Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Carbon Footprint?
A carbon footprint refers to the total estimated emissions of carbon dioxide and other green house gases produced by an entity (be it a person, an activity, a service or a product) over a specific period of time. For e.g. the carbon footprint of a business' annual operations or the carbon footprint of a consumer retail product.
What is a Carbon Audit?
A means of measuring and recording the total carbon dioxide emissions of a business or individual. Takes into account direct and indirect emissions.
What is a Carbon Strategy?
A carbon strategy is a long term action plan to manage and reduce carbon emissions. A carbon strategy is already compulsory in certain industries e.g. steel and car manufacturers.
Why measure Carbon footprint?
Climate change is being caused by green house gases; carbon dioxide accounts for 85% of all green house gases. Measuring your carbon footprint will indicate which aspects of your business' activities produce the greatest green house gas emissions. This will enable the development of an effective emissions reduction plan. Identifying areas of high carbon emissions will highlight potential savings in operational costs.
Why Implement a Carbon Strategy?
An effectively managed Carbon Strategy will result in lower carbon emissions for your business, and so contribute to helping reduce climate change. Aside from reductions in operational costs, also consider corporate social responsibilities, employee and customer expectations and brand value. See Benefits for Businesses.
Is Carbon Management and Carbon Offsetting Expensive?
Implementing a carbon strategy need not be expensive. Managing carbon emissions will result in cuts in your energy consumption and transport bill amongst others, and will pay for itself in a short amount of time. With increasing government regulation and consumer and investor pressures to cut carbon emissions, not taking any action may cost you even more.
How do you do a Carbon Audit?
A Carbon Analyst calculates the total carbon emissions of your business, taking into consideration numerous factors relating to energy usage, waste, fuel use etc. See our Carbon Strategy for further information.
What is a Carbon Offset?A “carbon offset” is an act through an organisation's specific projects to remove carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, to compensate for the same amount of green house gases that some one or some thing has added to the atmosphere.
How are Carbon Offset’s measured?
Carbon offsets are typically measured in tons of CO2-equivalents (or 'CO2e') and can be bought and sold through a number of international brokers, online retailers, and trading platforms.
Which activities generate Carbon Offsets?
Many types of activities generate carbon offsets, for example: Renewable energy such as a wind farm, installations of solar, small hydro, geothermal, and biomass energy can all create carbon offsets by displacing fossil fuels. Other types of offsets include: methane capture from landfills or livestock, destruction of potent greenhouse gases such as halocarbons, and carbon sequestration projects (through reforestation, or agriculture) that absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
What issues need to be considered when choosing an Offset?
The project type needs to be considered, for example, projects involving the destruction of halocarbon gases such as HFC-23 have been strongly criticised, including the fact that they actually result in a perverse incentive (due to the sheer volume of offsets - and profits - that they generate) for more of the ozone-depleting gas to be created.
Another important issue to consider when purchasing offsets is 'additionalilty’'width' is a duplicate attribute name. Line 1, position 37.. An offset project is considered ‘additional’ if it isn't business as usual. Typically this means that the project wouldn't have happened without the extra funding from the sale of offsets. Additionality is extremely important, as the entire concept of offsetting - i.e. purchasing greenhouse gas reduction credits from a project elsewhere to neutralize one's own emissions - is based on the premise that those reductions wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Offsets also need to be 'real', that is, they need to contribute in providing a long term solution to global warming.
The offsets need to be
What indicates a high quality offset provider?
A high quality offset provider is indicated by, for example, the provider uses a publicly accessible registry to track the offsets they have sold, or has methods in place to ensure that the offsets will only be sold to one buyer.
Also that they are validated and verified by reputable third-parties such as Gold Standard, Plan Vivo, The Rainforest Alliance or The American Carbon Registry.
An important indicator of a quality offset provider is the company’s dedication to the environment. A good company should be involved in educating consumers about climate change and in increasing awareness of global warming and not solely focused on selling carbon offsets.
What is Carbon Neutral?'width' is a duplicate attribute name. Line 1, position 37.
Carbon Neutral refers to having an overall zero carbon footprint. This is usually achieved by calculating your total carbon emissions, reducing them where possible and balancing (neutralising) your remaining emissions with the purchase of carbon offsets.
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