Sustainable Organisations
While your housing is the biggest impact on your organisation’s carbon footprint, other aspects of your operation contribute too, and you can reduce this impact fairly easily. Here are some things for you to think about.
There is a growing consensus that climate issues are a key governance issue for corporations. Since 2018 the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) which regulates listed companies has required companies to report on climate risks and opportunities as part of their overall risk reporting.
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Naturally the key beginning point in reducing your impact is working out what it is. You could do this yourself, working out the methodology from scratch, and the research involved would certainly help you learn about your impacts. It’s also not that hard to do, at least for your main emissions sources. However, there are some handy tools you can use to help with this task – some are free, some you have to pay for.
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Electricity use in your office is likely to be your biggest operational emitter. In calculating your footprint this is the easiest to measure because the information is all in your electricity bill. The means for reducing your emissions from your office are in many ways similar to those for housing – switching to clean energy, and paying attention to your heating and cooling, water heating, lighting and appliances.
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Your second area of impact is in your travel practices. Driving cars in the course of your work (whether you have your own or pay your employees mileage to use theirs), and other forms of travel such as flying if you work across distant locations, is a source of emissions that can be difficult to cut without impairing your operations. Here are some things to consider.
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A final thing you can do to lower your climate impact is to offset your emissions. Offsetting is essentially a way of trying to make up for the carbon you emit by doing (or funding) something else to remove carbon from the atmosphere or reduce emissions in another part of the system. This is area that has many pitfalls.
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