On Wednesday the US Securities and Exchange Commission voted to provide public companies with interpretive guidance on existing SEC disclosure requirements as they apply to business or legal developments relating to the issue of climate change.

The guidance highlights 4 key points:

• Impact of Legislation and Regulation: A company should consider whether the impact of certain existing laws and regulations regarding climate change is material. In certain circumstances, a company should also evaluate the potential impact of pending legislation and regulation related to this topic.
• Impact of International Accords: A company should consider, and disclose when material, the risks or effects on its business of international accords and treaties relating to climate change.
• Indirect Consequences of Regulation or Business Trends: Legal, technological, political and scientific developments regarding climate change may create new opportunities or risks for companies. For instance, a company may face decreased demand for goods that produce significant greenhouse gas emissions or increased demand for goods that result in lower emissions than competing products. As such, a company should consider, for disclosure purposes, the actual or potential indirect consequences it may face due to climate change related regulatory or business trends.
• Physical Impacts of Climate Change: Companies should also evaluate for disclosure purposes the actual and potential material impacts of environmental matters on their business.

The announcement on SEC's guidance on disclosure of climate change risks.

Over the Christmas break we added the ability to further categorise emission sources, facilities and assets in FoundationFootprint™ through the use of "tags".

In the same way that blog posts are tagged or labelled, resources and production items and organisation and facility items can be classified with as many different tags as desired.

For example, you may wish to tag facilities that come under the mandatory reporting requirements of regional or national regulations or that have recently had energy audits performed there.

You may wish to tag electricity accounts with more information than just whether they're time of use or none time of use accounts. For example whether they have data provided by smart meters or include a break down of usage data at the asset level.

Tags are also made available in reports where appropriate.

Tags are over and above the existing three levels of classifications already available to inventory and organsiation items as well as other labels such as emission scopes and types.

Tags provide for a limitless level of catogorisation on almost every aspect of your data in FoundationFootprint™.

I was fortunate enough to be born and raised in the English Lake District and spent the early years of my life travelling the world and living in different countries. I experienced the beauty of the Borneo and Costa Rican rain and cloud forests and the awe of the Yukon plains and the Australian Outback. This was contrasted with the all-encompassing poverty of South and South East Asia and Africa and the destruction of the human spirit and the environment that comes with it.

These experiences are the reason I started Revolution ID, because I care deeply about our planet and the way we treat each other, animals and the environment. I believe that the majority of people who are lucky enough not to have to struggle to survive each day do think about the state of our world and the plight of the impoverished and want to see a change.

These people work in businesses and governments all around the world. The catalysts of change. So why is there not more change happening? I think it's because we perceive the problem to be too big for us as individuals to have an effect. And I also think it's perceived as being just too difficult. But you've heard all this before. Hearing it again may bore you or it may frustrate you. It frustrates me. Incredibly so.

But that frustration drives my vision. A vision to embrace the problem and provide the means for businesses and governments to enable themselves, their value chains and their communities to make the change to a truly sustainable and responsible existence.

For businesses and governments to make these changes we have to focus on the bottom line at every stage or it simply won't happen. This multi faceted process of organisational change has to provide clear benefits and quantifiable returns on investments at every step of the way. This is what I am creating at Revolution ID with our software and resources. The tools to provide meaningful timely information clearly and concisely. Tools we provide to our customers as well as responsible third party climate change and sustainability advisory organisations to assist their own services and add further value.

If this process of change is fraught with unpredictable costs and risks then adoption will be slow and limited. But it doesn't have to be that way.

I'm bitter about the COP15 outcome and the Copenhagen Accord is a big disappointment. I saw it is an opportunity for the goodness of human nature to shine through but alas, greed and lack of leadership and commitment won the day.

Not even an agreement to protect our forests could be decided.

We must now concentrate on supporting those businesses and countries like Japan, the UK and other European countries who continue to lead the plight dispite Copenhagen. Those millions of us working in governments and businesses around the world can directly or indirectly influence their organisation and shout louder and fight harder for the change we all know must happen.

It's times like this that we need to channel our anger and frustration into constructive action. I have been told I have an altruistic and sometimes niaive perspective on the world and what I want to achieve. My response to those people is: So be it. Now get out of my way and let the rest of us get on with it.

With no deadline to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, no legally binding emission targets, no coverage of aviation or maritime emissions and no reform of the CDM market, what are the implications for business of the Copenhagen Accord?

For a brief overview and link to a free indepth report go here.

We've been busy enhancing our report features in FoundationFootprint™ over the last three months.

In the past we were very conscious not to inundate our users with reports that are configurable in every way imaginable as it often deterred the user from using them. I've seen it in many applications-it simply takes too much effort to understand how to use the features and get anything meaningful out of the system.

So we concentrated on having a selection of reports that were based on whatever business unit, facility, asset or supplier was selected in the page. Likewise with the emission sources. Two clicks away was the same in depth analysis whether it was electricity, gas, fuel, water, raw materials or mobile phone use.

And to compliment these automatic reports we created plenty of "half done" reports where the user simply needs to select the items of interest and two or three other parameters such as a date range and click go. Both methods gave users virtually instant access to really useful and meaningful information.

But that being said we were getting a steady stream of requests for a full blown report builder. So we did it. And as well as creating your own reports for personal use you can share them with another user, your team, your business unit or everyone and also have FoundationFootprint™ send the reports to you on a schedule that you define.

And users can now make real time reports available to the general public. Reports such as their absolute carbon footprint as well as the ongoing carbon intensity of their products, services or supply chain.

Something else we've been working on over the last few months, in partnership with Beckstones Services, is Granite™, an online document, project and timesheet management system for the construction industry.

The built environment makes up a large proportion of emissions globally as does the actual construction process. Granite™ reduces the costs and environmental impact of the construction process in many ways:

1. it improves communication between designers, architects, drafters, builders and the client reducing the likelihood of errors and costly modifications
   
2. it significantly reduces fuel costs and time for trips between offices and sites to deliver drawings, and obtain mark ups, alterations and signatures
3. and it significantly reduces printing costs as modifications can be made and viewed online

Furthermore, FoundationFootprint™ can be used to forecast and track the carbon footprint of the full lifecycle of buildings and whole developments from concept, through construction, operation and decommission.

For more information on Granite™ contact Beckstones.

It's been sometime since I last published a blog post. We've been busy to say the least.

From an engineering perspective we've been busy building the Report Builder in FoundationFootprint™. More about that in a later post. We also released a local government edition of FoundationFootprint™ that follows the draft GHG Protocol Public Sector Standard.

Operationally we've been moving our infrastructure to a new cloud provider. Now we have dynamic scalability meaning a million users can hit FoundationFootprint™ at the same time and the resources will automatically scale up to meet demand. We have automatic offsite backups three times a day and uptime is guaranteed 99.999%. Great peace of mind for our customers.

On the business development front we've been busy talking to local councils in the Auckland area regarding the upcoming SuperCity move and the Rugby World Cup 2011 preparations. We've been developing our FoundationFootprint™ Reseller Program across Australasia which has met with a lot of enthusiasm and we've also been moving into the dairy, forestry and transport sectors with great results. This has coincided with the release of our NZ ETS Compliance module for the Forestry sector.