Get Started
On Your Net Zero Journey
Not sure where to start? Here is a short guide to help you better understand the steps your business will need to take to cut its carbon footprint.
Important climate terms explained
Before beginning you may wish to familiarise yourself with a number of climate terms that you will encounter frequently.
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Greenhouse Gas (GHG): Any gas that absorbs infrared radiation in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases include, but are not limited to carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, sulfur hexafluoride, and water vapour.
Carbon Equivalent (CO2eq): A metric measure used to compare the emissions of the different greenhouse gases (GHG) based upon their global warming potential (GWP) which is used to convert all the different greenhouse gases to a carbon dioxide equivalent. Along with carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels, business are responsible for emitting many of these gasses such as leaks of refrigerant gases from refrigerators or air conditioning, methane from food production and decomposing waste or nitrous oxide from fertilisers. Their effect can range from 25 times to over 3000 times more warming potential than CO2 emissions.
Carbon Footprint: The total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions directly and indirectly caused by individuals, businesses and other organisations. It is calculated by adding up the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from every stage of a product or service's lifetime including its resource extraction, manufacture, use, and its end-of-life.
Net Zero: For businesses, net zero means cutting greenhouse gas emissions to as close to zero as possible, with any remaining emissions offset by CO2 re-absorbed from the atmosphere by forests or other carbon capture methods. These offsets are often purchased as carbon credits.
Measure, understand and manage your carbon footprint
The key to cutting the carbon footprint of your business is to properly measure, understand and manage each of the many contributing sources of your organisation's carbon footprint.
In the following sections we have outlined some of the key actions to take to get started on your net zero journey.
As a member of Techies Go Green you can access our Support Ecosystem with its growing collection of information, webinars and and contributions by other members to help support and guide your climate action plans. Your business can also sign up to to our Charter with its ready to go climate commitments to help get started quickly.
Measure
What gets measured gets managed. Accurately calculating your carbon footprint is a vital step in addressing this challenge. It is recommended that your business audits its direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions in accordance with the accounting standards of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol – Learn More> The Protocol specifies three categories to audit:
Scope 1 – These are the direct greenhouse gas emissions that occur from sources that are owned or controlled by your business. These include the fuels burnt on site and by company owned vehicles. It also includes leaks from gas storage, refrigerant leaks from air conditioning and cold storage facilities, methane emissions from organic waste storage etc.
Scope 2 – These are the indirect emissions caused by purchasing energy from a third party business. These are usually supplied in the form of electricity, heat, cooling, or steam.
Scope 3 – These are all the indirect emissions that occur because of your business activies. but from sources your business does not own or control. These include both upstream and downstream activities including your supply chain. Calculating your scope 3 emissions is difficult so much of Scope 3 emissions are addressed after dealing with Scope 1 and 2 first.
Understand
All too often, businesses make ambitious net zero target commitments before fully understanding the extent and complexity of this undertaking. We recommend that you consider the following actions to set verifiable targets and to get buy-in from your employees and management.
Interpret carbon footprint audit results to provide insights and technical information on the sources, quantity and nature of your greenhouse gas emissions. Consider getting an external expert consultant to better interpret this information.
Climate Action Plan: Develop a practical and sustainable climate action plan through informed collaboration with all the relevant stakeholders in your business and with external consultants with greenhouse gas emissions management expertise.
Education And Training: Provide opportunities for your staff to receive education and training on best practices to to better understand your climate action goals and to enable staff to adopt these practices at work and in their personal lives.
Manage
Empower your managers to make informed decisions and work with outside consultants and regulators. Appoint an overall climate champion to take long term responsibility for implementing your company’s climate action plans and achieving targets.
Get everyone involved: It is vital to get the necessary buy-in from everyone in the business at all levels. Through education, participation and reward you can build a sustainable low carbon culture in the every day operation of your business.
Reach out for guidance on regulations compliance and implement ongoing governance procedures. Larger businesses will need to comply with regulations such as UK SECR & EU Taxonomy, NFRD/CSRD measurement and reporting. Smaller businesses will increasingly face requests for proof of their climate action management to avoid getting locked out of the supply chains of their larger customers.
Monitor the implementation of our climate action plan and measure achievements against science based criteria. Adjust our plans where necessary and report progress regularly.
We help our members get started and implement their climate action goals
We know that developing and implementing a strategy to cut your company’s carbon footprint can be a convoluted and off-putting process.
To help our Techies Go Green members, we have developed a three part support ecosystem to help members at all stages of their journey, from companies just starting out to those organisations that are well under way.
We will shortly launch our Climate Action Charter to provide our signatory members with a roadmap for responsible and sustainable decision-making. We will have a support guide to help get you started quickly.
Our Knowledge Exchange is an online repository of expert articles, technical papers and webinars to help our members make more informed decisions.
Visit Our Knowledge Exchange >
To help our members plan & implement changes to their operations, we will shortly launch a Partner Network Directory with a choice of sustainability product & service providers.
