Carrying out the carbon footprint of all events, from the smallest to the "monuments
🎬 Interview with Jean-Baptiste Durier, Director ofAmaury Sport Organisation
Can you introduce yourself and your activity?
Jean-Baptiste Durier, CSR Director ofAmaury Sport Organisation. Amaury Sport Organisation is an organiser of sporting events, most of which are open-air and travelling, and organises 80 events every year or so in cycling, with the Tour de France, motor sports, mass events, golf and sailing.
Since when and for which occasions do you carry out carbon assessments?
We started to carry out carbon assessments about ten years ago, on some of our biggest events. We did the first carbon footprint for the Tour de France in 2013, and for the Schneider Electric Paris Marathon in 2016. These were benchmark carbon footprints, which we are now renewing very regularly.
Why did you choose the GCI platform?
We recently, two years ago, chose the GCI platform because we were seduced by this disintermediation and dematerialization of the carbon footprint. The fact that it works differently from what we used to do before, i.e. with specialized companies, with consultants, etc., which were rather cumbersome processes that mobilized both these consultants and our teams and made things expensive.
This did not allow us to develop many carbon assessments, whereas with the GCI solution, which is really very simple and very quick to implement, we have extremely accessible costs and this allows us to develop these carbon assessments also on our smaller events, and to really start this carbon accounting process is obviously of reduction and then compensation associated with all our events and not only on what we call our monuments.
What would you say to an entrepreneur to convince him or her to do a carbon assessment of their business?
If I had to convince someone, an entrepreneur in this case, to carry out a carbon assessment, I would just say that it is fundamental and that today it is very good to want to do CSR but it is difficult to do so without objectifying things and to carry out a carbon assessment is simply to have, in the same way as we have financial accounting, a carbon accounting that allows us to better understand our impacts, and then obviously to be much more effective in reducing them.
In my opinion, it is just as important today to have an extra-financial performance in addition to the financial performance, and this is important not only for the earth and for the climate, but it will also become very important tomorrow for business, quite simply.
