Environmental Policy

Open Geospatial Consortium Environmental Policy

This policy applies to all OGC subsidiaries, its employees, associates, secondees, and third parties who undertake activity for and on behalf of OGC. It applies to the goods and services we procure, our direct operations, and the services we provide to our customers.

Purpose

To provide an effective framework for realizing OGC’s commitment to protecting and where possible, enhancing the environment by reducing the Organization’s environmental impacts, preventing pollution, mitigating and adapting to climate change and a low carbon future. Responsibilities

All employees including associates, secondees, and third parties are responsible for ensuring that this Policy is adhered to. In addition, those employees who procure goods and services should follow OGC’s Procurement Policy including the requirement to include social value considerations, which include environmental issues.

Policy

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a not-for-profit (501C (6)) international membership organization of more than 500 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities with a mission to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. OGC runs a standard development process driven by its members and engineering development projects funded and executed by members.

With about 30 employees located around the world, we recognize that our activities impact the environment in a number of ways, principally through our use of:

• Energy and water in the buildings we occupy, 
• Business travel,
• Information Communication Technology hardware (ICT), and
• Paper.

In recognizing this, OGC is committed to protecting the environment and continually improving its environmental performance by:

• ensuring compliance with all relevant legislation and standards and the expectations of our customers and other key stakeholders;
• ensuring our systems and procedures prevent pollution;
• ensuring our suppliers are able and are encouraged to support our environmental commitments; and
• ensuring we continually review how we can make improvements to our environmental performance.

Specifically, we will:

• reduce energy and water consumption across our operations through staff awareness and improved controls,
• opt for renewable and sustainable energy sources wherever possible,
• opt for carbon offset initiatives to neutralize the carbon footprint of our own activities by suitable actions,
• reduce business travel miles through better journey planning and the use of virtual
• meeting platforms,
• reduce paper consumption through staff awareness and increased use of electronic
• communication and data storage, and
• rationalize our use of ICT hardware and ensure that all waste electrical and electronic equipment is reused or recycled where possible.

To realize our environmental objectives, OGC both recognizes the need for and is committed to communicating our environmental objectives to our suppliers, employees, customers, and wider stakeholders. This will be achieved via our procurement processes and our existing communication channels to employees including business plans, intranet, purchase order reviews, team briefings, and the staff introduction processes.

Responsibility

This policy and the actions arising from it will be annually reviewed as part of the business planning process which involves OGCs senior leadership and management teams

Approved on behalf of the Open Geospatial Consortium Inc. and all Subsidiaries,

Nadine Alameh, PhD
Chief Executive Officer