You are committed to reducing your organizational Carbon Footprint, but not sure where to start?
With a quick Google research one can find multitude of suggestions: using recycled paper, replace singe use plastics with bio-degradable solutions, use more environmentally friendly transport options such as a work bicycle, buses, car sharing etc., reduce air travel to a minimum and trace & reduce emissions coming from your supply chains. But still, where to start and what actions should be given a priority?
Here are few steps, that could provide a direction:
3 steps on the way to Carbon Neutrality
1. Measurement
2. Avoidance & Reduction
3. Compensation/offsetting
1. Measurement
Before starting with any activities it is important to understand, where major sources of the company emissions are located. This could be done through Carbon Emissions assessment.
As outlined by Greenhouse Gas Protocol, there are 3 scopes/groups of emissions.
First Scope are direct emissions from the sources, that belong or controlled by your company. In other words, these are emissions, that directly result from your company activities/your facilities or vehicles emissions. These emissions could be heating, cooling or emissions from the vehicles owned by the company.
Second Scope are the emissions from purchased energy for powering your facilities or electric vehicles,purchased heating or cooling. This Scope contains indirect emissions resulting from purchasing energy from an external provider.
Third scope is the more complicated to measure and include indirect emissions happening in your supply chain. These could be your air travel, land travel (using not owned by the company means such as train, buses, taxi, hire cars & trucks etc.), hotel stay, employee commute, generated waste as well as purchased services etc. Greenhouse Gas Protocol identifies 15 categories of emissions in Scope 3. Take a look at this visualization of 3 scopes provided by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol:
2. Avoidance & Reduction
Once major emission sources were identified, one will be able to see where majority of avoiding and reduction efforts should be put. Lets say, that majority of your emissions coming from air travel, purchased electricity or from procurement of raw materials.
First step here would be to gather “low hanging fruits” and avoid emissions.
On this stage organization should consider creating Carbon Reduction Plan, where you can agree, which types of emissions should you target first, second etc. and what activities avoidance and reduction should focus on.
Avoidance could be done through for example, relying more on digital communication and cutting down air travel, if not possible, combining several destinations/meetings during one trip. This could also be installing solar systems or solar pump to reduce need to purchase electricity or heat. One could also look for more environmentally friendly replacement to currently used materials (re-using/using recycled materials). See few innovative examples featured in ArchDaily.
Once emissions are avoided as much as possible, one should look at organizational adjustments and restructuring in order to reduce the emissions. There are multiple options for this such as providing possibility of mobile working to your employees, re-organizing your supply chain and sourcing locally. However, solutions should come from analysis of your emissions assessments and challenges of your specific sector.
3. Compensation/offsetting
Once emissions were reduced as much as possible through your avoidance and reduction, you will find, that some emissions are still remained and difficult to avoid.
Here you can still reach Carbon Neutrality by getting some help from the third parties:
a. This could be done through direct activities of organization or direct activities of third party (for example, reforestation and long-term forest protection on the company behalf)
b. Or you could purchase Carbon Credits from offsets providers such as GoldStandard, Plan Vivo or Verra. One Carbon credit is equal to 1 ton of CO2.
Carbon Credits are different in quality, criteria and attributed price, varying from few cents to over 100 EUR for more complex Carbon removal projects using tech or having additional benefits (for example, improved community livelihoods etc.).
Here once more an overview how the major Carbon Neutrality steps could be operationalized in your company
1. Organisational awareness
informing your employees about Carbon Neutrality aspirations of your company and providing information on what it is and what would be the internal process
2. Create responsible body (Climate Change Committee or Working group)
This group should have mandate and be able to draft and implement your Emissions Reduction Action Plan
3. Measure Emissions according to 3 GHG scopes
This could be done by your responsible body using one of the existing calculators or you could get support of a consultant.
4. Create & Implement Action Plan for Emissions Reduction
5. Compensation /offsetting
a. Activities on behalf of company by third party (such as reforestation)
b. Purchase of Carbon Credits
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