As part of our 30 year anniversary we are reflecting on the history of BIP.Verco. Jeff Kenna who founded ESD back in 1989 talks to us about the company's early years, how it was formed, the projects it was involved with and the 'work hard' ethos that was established from the start. Read more
October 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of BIP.Verco’s founding – a period which has seen the company expand, diversify and shift through multiple incarnations, before, as Dave Worthington (Managing Director) remarks, emerging “back out the other side as an independent consultancy again”. Sustainability has remained at the heart of the company’s collective ethos however, leading to many successful projects and partnerships across the globe. Read more
On Thursday 5th September, our Overmoor office donated a day of time to help maintain the 24-acre community woodland on the western edge of Bath.Primrose Hill Community Woodland is maintained and enhanced by Primrose Hill Community Woodland Trust. The trust bought the woodland in 2012 and has been maintaining and enhancing it ever since. The Trust works with others in the community including ‘Grow Yourself’, a local Community Interest Company which offers unemployed 18-25 year olds the opportunity to work in the community. Read more
The requirements for GHG reporting have changed with the arrival of the Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR).SECR is the UK government's new energy and carbon reporting scheme. The purpose of SECR is to: Read more
Based on the site of an old quarry, Brockholes Nature Reserve is owned and managed by the Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester & North Merseyside. The Trust has used their expertise to create habitats for lots of different wildlife in 250 acres of reserve and BIP.Verco Chorley visited for the third year running on Wednesday to carry out their annual team volunteering afternoon.In past years they have helped with the removal of Himalayan Balsam and created some dead hedges along one of the many trails the site has. This year however they assisted in removing dock and ragwort plants from one of the meadows. Read more
The call for companies to be more transparent about their climate-related risks and opportunities has received a big push in the UK, thanks to the Government’s newly published Green Finance Strategy. This sets an expectation for all listed companies and large asset owners to disclose in line with the Task-force for Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) recommendations by 2022. A task-force of UK regulators chaired by Government is being set up to look into the most effective way of achieving this, including how to make the TCFD recommendations mandatory. In this article, Tim Crozier-Cole - Head of Strategy and Research at BIP.Verco - comments on the status of TCFD presently and how companies are likely to respond. Read more
BIP.Verco was proud to sponsor the Crowd’s well timed event on Zero Carbon Futures last month. A lot has happened since then- The House of Commons has approved legislation for net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and Teresa May has used this as a platform to encourage others to follow our lead at the G20 Summit, highlighting the need for a five-fold increase on existing 2030 commitments if we are to remain below 1.5 degrees of warming. Read more
BIP.Verco are proud to support the delivery of Springboard – one of the UK’s leading funding competitions for low carbon innovation. For the last 14 years BIP.Verco have been Shell’s technical assessment delivery partner - our role is to review and evaluate the low carbon business ideas submitted to the programme, of which there are routinely over 100 each year. We select the 16 who will proceed to the semi-finals. This is based on the credibility of the commercial strategy, the level of innovation demonstrated and the potential of the idea having a material impact on the transition to zero carbon. Read more
Having thoroughly enjoyed our trip in 2018, the BIP.Verco London office once again spent a day volunteering at Stepney City Farm. Read more
Climate change is more prominent than ever in UK and world news. The UK has had its first coal-free week in power generation since the 1880s, and the UK Parliament has recently declared a climate emergency. The Committee on Climate Change’s recently released report recommended a reduction in carbon emissions to nearly zero by 2050. Solar photovoltaics (PV) have an important role to play in meeting this ambition. Read more
BIP.Verco is a partner in the ALliance for Deep RENovation (ALDREN) a 30 month Horizon 2020 project which started in November 2017. The purpose of ALDREN is to develop protocols which support deep renovations of office and hotel buildings and to demonstrate their effectiveness by real-life pilot studies. It is thereby intended to encourage investment and accelerate the movement towards a nearly zero energy non-residential building stock across the EU, as targeted by 2050 to meet Paris Agreement commitments. The project is co-ordinated by the Centre Scientifique et Technique du Batiment (CSTB) in France, with seven expert partners from around Europe. Read more
BIES has launched an informal consultation titled ‘Designing the Industrial Energy Transformation Fund’ (IETF), which was announced in the autumn Budget in 2018. Read more
Manufacturing sites typically lose 2-7% of product during processing*.Product loss in manufacturing can be extremely costly for a site; these losses are typically difficult to address since it is hard to quantify where and when product is lost in the manufacturing process.Product loss incurs costs in four main ways: Read more
BIP.Verco were proud to be the programme sponsor for the first event of 2019 hosted by The Crowd on “Harnessing collective intelligence to accelerate the Sustainable Development Goals”. The event was hosted by the RIBA in London and had a fantastic line up of speakers, from finance to the charity sector. Geoff Mulgan from Nesta and author of the book ‘Big Mind’ started the presentations by asking what resources of intelligence could be used to allow a city to function as if it were a human brain. Steve Waygood from Aviva voiced his concerns of how business externalities are not incorporated into investment decisions fundamentally ignoring the one planet boundary, and the vital need for more clarity into how our money is being invested. Sam Baker, Partner at Monitor Deloitte, warned of the myopia of middle management as one of the biggest challenges to achieving the SDG’s, and also the essential role of collective intelligence in reporting to ensure that annual improvements are demonstrated, and the impact on stakeholders that we are trying to engage with is measured and fully understood. Linked to this, in the absence of a global regulator to hold companies to account for their commitment to the SDG’s, the World Benchmarking Alliance, which was launched last September, aims to provide an essential tool for measuring and comparing corporate performance on working towards the SDG’s. Read more
Our one-day, intensive Scoping Audit identifies specific steps to improve and sustain building performance. Read more
The Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) has announced that it will publish an updated set of target validation criteria in April to reflect the latest science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, published in October 2018. Read more
From 2016 to 2018, BIP.Verco were commissioned under the FCO’s Global Britain Fund with the British Embassy in Russia to provide policy advice and evaluation for the Russian Federation. Over three years, we delivered research and advice for the Ministry for Economic Development and Ministry for Natural Resources on international best practice examples of carbon regulation, carbon pricing and energy efficiency policy including the UK. As a business, BIP.Verco has been involved with policy projects at the highest international levels since the 1990s - we were one of the founders of the UK Emissions Trading scheme in 1999 - and we continue to help shape the structure of today’s international regulatory landscape. Read more
Austrian community catering supplier GOURMET leads the way in energy efficiency with the first European industry project certified by the Investor Confidence Project.The Investor Confidence Project’s innovative Investor Ready Energy Efficiency™ Certification has been awarded to a waste heat utilisation project at GMS GOURMET GmbH. The project saves natural gas and electricity by using the waste heat of two fast cooling plants to support the heating demand of three ventilation systems at GOURMET’s production site in Vienna. Read more