This year we are supporting a number of schemes, and offsetting our office's footprint of 82 tonnes of carbon

06.05.2020

This week we announce that we have, for the third year in a row offset our full business footprint. Though these are difficult times, we feel this is the time to stand by our principles and a better vision for the future. As members of the United Nations Climate Neutral Now scheme, and alongside our World Green Building Council Net Zero Carbon Buildings pledge, we have been voting in the office to select the offset schemes..

Offsetting is controversial, and for a long time we were firmly against the principle as it is often used as a fig-leaf to hide business as usual. The UN pledge however requires measurement (and public reporting) of emissions, reduction of emissions and then only as a last resort, their offsetting.

This year we are supporting a number of schemes, and offsetting 82 tonnes of carbon (that’s our full office footprint, including scope 1,2 and 3 emissions) minus the renewable electricity that supplies all of our offices. We do procure 100% biogas for our London studio and our Edinburgh office is all-electric, but feel like until we electrify all our offices we should also offset any direct emissions on site.

100% of our offset emissions are done via schemes that are both certified by the Gold Standard, and are part of the Clean Development Mechanism, which means that we can have the most certainty over the emissions that are avoided, and at the same time support a wide range of the UN Sustainable Development Goals around the world.

If you want to find out more about how offsetting works, and how to select offsets then you can find out more in our latest Sustainable News Bites here.

Oliver Boaler
Architect