How Does A Large Employer Up The Ante On Sustainability?How Does A Large Employer Up The Ante On Sustainability?

Our commitment to be 100 percent reliant on renewable energy by 2020 and to facilitate $200 billion in clean financing through 2025.

At JPMorgan Chase, we have gradually and thoughtfully been increasing our commitment to sustainability for over a decade. When one of the world’s largest banks thinks about sustainability – it’s not just as an employer with a global real estate portfolio of 75 million square feet of space, which is approximately 27 times the square footage of the office space at the Empire State Building - but also as a financial services company helping its clients better manage sustainability challenges and capitalize on new opportunities.

JPMorgan Chase

As part of the comprehensive strategy that we’ve built over time to advance environmentally sustainable solutions for clients and our own operations, JPMorgan Chase has put a stake in the ground - committing to source renewable power for 100 percent of its energy needs by 2020 and to facilitate $200 billion in clean financing through 2025. This commitment – the largest made by a global financial institution – builds on JPMorgan Chase’s leadership and long-standing efforts to advance sustainability in our business and operations.

Business must play a leadership role in creating solutions that protect the environment and grow the economy. This global investment leverages the firm’s resources and our people’s expertise to make our operations more energy efficient and provide clients with the resources they need to develop more sustainable products and services."

Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase

Here is what our two new commitments – Renewable Energy and Clean Financing – mean in practice.

Renewable Energy

We are committed to using renewable energy for 100 percent of our energy needs – that includes offices and operations in more than 60 countries across over 5,500 properties. Here’s how we plan to achieve this goal.

• Installing On-Site Renewable Energy: We will be developing on-site solar power generation for up to 1,400 bank-owned retail and 40 commercial buildings globally. One example includes the on-site solar installation at JPMorgan Chase's Polaris Corporate Center in Columbus, Ohio. This is the firm’s largest single-tenant office in the world. The solar installation could comprise up to approximately 20 megawatts (MW) of capacity - enough to power the equivalent of 3,280 homes - to offset 65 percent of on-site power usage.
• Executing Power Purchase Agreements for Renewable Energy: We will use the strength of the company’s global reach and expertise in the renewable power sector to support the development of new renewable energy projects on the grids from which JPMorgan Chase purchases power. As a first step, JPMorgan Chase’s Global Real Estate and Global Commodities divisions executed a 20-year Power Purchase Agreement with a subsidiary of NRG Energy, Inc. to support the development of the Buckthorn wind farm, a 100 MW project in Erath County, Texas. The project is expected to be operational by the end of 2017 and will provide electricity for approximately 75 percent of the firm’s power consumption in Texas and 13 percent of overall consumption in the U.S. The project created about 190 clean energy construction jobs and will produce enough renewable energy annually to power the equivalent of 29,300 homes.
• Reducing Energy Consumption: As just one example, we are conducting the world's largest LED lighting installation in partnership with Current, powered by GE. About 4,500 Chase branches will install new lighting technologies, cutting total energy consumption by 15 percent. We have retrofitted 2,500 branches to date with LED lighting for a total of 1.4 million new light bulbs, cutting Chase’s lighting energy consumption by 50 percent, or the equivalent of taking nearly 27,000 cars off the road.

Clean Financing

JPMorgan Chase has facilitated and advised on some of the largest clean financings and strategic transactions in the renewable energy sector. We are now making the largest commitment by a global financial institution by facilitating $200 billion in clean financing by 2025. This includes:

• Advising clients on leading strategic transactions and capital raises in the renewable energy sector. As just one example, JPMorgan Chase advised Dong Energy, a global leader in offshore wind, on its USD $3.0 billion Initial Public Offering in 2016.
• Financing and providing risk management solutions for clients’ renewable energy projects and companies to facilitate new energy, technology, transportation, waste management, and water treatment. JPMorgan Chase provided nearly $2 billion in tax equity for wind, solar and geothermal projects in 2016.
• Underwriting debt with a sustainable use of proceeds for municipal, corporate and multilateral clients. These transactions totaled nearly $15 billion in 2016. Projects in 2017 include serving as active bookrunner on Apple’s $1.0 billion green bond offering in June.
• Supporting clients’ sustainability initiatives JPMorgan Chase provides industry-leading research and publishes reports on environmental, social, and governance issues. We share insights and best practices on sustainability with our corporate and investor clients to advance efforts globally.

Read more detail about how we plan to fulfill this commitment. www.jpmorganchase.com/environmentalsustainability

Learn more about our sustainability efforts.

See how we are collaborating with GE to cut energy use in branches across the U.S.

Some Businesses Totally Miss The Future Of Sustainability

This post is sponsored by SAP.

"Sustainability" has become a business buzzword lately, but many people don't know exactly what it means. 

Organizations trying to become sustainable need to do more than separate their recyclables from their garbage. Dr. Peter Graf, who became SAP's first chief sustainability officer in 2009, tells us the true leaders in the field are those who look at the financial, environmental, and social implications of business processes all at the same time.

Graf recently spoke with us about the challenges of becoming sustainable, as well as the path he took to embracing sustainability in both his professional and personal life.

Interview conducted by Business Insider's Patricia Chui. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Business Insider: What does sustainability mean to you?

Peter Graf: Sustainability is an end goal in which you could theoretically run your organization, its supply chain, and its products indefinitely. It's a big vision about how can we set up our organizations, our supply chains, and our interaction with customers in a way that optimizes the economic equation [and] the environmental and societal outcomes at the same moment.

BI: Why should businesses become sustainable?

Peter Graf

PG: First and foremost, sustainability has proven to be a source of innovation, so it can help you increase your revenues. Second, by being more clever and effective about the use of your resources, you can save a lot of money. The third point is that you can reduce your risk. The public doesn't condone environmental damage or societal unfairness. If you operate an oil rig and you produce a lot of pollution, people avoid your gas stations.

Revenue, cost, and risk are the drivers for sustainability. The big challenge is to help the company understand that transformation is required, and there's a strong business case behind the transformation — in fact, a stronger business case than many other things the company could do.

The leaders in this transformation see sustainability not as a necessary evil but as an opportunity to compete. And they develop an integrated thinking. The decision to create a warehouse somewhere has implications that are financial, environmental, and social. The trick is, you need to look at all of them at the same time.

BI: When companies try to become sustainable, what is the hardest part of the process for them?

PG: Many companies are not approaching sustainability from the core of how they create value. Sometimes people go after the lower hanging fruit, but transformation in the core of the company is not happening. For example, if you're in the food industry, or in the consumer goods industry, it's all in the supply chain. If you don't start figuring out how to make your supply chain more sustainable, and if you don't really care where you put your buying power, then everything else you can do is not going to be as relevant.

Every industry is being redefined right now, as people start to grasp how sustainability creates value for them. That's difficult, because that means change at a level that is really at the core of the organization.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-graf-interview-sustainability-sap-2013-3#ixzz2OF0ipVuZ