10 Steps to Becoming a Carbon Neutral Business

Page 6 STEP 01: DEFINE YOUR AMBITION / Setting the right timeline Setting a timeline for your pledge is inherently connected to your emissions boundary and your available resources. If you set a deadline for your program far into the future, you might be able to include more emissions in your carbon neutrality program than you would if pledging to go carbon neutral within a few years, simply because you have more time to identify and collect your data. You will also have more time to implement larger scale programs that reduce your biggest emission sources internally rather than having to opt for the quicker method of offsetting them. From a budgeting perspective, the costs of going carbon neutral can be spread over multiple years. The downside of a longer timeline is the challenge of keeping your carbon neutrality pledge on the agenda of your organization and maintain the priority focus. The advantage of setting a shorter timeline of one to two years is that you create a sense of urgency to start delivering the program right away as you simply have less time to meet your target. You may also have to compromise on the extent of your strategy. You should ideally always focus on reducing your emissions internally before you start to offset. In terms of climate impact, actually reducing your immediate carbon footprint is considered a better option than compensating via offsets. Realizing significant reductions in your footprint, however, can take time and sometimes requires considerable investments whereas offsetting can be done immediately. You should expect to look at a combination of both reductions and offsetting as part of your strategy, with various emphasis depending on whether you have decided on a shorter or longer timeline. LM WIND POWER’S APPROACH TO SETTING A TIMELINE At LM Wind Power, we opted for a deadline that was about two years away from our announcement to go carbon neutral. We were convinced that if we were going to be successful, we had to act fast and build on the immediate momentum. The short timeline had an impact on the level of internal reductions we were able to achieve before the deadline. We wanted to reduce as much as possible but had to settle for an approximate four percent carbon footprint reduction in the first year through a focused energy efficiency drive. These reductions were worth hundreds of thousands in (USD) savings and proved to everyone from top to bottom in the organization that our sustainability ambitions were driving hardcore business improvements. In this way, the savings enabled us to pursue the rest of our program components which, for a large part, focused on purchasing Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) to achieve a green electricity supply and acquiring carbon credits to offset our emissions.