RealComm’s Sustainability and ESG in the ‘Built World’ Webinar

Microshare CMO & Chief Risk & Sustainability Officer, Michael Moran, was recently invited as a guest speaker on a Realcomm webinar discussing sustainability as part of our solutions across the world.

View the full webinar here.

Webinar transcript:

The transcription of this episode is auto generated by a third-party source. While Microshare takes every precaution to insure that the content is accurate, errors can occur. Microshare, Inc.  is not responsible for any errors or omissions, or for the results obtained from the use of this information.

Host: [00:00:00] Fantastic, great. Let me welcome and thank again Mike Moran, for supporting our event today. Mike is the CMO and director of Risk and Sustainability for Microshare Micro Share that he oversees micro shares, ESG practice, as well as communications and thought leadership strategy. He’s also a writer and a broadcaster on sustainability, as well as many other topics, and he’s also a former principal and chief U.S. macro analyst for added global risk consultancy known as Control Risks. Welcome again, Mike. Thanks for the support. Look forward to hearing your presentation. [00:00:45][45.1]

Michael Moran: [00:01:04] Thank you. That was our CEO dashing through the headquarters in Philadelphia. He’s a good sport and and a bit of a ham. So as you saw, I mean, one of the things we do other than energy monitoring, which we have a pretty robust solution for is the the larger aspects of ESG, which is such a broad term these days. And you know, I think before the pandemic, ESG and sustainability, there was a kind of it was a straw man for for energy and environmental carbon footprint. I think the pandemic has really kind of reinforced the S in ESG, the social aspects which are much harder to collect data for. And some of the things you saw on that video were the data points that we collect on top of the energy ingestion and utility bills and electricity monitoring, which give you something to hang your hat on when you’re revealing and releasing data on your social and ESG performance as well. So I’m going to try to race through this deck because some of it was covered quite well by Brant at the top. You know, there’s three major drivers market demand. Climate risk is obviously a millennial, you know, issue that you’ll get from everywhere, from your investors to to staff that you’re trying to retain. You’re also seeing regulatory action now in the EU, and he sees chewing on these things. And of course, in the post-pandemic world, we’ve had a real reset about the labor management relationship and that it plays very real into the way that we look at performance to buildings and health within buildings and the carbon footprint of a given company or portfolio of buildings. So ESG metrics will you’ll see this, of course, because we’re going to share the the slide deck, but the things they’re trying to measure are varied. In many ways, defining ESG is kind of a moving target we have in our practice in iottie approach to ESG, in which many of these things are actually possible to derive from IoT sensors and our platform a real metric that is empirical. And that’s a tough one because one of the things that’s happening in the world is whether it’s your carbon footprint, your your, your plan to decarbonize. There’s accusations of greenwashing, as it’s called, which is essentially when you hand your marketing department, the job of reporting on your ESG and sustainability initiatives. Having that data in there to hang your hat on is extremely important from a legal standpoint, regulatory standpoint. But in terms of investor relations and so your reputation. What we’ve found is that many of the core elements of ESG can be measured with empirical data data, whether it’s electricity monitoring, gas, water consumption data that we’ve been talking about here. It also applies to water and wastewater. All of that correlates really closely with occupancy. Occupancy data correlated with these things can tell you sometimes whether to shut down heat and gas supply in an area when they’re not occupied. But it it can also help you understand why a room that is occupied is being heating up and you’re getting complaints. Similarly, with the social aspects of it having that kind of data to talk about duty of care, to talk about the way the transparency that exists within the organization can be very vital. That’s it for this sideshow. I’m trying to keep this really succinct. You are brilliant, but I got like 30 seconds to go. [00:04:53][228.8]

Host: [00:04:54] Mike, thank you so much, but very cool stuff. Very interesting. Great video. How to give you an overview of the platform. But one quick question that I had for you is really about the social component, and we talked about engagement a little bit a couple of times here in our discussions, and it seems to be the most susceptible to kind of greenwashing. And when you start thinking about labor rights and occupant health and safety and the environmental soundness, soundness of environmental, of the interior spaces, you know, is there a way to back these up these claims with empirical data in the work that you guys do? [00:05:28][33.5]

Michael Moran: [00:05:29] Absolutely. And I think the kinds of. The kinds of things you can deploy to do something like that are things like occupancy, as I mentioned, indoor air quality monitoring, humidity and temperature. When you when you submeter for those factors that actually optimizes the environment and it will retard the spread of viral infections, which is obviously a very big issue right now. Density can be measured. Cleaning and the efficiency of cleaning can be measured both in terms of having data drive what is cleaned on a given basis so that there’s a visible treatment of places that are being used high in a high volume way, but also it retards the spread of chemicals that it’s unnecessary. The traditional way of cleaning, of course, is like like Peyton took land in France and Germany. You know, you see a territory and you clean every inch of it every day. That’s not the way things should be cleaned now. And there is data now to drive that type of a change, which is a very reassuring thing for occupancy when they see that the cafeteria that’s been heavily used is being cleaned after use, not at the end of the day, 100 percent. [00:06:41][71.6]

Host: [00:06:41] And I think it’s really important because of the human health impacts, as you say, and and being more again analytical about that and really measuring and monitoring what that looks like, not just saying that is but tracking it. Thank you so much. Appreciate it greatly. [00:06:41][0.0]

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