Questions & Answers
from Becoming Carbon Neutral web workshop
Tuesday 28th April saw us run a very exciting interactive online workshop Becoming Carbon Neutral. The event, led by Simon Forsyth, was attended by a very engaged group of participants from diverse perspectives interested in carbon neutrality. During the event, participants had some questions and because there was so many, a few went unanswered…find them below!
How do you calculate your business carbon footprint if you work from home?
Unless you have separate utilities meters for your office supply, it's difficult to separate work-related use of electricity, water, and gas from your domestic consumption. The best way to do it is probably to estimate the percentage of each used for business activity - only a rough indication, but you can make a reasonable quantification based on the your work equipment and behaviour then compare it to the total consumption shown on your bills to get the percentage. That's probably the best that’s possible.
With transport, it's a question of being disciplined enough to log litres purchased and miles travelled when you buy fuel. I scribble mileage and litres onto each petrol receipt then file it in my wallet - the filling-station attendants must think: “It’s that an obsessional biker again”.
If you use the same vehicle for business and domestic travel (which you almost inevitably will) then you also need to track whether a tankful is predominantly for business or for domestic use. I just keep a simple spreadsheet and transpose the info-scribbles plus date when the stack of receipts makes my wallet look lumpy – then, come end of March, I have total mileage and litre-age for the year (for both bikes). Plus a log of their fuel-efficiency.
Of course, if you’re green-minded enough to be using an electric vehicle then you ideally need to be tracking kilowatt hours consumed charging it rather than litres put into it, and it's really a question of whether you have a separate meter on your home charging point.
Solid waste … well you’re an illustrator not a cottage industrialist, so unless you’re a rabid printer of drafts, copies, and emails you probably produce very little. I’d estimate a few percent of your domestic waste. Do you actually track your types and quantities of domestic waste? Log those waste types, count the containers each month. The dataCollector actually provides you with a neat way to do this…
As for purchased stuff, that takes us deep into Scope 3, embodied carbon in goods and services, quietly ignored by most when they do their footprints. If you want to know about that one, book onto to the Future Economy Network event on 11th June: Coping with Carbon: What about Scope 3?
Will the dataCollator acknowledge renewable energy tariffs that already include offsets? Or utilities where the organisation is doing neutrality (e.g. GENeco)?
Well this is about renewables as much as about offsets, even if you’re on a standard tariff.
Electricity supplied through the UK National Grid is on average now around 30-40% renewable, originating from solar and wind generation. This proportion has been rising rapidly over the last decade and continues to rise – so averaged across the grid, the amount of greenhouse gas emitted per kWh generated has fallen. This means that the carbon conversion factor for electricity, updated every year, has also fallen. If you’re a business using the same amount of electricity now as you were in 2010, the electricity component of your carbon profile will be considerably smaller now then it was then. Basically we are generating electricity more efficiently thanks to renewables.
Now, the greenhouse gas protocol allows two ways of calculating the carbon conversion factor for electricity – ‘location based’ and ‘market based’. The UK carbon conversion factors for electricity, the ones provided annually by Her Majesty’s Government, are location-based - that is, they give the carbon emissions per kWh averaged across the entire national grid. UK government guidance for calculating carbon emissions from electricity tells you to use the location-based conversion factor - ie the grid average. The UK doesn’t really do ‘market based’. Paradoxically…
This is hard on anyone who pays a premium for 100%-renewable electricity, or who has made a significant capital outlay to put photovoltaic generation on their roof. The argument is that such tariffs and local generation are already being accounted for by reducing the grid average for carbon conversion. But if you're paying for this in real money, you might jolly well expect to see a reduction in your official carbon footprint - especially if you are offsetting your footprint in order to be carbon neutral, because each additional tonne is costing you real money.
So the dataCollator effectively allows for both alternatives - it was the best way I could think of to deal with this little quandary. You tick a box next to the usage table for any electricity meter that it is clocking self-generated kWh, and state what sort of renewable it’s showing - or indeed whether it's just logging power supplied on a 100% renewable tariff. The software is then distinguishing what is zero-carbon and what isn't. Your self-generated electricity is not then contributing to the footprint shown, and nor is any 100%-renewable electricity you’re purchasing at a premium on a green tariff.
However… if it’s a legally-reported footprint, you have to use the standard carbon conversion factor for all electricity drawn from the grid, regardless of how it’s generated. So what I suggest to clients is that they may wish to produce two footprints, an official one following due process for legally mandated carbon reporting, but also a truer one for internal management to use that does actually take account of their local generation and their renewable tariffs. As so often, ‘truth’ rather depends on viewpoint.
Could you give any advice on insetting? How to measure/monitor the impact? Where to start? Best places to get information on this.
Insetting is a good concept but is very little known - we had a small debate in our group about what it meant. In essence it is offsetting within a company's existing supply chain. The people who first developed the idea were large hotel groups, who funded their food suppliers to plant trees on their land in order to offset the hotel group’s footprint. The logic is that this enables better control of offsetting activities, so there’s a higher likelihood that the funds spent can be linked to accurate tonnages offset. Or inset. In some cases, it also helped secure supply by improving the ecological viability of the supplier’s production – shade, water, soil - so it was also wise purchasing spend.
