services.  
• ‍Services – capturing our efforts working with social impact clients against our global targets
• ‍Giving – tracking the donations (both cash and time) we make to our chosen causes.

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Q: What’s next?
A: We are continuing to expand and improve the dashboard to better understand the impact our business has. We are also looking at how we can integrate with other systems and tools to improve these processes.  

We are taking what we have found to our clients and social impact partners to share the insights and lessons we have learned and helping them better understand and track their ESG metrics.  

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If you would like to hear more about tracking ESG, or how we are invested in our communities, please get in touch.

Or perhaps download our Social Impact Report and learn what else we are doing to put ESG at the heart of our business.