New - Sustainable management students available

New - Sustainable management students available for your CEED project ...

SMART (Sustainable Management Alliance in Research and Teaching) is a partnership program founded in 2007 by the University of Queensland (UQ). Through CEED Program Qld, companies / Government can link with talented UQ students, who have a passion for corporate sustainability. The ultimate goal of SMART is to inform and enhance innovative research, project implementation and industry guided teaching in the field of sustainable business management.

Types of Projects

Some of the projects that SMART students can complete for companies include:

Integrated Carbon Inventory and Management Projects

In these projects students will develop and evaluate a set of carbon emissions reduction strategies for the client. The projects will be organised into the following three stages;

Stage 1 - Carbon Inventory

Students will conduct a greenhouse gas emissions inventory of Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions for the client in accordance with the principles and guidelines stipulated in the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007.

Students in the SMART group have completed or are currently undertaking carbon inventories (carbon 'footprints') for companies such as Caltex, CS Energy, Billabong and Freedom Fuels.

Stage 2 - Marginal Abatement Cost Curve (MACC)

Students will develop a MACC for the client. Please find an example of a MACC below - this one was developed by McKinsey and Co for Australia-at-large. The height of the bars represents the marginal cost of the denoted abatement activity, and the width of the bars represents the volume of greenhouse gases that are available for abatement under the denoted activity. Marginal cost is the difference in cost to a business-as-usual or baseline scenario (e.g. a negative marginal cost represents a cost saving).

A MACC allows companies to conceptualise and cost-out their internal emissions abatement options. By doing so, companies can formulate strategies and make decisions about the most cost-effective methods at their disposal to reduce their carbon emissions. MACCs are also a good exercise in identifying opportunities for cost-savings within a business, and so are of benefit to all companies, not just firms with a compliance obligation under the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

Students in the SMART group have completed or are currently undertaking MACC development projects for companies such as Cement Australia, the Port of Brisbane Corporation, Thiess and Virgin Blue.

 

Diagram: MACC example (developed by McKinsey and Co for Australia-at-large)



Stage 3 - Evaluation of Carbon Reduction Strategies and Recommendations

Companies can also reduce their net greenhouse gas emissions by acquiring greenhouse gas emissions offsets. In simple terms, under the proposed Australian CPRS firms can acquire two types of offsets - Certified Emissions Reduction units (CERs) from Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects registered under the UNFCCC or offsets from compliant afforestation or reafforestation projects undertaken within Australia. The SMART group and its students are uniquely position to provide advice on current developments in the market for offsets and offset project development. The SMART group is part of the UQ Tropical Forestry group, one of the foremost tropical forestry research groups anywhere in the world. The SMART group is also currently engaged in a number of CDM development projects in the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and PNG, for clients such as XStrata Copper, and we have a very sophisticated understanding of the CDM development process and international market for CERs.

Under these projects, students will be required to evaluate the offset options available to the client, and integrate those evaluations into the client's MACC. Students will then evaluate and consider the various emissions reduction options available to the client and make recommendations about which options present the most cost-effective carbon pollution reduction strategies.

UQ SMART Student Backgrounds

Around 40% of the students in the UQ SMART courses are studying engineering; about 30% are from business, economics, commerce or law; about 20% are from environmental management; with the remainder from agribusiness, journalism and general science programs.

The majority of students are in the final year of their undergraduate degree.

From 2010, UQ will be offering a number of new programs in which SMART courses will form part of the major.

These include:

a. BBusMan (Sustainability)
b. MBus (Sustainability)
c. Masters of Sustainable Systems (Environmental Markets

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