These hotel groups were multinational corporations, so their suppliers’ insetting activity was also international. That doesn’t mean that their carbon sequestration activities are any less effective or accurate, but it does conflict with another emerging requirement among carbon-conscious businesses... Many would prefer to have their offsetting activity take place locally since this would make it more visible. This would also open up a chance to involve staff directly - tree planting is good team building fun and offers very visible, very green social engagement.
All of which raises an obvious question: can a business do local insetting, involving its local suppliers? Well yes. It has been suggested that insetting is just good offsetting - good because the funder has more direct visibility of the activities undertaken at their expense and of the carbon quantities so sequestered. So if you have local suppliers, it’s a perfectly feasible option.
The ‘but’, however, (there’s always a but) is that you as the funder will end up overseeing the process much more directly – very possibly a novel, complex, and demanding task. It will also deepen your engagement with the suppliers involved, which may be a good thing (strategic partnership and all) but needs to be a very conscious business decision.
So, addressing your specific questions, the best place to start and probably also the best place to get information on this is to talk to those organisations who are already exploring the possibility. Personally, I’d start by talking to the Wildlife Trusts (eg. Wiltshire Wildlife Trust) and to organisations like 9 Trees who are trying to make local offsetting/insetting a real possibility for businesses. They understand exactly how to plant so as to enrich local ecosystems. And they’re asking a very good question: why isn’t carbon insetting/offsetting through well-judged planting becoming our new normal…?
You talked about additionality when looking for offsetting projects and that they must be something that wasn’t going to happen unless you funded the action e.g. planting trees. What about investing in organisations that protect current forests from logging, felling etc that reduces the world’s potential to sequester CO2?
Ooh, that’s a good one. In effect you're asking whether money paid for carbon offsetting in order to achieve carbon neutrality could equally well cover campaigning activities to protect woodland. That's really a business decision for the organisation in question - and there's a big but. As soon as any offsetting activities you fund go beyond the procedural, operational detail of compensating for your carbon footprint, they become instantaneously political.
So my recommendation would be that formal business offsetting remain strictly operational in what it funds - and of course carefully follows all the strictures of Gold Standard accountability and validated offset tonnages that we covered earlier. But the personal decision of all involved may well be to fund organizations like Avaaz or FoE or Greenpeace who campaign globally on climate issues. Or indeed organizations who act and campaign more locally. That makes entirely consistent sense, but it’s a personal choice with your private money.
Unless, of course, those running a business choose to make a deliberate management choice to fund campaigning. That might be seen as a dangerously radical step - but a quarter of a century ago, separating and recycling your business waste was seen as pretty radical! Now it is not only normal but legally required and economically rational, with a whole industry transformed and reorganised to support it. Thus ideas evolve and normality changes …
We can only hope that a similar cultural shift occurs around planting trees and recreating habitats – that the dangerously radical becomes the utterly normal, and that not doing it is seen as poor management. In that world, of course, businesses who years before took the step of offsetting by supporting campaigning will no longer be seen as loose cannon but remembered as prescient pioneers …
And, of course, charities are already pioneering an emerging middle ground. The Woodland Trust, who campaign to preserve the UK’s few remaining ancient woodlands, already give supporters the option of offsetting their personal footprint by funding woodland replanting and management. And I know of ongoing deliberations within Wiltshire Wildlife Trust about whether they could offset their own footprint through their routine workaday activities of planting trees and recreating habitats on their own nature reserves.
I’m sure other Wildlife Trusts are musing along similar lines, and I know that Avon Needs Trees have considered whether their local replanting activity could register as offsetting – but all have found that it’s actually complex to establish then administer a formal offsetting scheme. So one might like to ask why that is – what exactly is preventing carbon offsetting through local tree planting from emerging as our new normal…? And where is the boundary between acting and campaigning?
As part of the consultancy service offered through our hub, Future Leap, Simon can provide a clear one-page breakdown of the cost and time undertaking carbon profiling would require. This can help towards convincing the board of the importance of and manageability of embarking carbon reduction. This workshop provided attendees with the opportunity to sample what is required to complete a carbon footprint. Simon offers his consultancy services, on behalf of Future Leap, that can include:
• Carbon neutrality (PAS 2060) • Carbon foot printing (GHG protocol) • Scope 3 supply-chain analysis • Science-Based Targets analysis (SBT) • carbon modelling of products / activities / scenarios • ESOS compliance (Energy Saving Opportunity Scheme) • SECR compliance (Streamlined Energy & Carbon Reporting) • ACA certification (Airport Carbon Accreditation scheme) • ISO 14001 systems / training
Consultancy services are charged at £600 per day.
Access to the dataCollator can be provided for one year for £150 per license.
Contact Simon to discuss your plans and to get a free estimate.