Company
Bpifrance
Headcount
~2,500 employees
Website
Sector
Project type
Climate strategy
Managers
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In brief
- Bpifrance is a French public investment bank whose account managers provide local support to businesses with their financing needs.
- Carbon Cutter has created sector-specific resources for France 2030 assessors to give them the tools they need to analyse the environmental impact of projects.
- 28 educational kits produced for a variety of sectors.
- 8 training sessions and 36 assessors support sessions carried out to help them get to grips with the educational kits.
Bpifrance, the government operator for the France 2030 plan
Bpifrance is a French public investment bank whose objective is to finance and develop businesses throughout France.
Bpifrance’s Industrial Sectors Division is one of four government operators responsible for calls for projects under the France 2030 investment plan.
The initial challenge
Each France 2030 application must include environmental information, in particular arguments proving that the project does not cause significant harm to the environment (application of the ‘DNSH’ principle – ‘Do No Significant Harm’). Bpifrance assessors must then evaluate these arguments and issue an opinion on the environmental impact of the project.
This task requires knowledge of the environmental issues at stake in a large number of very diverse sectors (health, digital, space, nuclear, chemicals, etc.). In this context, Bpifrance assessors needed technical support to provide an objective opinion on the arguments put forward by the companies analysed.
The completed project
The project included two major stages:
Designing educational kits
We began by analysing a large number of previously reviewed applications and by consulting with assessors and government officials responsible for monitoring, with the aim of defining, together with each of the four teams of assessors (health, digital, industry, and eco-technologies):
- a list of 28 topics representative of calls for projects;
- an educational kit format designed to help assessors identify the main environmental impacts and the levers for limiting these impacts.
The Carbon Cutter team then analysed the environmental issues associated with the 28 themes, proposing, for example, maps of the impacts identified along the value chain.
These kits also list examples of actions that can be implemented by companies, examples of analyses and sector-specific focuses on certain specific points (e.g. electronic equipment components).
Training and support for case assessors on initial analyses
Each team attended training sessions and learned how to use the teaching kits. This training enabled them to understand the main environmental issues in the sector in which they work on a daily basis (health, digital technology, industry or eco-technologies) and to grasp the method of case analysis recommended by Carbon Cutter.
This method is based on comparing the company’s activity with the reference scenario (what solution is currently used?) and the risks and impacts associated with this activity.
Following this training session, each assessors was accompanied by a Carbon Cutter consultant on one of their cases in order to experiment with the use of the kits on a real case. Finally, help sheets were written for project leaders to help them better understand the expectations of the exercise.
