The year that was.. and moving forward
Posted by JLow on Dec 22, 2010
It’s time to look back and see how we have done for 2010.
As with all airlines that serve the European markets, we had started our EU ETS monitoring and reporting activities for the whole of this calendar year. As I type this we are finalising the legal and commercial arrangements with a vendor on the verification process- a process / exercise that is mandatory for the EU ETS compliance.
Disappointingly, our Green Office program has not been running as smoothly as we had hoped. There were stop-start activities- some folks have seriously taken this on board, but most have been busy with the airline’s main focus, sidelining this “secondary activity” to pursue company objectives. We did have one building-wide “spring clean” exercise in our own office, where at least on a local level we are now aware of how much paper products we use and dispose. We are looking at having this as a recurrent activity, as well as for other buildings to do the same.
Our Voluntary Carbon Offset program has gained another corporate client- Khazanah Nasional Berhad, who joined our program with a donation. Thank you ladies for supporting our initiative 
And on this note, we will be having a tree-planting event in January 2011 together with FRIM and the Pahang State Government, to assist in their redevelopment of the Pekan peat swamps.
On November 11th we jointly conducted the Airport and airline on sustainability seminar, where we shared similar and different challenges and approaches in dealing with climate change in the industry, and where we also learned about our guest speaker’s Deep Green program. I would very much like to see this become a series of events, with Malaysia Airports again, on similar topics, but with expanded scope and depth. Aviation and climate change is an interesting combination of topics internationally, even more so for the locals perspective.
Moving forward we will be further pursuing the sustainability agenda for the airline. A lot of 2010 was spent creating the awareness and educating the internal folks and management about this topic and how the airline would benefit with green initiatives. We have been engaging the higher management with this topic, both from a CSR as well as a brand-positioning perspective. 2011 will be the year when this becomes an internal policy, where we will also be pushing for more employee engagement activities to support this slow but steady cultural change.
On that note Malaysia Airlines will also therefore start to formally report on its sustainability efforts. This will include formalising this as a policy, increase internal adoption at the corporate level, conduct activities where we will measure and set targets for our (reduced) carbon footprint, increase our Green Office and 3R programs to include onboard activities, social responsibility activities, and have fun at the same time 
Airline chief warns governments not to squander opportunity for a global sectoral solution for aviation
Posted by JLow on Oct 8, 2009
This week saw the Greener Skies 2009 conference being held in Hong Kong, where airlines came together to discuss the ways forward for the aviation industry in tackling climate change and policies on carbon emissions.
General sentiment is that while on the surface it appears logical that respective nations’ governments should be imposing their own policies on carbon emissions, since the nature and operations of the aviation sector is cross-border, requiring individual airline companies to comply with respective carbon policies of the countries to which they fly creates a whole myriad of complexities in terms of regulations, taxes, and maybe even carbon prices.
Below is the reproduction of a recent article update on the conference from GreenAirOnline. It summarises the united front of the sector in preparation of the Copenhagen summit in Dec 2009, calling for the global policy makers to consider a holistic single approach for the aviation industry, instead of leaving it to individual nations and their respective, and potentially differing, policies for a global sector such as the aviation sector.
John Low
Malaysia Airlines
