ESB’s Sustainability Transformation Enablement Programme (STEP) initiative recently won the ‘Best Net-Zero Initiative of the Year’ award at the 2023 All-Ireland Sustainability Awards.
Ciaran Doran, Sustainability Transformation Manager at ESB, outlines below the key objectives of the initiative and how our employees are getting involved.
What is the purpose of ESB’s STEP Programme?
The aim of our STEP Programme is to enable outstanding environmental and social performance across the organisation by delivering enhanced reporting standards, systems, processes, resourcing, organisation, and governance arrangements for sustainability. It is about positioning environmental stewardship and social responsibility at the core of everyone’s role within ESB.
How does it work in practice?
There are five main and inter-related workstreams within the programme:
Standards and Requirements: This focuses on supporting the delivery of key sustainability reporting standards and the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
Systems and Processes: This is implementing an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting solution and the data collection and reporting processes for leading internal and external sustainability performance reporting.
Governance and Organisation: This focuses on defining and implementing the overall operating model for enhanced sustainability management.
Developing leaders and engaging everyone: This is supporting our sustainability leadership development and learning support for everyone on sustainability issues.
External Transparency: This focuses on helping to communicate our sustainability journey and performance to our stakeholders.
How do ESB employees get involved?
We now have almost 9,000 people working across ESB and the aim is to make social responsibility and environmental stewardship core to everyone’s role. Our colleagues are getting involved by:
Building their personal understanding of climate action and wider sustainability topics.
Reflecting on respective team’s environmental and social impacts, and their contribution to ESB’s Net Zero strategy, and building improvements into their plans, targets, and performance measures.
Actively seeking to deliver sustainability enhancements as part of their work.
Seeking to help our customers to reach net zero; to enhance nature and support communities in which we operate; to use resources wisely and efficiently; and to consider all the impacts on people across our value chain.
To help, we are supporting a network of Sustainability Navigators to champion sustainability across the company, and delivering Sustainability Leadership training for managers, as well as foundational training for employees.
More information on our ESG and Sustainability work can be found here.