World Wide Fund for Nature’s Earth Hour campaign: tackling sustainable urban development through applied analytics and performance management

Client ProfileThe World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is an international nonprofit organization working on conservation, research and restoration of the environment. The world’s largest independent conservation organization with more than five million supporters worldwide, WWF works in more than 100 countries, and supports around 1,300 conservation and environmental projects.

How Accenture HelpedTo engage people with issues related to sustainability and drive change, WWF initiated the Earth Hour campaign in 2007, which became the world’s largest environmental movement in just a few years. Every year during Earth Hour, millions of people in more than 150 countries across the world send a collective signal to their business and policy leaders by engaging in the symbolic act of turning off the lights for one hour.

In 2010, WWF decided to encourage people to go beyond the hour and engage in environment-friendly activities during the Earth Hour week and throughout the year. In line with this, in 2010-11, WWF Sweden ran a pilot, WWF Earth Hour City Challenge, which encouraged cities in Sweden to submit their strategies and plans for sustainable urban development. WWF reviewed those plans and, together with a jury, selected Malmö as the Earth Hour Capital—the city with the most inspiring and ambitious agenda.

The Earth Hour City Challenge is an initiative to mobilize action and support from cities in the global transition to a climate-friendly, one-planet future, and to promote the development and dissemination of preferred practices for climate mitigation and adaptation. It is run as a challenge to cities to present ambitious, holistic, inspiring and credible plans for low-carbon development and dramatically increasing the use of sustainable and efficient renewable energy solutions in the next few decades.

In 2012–13, WWF wanted to take the challenge beyond Sweden and, in a first step toward a truly global campaign, ran it in cities across five more countries (Norway, Italy, India, Canada and the United States). Through this step, WWF wanted to evaluate the cities based on the following activities:

•Moving toward a low-carbon economy and strongly promoting the use of renewable energy solutions

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•Taking ambitious actions to meet carbon and sustainable energy commitments

•Integrating actions into coherent strategies for sustainability

•Innovating and thinking out of the box

•Showing significant leadership and credibility in the local context

As Earth Hour City Challenge went international, WWF realized it needed a strategic service provider to:

•Maintain the quality of the evaluation process and methodology.

•Deliver analytics input on the carbon reporting platform for cities.

•Provide support in analyzing, evaluating and scoring city sustainability plans and actions.

•Moderate international jury discussions.

With the number of competing countries expected to grow from six to 14 in 2013-2014 (a figure that has proved accurate) seamless planning would be essential. WWF therefore needed to make sure that learning, processes and methodologies from this first step could be reused.

WWF approached Accenture for consulting support based on its extensive and deep engagement with cities across the world on urban sustainability. Accenture’s subject matter advisors in sustainability, strategy, analysis and project management, and existing partnerships with independent nonprofit organizations such as CDP also played a key role in this selection.

Members of Accenture’s global development practice—Accenture Development Partnerships—quickly put together a team and helped the central Earth Hour City Challenge team in Sweden shape a three-phase process, which ran from March 2012 to the announcement of the Global Earth Hour Capital in March 2013.

In phases one and three, Accenture provided subject matter advisor support in project management, analytics, sustainability and intelligent

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cities to help WWF ensure quality and analytical rigor, and use design processes and tools that could be replicated across cities.

In phase two, Accenture engaged a team with in-depth analytical knowledge to review and analyze more than 1,000 unique action plans submitted by 66 cities from the six countries. The team designed a custom analytical model to assess, compare and score the sustainability performance in all sectors including transportation, energy, buildings and waste management.

High Performance DeliveredTo track data provided by countries, WWF decided to use the Carbon Cities Climate Registry as the reporting platform. Cities in participating countries could log in to the platform, and upload emissions data and information on commitments, actions and action plans. The reporting platform is managed by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).

By designing a blueprint of the evaluation model—how Accenture thought cities should be evaluated—before having seen the data, Accenture was able to quickly understand what would be required from the reporting platform. Accenture worked closely with WWF to provide ICLEI inputs for the platform design to help effective and objective analysis of the data.

The global campaign meant that cities in developed and emerging economies would be compared with each other. Accenture collaborated with WWF to develop an approach where the local context was assessed and taken into account in the evaluation using information such as the gross domestic product of a country, national level support to cities and the legislative framework of different countries.

Together with WWF and ICLEI, Accenture also generated a local context document for each country explaining key variables such as financial resources and the political mandates of various city governments. This was of particular importance in countries where the national and state contexts differ greatly on the sustainability agenda. In addition, Accenture analyzed more than 1,000 unique actions—renewable energy production, green building incentives, electric vehicle infrastructure, mobility plans, sustainable food systems and green growth programs—to identify and highlight some of the most innovative sustainability actions taken by cities around the world. WWF was able to effectively leverage this analysis in its communication with cities, citizens and media.

The Earth Hour City Challenge campaign has positioned WWF as a leader in urban sustainable development, not only among city officials, but also citizens and important organizations such as CDP, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, ICLEI and the Mexico City Pact.

By working with Accenture to develop a custom evaluation approach and model, WWF impressed key experts in the field who expressed interest in the innovative approach to assessing, scoring and comparing cities with very different starting positions, something that had been done rarely, if ever, before.

Accenture’s data-driven approach also helped WWF to present findings and conclusions on urban sustainability plans in a more quantitative way than is usual with sustainability reports, which lent credibility to its findings on sustainability.

“Through the Earth Hour City Challenge, Accenture had the opportunity to analyze more than 1,000 unique actions on urban sustainability and by fact-based comparison provided recommendations and analysis for turning actions into strategies for sustainable urban development. This has been an amazing learning experience over a year for Accenture, WWF and the leading cities that participated,” said the global lead for intelligent cities at Accenture.

Accenture Management Consulting in ActionAccenture and its international development practice—Accenture Development Partnerships—developed innovative custom evaluation processes and tools for quantitative scoring of urban sustainability plans and actions. It also developed methodologies to “level the playing field” and compare the performance of cities on a complex issue—sustainability.

Accenture also proposed a test run for the data submitted by cities halfway into the reporting period. This helped the team to adjust the evaluation model before the closing of the carbon reporting platform and come up with better ideas for city reporting.

Subject matter advisors and assets from Accenture Sustainability Services Intelligent Cities were also engaged for this project, and they contributed enormously to its success.

With the help of Accenture and Accenture Development Partnerships, WWF can continue to expand its Earth Hour initiatives to help safeguard the natural world and people live more sustainably.

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 275,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$28.6 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2013. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

About Accenture Sustainability Services

Accenture Sustainability Services helps organizations achieve substantial improvement in performance and value for their stakeholders. We help clients leverage their assets and capabilities to drive innovation and profitable growth, while striving for a positive economic, environmental and social impact. We work with clients across industries and geographies to integrate sustainability approaches into their business strategies, operating models and critical processes.

Our holistic approach encompasses strategy, design and execution to increase revenue, reduce cost, manage risk and enhance brand, reputation and intangible assets. We also help clients develop deep insights into sustainability issues based on our on-going investments in research, including recent studies on consumer expectations and global executive opinion on corporate sustainability and climate change. To find out more about how Accenture can help you meet your sustainability imperatives and chart a course toward high performance, visit www.accenture.com/sustainability. Please also join our on-going conversation about sustainability, business and policy by following us on Twitter @ActSustainably and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/accenturesustainabilityservices.

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