It doesn't take much to be CO2 neutral

April 6, 2020 — Johannes Sattler

What is our obligation as an organisation when it comes to environmental protection?

We asked ourselves this question at the beginning of 2019 at our yearly get-together. Greta Thunberg was more and more present in the media, it was more than clear that not much could be expected from Trump on this subject, diesel scandals with a lack of explanation and lack of consequences and ultimately also far too little commitment from the German government moved many people in Germany and worldwide.

One of our favourite models in coaching sessions and workshops is the circle model, which helps people to complain less about the things that cannot be changed. Instead, it is much more productive to take care of the things you can influence or even control. Since the influence of a relatively small network of consultants on Trump and Merkel is likely to be rather small, it was clear: time to sweep outside our own front door and look at our own ecological footprint - not entirely unimportant in a consultancy that spends a lot of time in planes, trains, cars or hotels and sometimes treats itself to a coffee to go.

At our get-together, it was obvious that we all wanted to take on our responsibility. Many of us already did so privately by donating to organizations like Greenpeace, participating in climate demos, supporting signature campaigns, living (or at least trying to live) plastic-free, giving up private driving, and so on.

With Atmosfair we found a good partner who calculated the CO2 emissions we produced based on our information about usage of planes, trains, cars and taxis as well as hotel stays. We compiled our data retrospectively for a complete year. We agreed to declare all business trips - even if one or the other of us probably cursed it in between. For private trips, too, there was the option to get an evaluation in order to compensate privately for these later. About half of the network members made use of the private option.

In the end a surprisingly small amount nearly 700€ came out. We should pay this amount to compensate for the CO2 produced by us. Atmosfair invests the payments in worldwide projects that ensure a reduction of the corresponding amount of CO2 (e.g. building efficient stoves in Rwanda, biogas plants in Nepal, environmental education etc.). 700€ for a whole year's professional travel seemed far too little to us, but the data was correct. To be sure that we did not compensate too little and to take into account all the things that were not included in the calculation (e.g. heating costs in the office, energy consumption for laptops and printers, paper for printing workshop documents etc.) we decided to double the amount. Private travel was additionally compensated privately.

Does this mean that we now are a climate-neutral consultancy? By definition probably yes. Our feeling was unanimous that this was still too little. We are working on it!

If this topic also moves you and you want to learn more, have a look at Atmosfair!