🔎 What’s going on?
Danish roof and window manufacturer, Velux Group has announced they will become lifetime carbon neutral by 2041, their 100-year anniversary.
🌳 Awesome, what does it mean?
Velux Group is one of the first companies in the construction industry to take responsibility for past, current and future emissions. This is a game-changer.
Let’s first define what being carbon neutral means before diving into lifetime carbon neutral. A company claiming to be carbon neutral simply means that they have measured all of their carbon emissions that they have emitted and have removed the same amount through carbon offsets and/or other carbon removal projects. The term carbon neutral usually gets a bad rep in the sustainability circles but it can be a very useful tool if full transparency of measurement and methodology exists.
Lifetime carbon-neutral essentially goes one step further to estimate or measure historical emissions a company has emitted from when the company was founded and then goes onto removing the same amount of carbon emissions from the atmosphere. No standard methodology currently exists for calculating historical emissions. But that didn’t stop Velux Group, instead, they partnered with World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Carbon Trust to review and verify their unique methodology.
Velux Group has also announced a 20-year partnership with WWF to offset their historical carbon emissions (estimated at 5.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide) with global afforestation and reforestation projects. The first two forest projects will be in Uganda and Myanmar focusing on restoring degraded forests and enhancing biodiversity working closely with local communities.
❓ Why should I care?
The majority of companies are now starting to measure their current year-on-year carbon emissions and set science-based targets for future reductions. However, not many companies estimate or even acknowledge their historical carbon emissions. According to the Carbon Disclosure Project’s (CDP) Carbon Majors report (2017), just 100 companies were responsible for over 70% of global industrial carbon emissions since 1988. Even more startlingly, since 1988, over half of global industrial carbon emissions can be traced to just 25 corporate and state fossil fuels producers. 1988 also happens to be the year that ‘human-induced carbon emissions’ was officially recognised by the newly formed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
🚦 Where do we need to be?
For starters, the 100 fossil fuel companies (corporate and state-owned) take responsibility for their historical emissions by making commitments on lifetime carbon emissions that would be a massive step in the right direction. Additionally, where possible every company should aim to go ‘beyond net-zero carbon emissions’.
👤 What can I do about it?
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- You can’t manage what you don’t measure so the first action plan for any company is to measure your carbon footprint. Follow the Greenhouse Gas Protocol corporate standard and ensure it includes your supply chain, past, current and future carbon emissions.
- Be fully transparent (i.e. make it publicly available) about estimated and measured emissions, along with the methodology used.
- Get your measurement verified by an independent third party such as Carbon Trust.
- Set Science-Based Targets to reduce your companies carbon emissions in line with climate science.
- Most importantly, start taking measures to both reduce and remove current and future carbon emissions.
Related: Stripe makes first carbon negative purchases