iCOR: A Platform for Legal Carbon Compliance

With the effects of climate change being rampant across the world, and the causes having been scientifically identified through decades of research, the UK government has taken several steps in the direction of climate positivity.

Our government has committed to achieving a net zero target by decarbonising all sectors of the UK economy by 2050. This is a significant goal, not in the least because carbon is inherent to all the products we consume, and all the production that is undertaken in every industry.

It is in the waste we produce, and the water we discharge, all of which are parts of the environment that are protected by environmental legislation. So it becomes of utmost importance for firms and businesses to use the existing regulatory networks and frameworks so as to affect real change in climate positivity.

Actions towards carbon management, carbon reduction, the achievement of net zero and ultimately climate positivity are all going to be founded on environmental legislation. It is through meeting the regulatory requirements of environmental legislation that applies to your specific industry that you can make a tangible contribution towards achieving our country’s larger goal of decarbonisation in a sustainable manner through holistic, and not superficial strategic changes in policy and operations.?

At the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, commonly referred to as COP26, the United Kingdom has set up several legal operative frameworks, some mandatory and some voluntary. Schemes like Streamlined Energy Carbon Reporting and the UK Trading Emissions Scheme are mandatory to ensure that businesses are required to report their emission levels, maintain a degree of transparency and to also be able to cap emission levels for companies in specific industries. Meanwhile, there are also voluntary frameworks and accreditations that businesses can choose to seek out to achieve.?

?Do refer to our previous blog for more information?

When legal compliance with these frameworks is enforced, it will ensure that the environmental effects of business and production-related decisions get taken into consideration during investment and strategising processes and help move the area to a sustainable industry.?

How to combat climate change as a business leader??

An issue that arises in this context is the difficulty of being able to keep track of legal environmental obligations. As the operator or decision maker of the business, even if you were well-intentioned enough to want to fully follow the requirements of such frameworks in order to be environmentally sensitive, there is difficulty in accessing and managing information regarding compliance legislation.

Logistically, the process of managing environmental legal regulations and requirements that you have to meet can be a very tedious task requiring a separate specialised consultancy team which would be difficult to maintain and train, and this is not a very feasible solution to address the tangled web of legislation for many companies.??

To that end, the program called?iCOR?is attempting to streamline the accessibility of information regarding environmental legislation in the United Kingdom. The team behind iCOR includes Tamma Carel of Imvelo Ltd - Environmental Consultants and Matt Shaw of Pixel House Media , who have significant experience in environmental legislation. Their goal with the program is to enable auditing and checklists to ensure that companies are following the legislative frameworks and requirements that apply to them.

This sets up a legal register for companies to use as a crosscheck mechanism to allow for compliance auditing and to highlight any non-conformities. The program allows for all the information being shown to the company dashboard to be specifically relevant and tailored to your own company and your specific needs. This tailoring of information would be done through an initial auditing process that would then lead to the creation of a database of regulatory requirements in a legal register and compliance statements.

The audit would therefore completely customise the legal register, without having the additional workforce of a consultant expert team. It would provide you with a holistic overview of the full status of your conformity with regulations at a given moment.

Though email communication and the flagging system are built into the system, it further draws your attention to specific factors and flags specific issues where your strategizers need to make changes in your policy to address specific non-conformities, and allows you to be frequently up-to-date with your compliance auditing. The team behind the software will also be regularly available to address specific problems and questions that companies can face in terms of operation and regulatory requirements, therefore providing a well-rounded and consistent solution to the problems of dealing with the nitty-gritty of environmental legislation.?

How to use iCOR and why should I use it?

The program is expected to be launched soon and the team eventually hopes to expand past environmental safety regulations to also automate auditing of health and safety regulations and any other such regulatory procedures and information. It would offer a year-long subscription for ￡3,500 that offers, specifically, the audit function, the legal register, the monthly legal register updates, the non-conformity tracker as well as the action planners which provides a function for different managers in different fields whose work cuts across each other regarding maintenance of certain environmental regulations to be able to collaborate on the database and auditing processes.?

iCOR is going to be best used by business owners, environmental managers, and people in such offices who are responsible for maintaining and ensuring that the company is in compliance with environmental regulations that apply to them, which, failure to understand or keep track of them, could result in legal prosecution against them and/or generate real environmental harm. It would therefore minimise risk for your company on financial, operative, investment and legal fronts.

The usage of iCOR will streamline and automate your business’ internal compliance checks for requirements such as the ISO framework and will allow for long-term strategy-planning in the respect of environmental sustainability policies and practices. Ease of keeping up with environmental legislation coupled with access to resources to further improve and test out strategies in the respect of how environmentally sound they are will make iCOR an extremely useful tool to your business, particularly if you operate in production, livestock, marine industries and other such related fields which result in significant environmental harm and therefore are required to face a lot of environmental legislation.

Further, beyond simply meeting the baseline legislative requirements in order to stay above board, the aspiration is that the ease of operation and access to information of iCOR will encourage businesses to take further initiatives to improve their environmental policy, and, through that, overall business performance.