Our carbon footprint is GROWING - we're OK with that!

Our carbon footprint is growing. It has increased for the past 2 years and we reckon it will continue to grow. Even though we're a carbon consultancy, we are OK with this. Let us explain.

The foundation - a fundamentally low carbon business

As a company that measures the carbon footprint of others, we take our own carbon footprint very seriously.

We have designed our business and operations in a way that minimises our emissions:

• We are a remote business, with staff working from home and the vast majority of client services delivered online.

• All staff members are on renewable electricity tariffs at home.

• We commute to a co-working space one day per week, either on foot, by bike or by train.

• Business travel is kept to a minimum. We have implemented a business travel policy to ensure that travel only occurs when absolutely necessary, and that cars are used only when public transport is not a viable option. Flying on business is not permitted.

• We have adopted an environmentally preferable purchasing policy.

• Our software platform and website use efficient, renewable-powered hosting services.

This means we have a small carbon footprint. Here are the numbers for 24/25 in tonnes of CO2e:

• Scope 1 - 0
• Scope 2 - 0
• Scope 3 - 11.64

Since there are no company-owned buildings or vehicles, we have no Scope 1 and 2 emissions.

The main sources of emissions in Scope 3 were:

1. Purchased goods and services: 7.84 tCO₂e

   • The largest source of emissions in this category stems from the running and ongoing development of the Green Business Portal, our bespoke software platform.

   • Other emissions are associated with marketing, our virtual assistant, accountant, insurance and bank fees.

2. Employee teleworking (homeworking!): 1.36 tCO₂e

3. Capital goods (IT equipment in our case): 2.08 tCO₂e

4. Business travel: 0.35 tCO₂e

The challenge of carbon reporting for low carbon businesses

Having a low-carbon business is really important to us and will always remain so. However, when it comes to carbon reporting, it can cause problems.

When your business already operates in a fundamentally low carbon way AND it is growing, that growth almost inevitably leads to a growth in emissions. Our emissions have increased by 320% from our 2022/23 baseline because our staff team grew from 1 to 3 people, and we invested heavily in software development (paying others to do work on your behalf is part of your business footprint).

We do continue to take steps to further reduce our emissions. For example, we have recently had our website redesigned to take its carbon rating from an F to an A.

However, as we continue to grow our impact, our emissions will also grow. We're not actively seeking to grow our carbon but we are seeking to grow our business and our impact. When we do that, growth in carbon is inevitable and, as a business committed to authenticity and truth-telling, we must be honest about this.

Hence this announcement.

Our carbon target

We're not actively targeting a growth in our footprint. We're targeting a limit in the growth of our carbon footprint, but it is growth nonetheless.

How can we justify this and still claim to be concerned about carbon?

The bottom line is that if we want to continue to grow our impact, we can't do that without growing our footprint. But we will be failing in our jobs if the growth in our business and our carbon footprint does not result in carbon reductions being achieved by our clients. Our carbon goes up, 'societal carbon' goes down. That's the plan.

The projections behind the target

In 2024, we set the following year-on-year growth rates for our absolute carbon footprint, taking account of the ongoing decarbonisation of electricity and supply chains, plus the opportunities we have to make incremental improvements to our practice:

• 2024/25 - +60% from previous year

• 2025/26 - +40% from previous year

• 2026/27 - +20% from previous year

As you can see from the chart below, however, we overshot this in 2024/25, largely because we invested more in business development than we planned.

Good for our business and for extending our impact, not so good for our business carbon footprint.

What about carbon intensity?

For those of you with experience of carbon footprints, we can already hear you asking - what about carbon intensity?

When we work with our clients, even when absolute emissions will grow, we encourage them to avoid increases in carbon intensity, i.e. their footprint per £m turnover.

In our case, even that is a challenge. This is for two main reasons:

• Whilst we will aim to keep our workforce local, it is unlikely we will be able to recruit solely from Kendal (our 'base'). That means extra emissions from travel on our weekly co-working day.

• More fundamentally, as a new-ish business we are investing a growing percentage of our income in the development of the business - in software, systems, marketing etc.

The result is that our footprint has grown faster than our turnover up to now and we predict that this trend will continue for the next two years, before starting to decline from 2026/27 onwards as the levels of investment needed in internal systems begins to tail off (in percentage terms at least).

As you can see from the chart above, in 2024/25, intensity grew even more than anticipated, driven by higher than planned investment in our systems.

And the long-term?

We have not set any long-term targets beyond this. We do not have a long-term business plan beyond this so we cannot confidently predict what our business will look like in the long-term. A long-term carbon target would therefore represent levels of speculation which we are currently not comfortable with, and we do not think it would add further value to our decarbonisation efforts (we're fortunate to be able to make that choice!).

We encourage our clients to keep their carbon targets under review and we will do the same. As our business evolves, as our business plans evolve, as we gather more data from our suppliers and as new opportunities for carbon reduction emerge, we will update our targets, increasing ambition wherever possible.

Our contribution model

We do not believe in the concept of carbon offsetting (for reasons that require a separate article). However, as we continue to grow our carbon footprint, we will also continue to invest in projects which result in carbon reductions and which improve resilience to climate breakdown - our 2%+ commitment.

Honest carbon reporting (stories)

That's our carbon story. As with most honest carbon stories, it's far from simple.

It is nuanced and challenging.

It can't be summed up by any of the current plethora of carbon-related labels.

It requires thinking about the bigger picture, beyond the boundaries of our own business footprint.

It requires thinking about societal Net Zero, as much as organisational Net Zero.

It's our honest story.

We are proud of it and we will continue to tell it.

If you're interested in understanding and reporting your carbon story in a similarly honest fashion, get in touch.