Story at a glance:
- Measuring a workplace’s carbon footprint and investing in decarbonization technologies can help companies have a climate-positive impact.
- This relatively new field encompasses everything from avoidance to removal, from the natural to the engineered.
- Climate-positive efforts can also help support justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion goals.
Every workplace, big or small, sustainability-certified or not, contributes to the greenhouse gases (colloquially referred to as “carbon”) accumulating and lingering in earth’s atmosphere. Considering the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) overwhelming data that the earth is nearing a 2030 tipping point, it’s clear that it’s no longer enough to merely reduce a building’s greenhouse gas emissions. Decades-old carbon won’t naturally dissipate from the atmosphere.
For our collective good, it’s time to go above and beyond avoidance strategies. By measuring a workplace’s carbon footprint and investing in decarbonization technologies (in addition to carbon reduction), companies can achieve measurable climate-positive impact and do their part to help stave-off some of the most horrifying effects of a warming planet.
Measuring Impact
HED’s Chicago office earned LEED Platinum. Photo courtesy of HED
To analyze a company’s impact, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG) is one of the most respected methodologies for calculating a carbon footprint. It focuses on three core components: direct energy use, such as onsite combustion (Scope 1); energy purchase, such as electricity (Scope 2); and supply chain emissions both upstream and downstream, such as from business travel or purchased goods and services (Scope 3).
As architects and engineers it makes sense that we look inward and set an example as we help our clients do the same for their own operations.
As architects and engineers it makes sense that we look inward and set an example as we help our clients do the same for their own operations. As part of the communal efforts agreed upon with our fellow members of the AIA Large Firm Roundtable, HED began our own decarbonization journey in 2023. This started with the analysis and subsequent offset of 2023’s emissions from Scope 1 & 2 plus Scope 3 business travel. For 2024 and beyond, LFRT firms will complete fleshing out our Scope 3 analysis until our entire carbon footprint is measured and offset.
Both challenges and opportunities have come to light as we work through the process. For example, given that many companies lease space in a shared building, calculating Scope 1 and 2 energy use may boil down to estimating a percentage of the landlord’s overall (hopefully metered) consumption. This simple square-footage calculation can result in overestimating a carbon footprint in an efficient space (like HED’s LEED Platinum–certified Chicago office) or underestimating energy use in an older workplace. Further, without a workplace specific sub-meter, companies cannot easily measure, and thus justify, saved energy usage from strategies such as shutting off lights in the middle of the day.
6 Steps to Take to Reduce Energy Use
To reduce energy use and increase accuracy of measuring carbon output, there are some key steps companies can take:
● Look to rent in (or build your own) high-performance buildings.
● Seek core and shell spaces where installation of sub meters will be possible so you can measure your own usage.
● Choose an urban location, where transit is readily available (and offer bike or scooter shares or rentals and carpooling to reduce single-occupancy driving).
● Zone usage and set occupancy controls on lights, computers, and HVAC systems. For example, there’s no need to run a ventilation system in an empty conference room.
● Think about daylighting opportunities. Instead of building cubicle farms that require all day usage of electric lights, create greater access to the free resource of natural light.
● Share the information you accumulate so others can learn from it because we are all in this together.
The more information people have, the more likely they are to act in a sustainable way.
For example, imagine a trade show in a brightly daylight-lit conference hall, where the overhead lights are unnecessarily and unnoticeably turned on. If a simple notice board announced that the cost of those lights was $2 per minute, someone would turn them off, saving the company both money and carbon emissions. Similarly, analyzing business travel may lead to carpooling or sometimes substituting carbon-heavy airplane trips with virtual meetings.
Supporting Decarbonization Technologies
Once a company knows how many metric tons of carbon dioxide it’s releasing into the atmosphere, leadership can choose ways to offset the workplace’s impact and help tip the earth away from further overload. Enter decarbonization technologies.
This relatively new field encompasses everything from avoidance to removal and from the natural to the engineered, with varying durations of sequestration. Avoidance might be by supporting a program to cap abandoned natural gas wells. Removal could mean using something like carbon mineralization (injecting carbon into concrete) where it is locked up permanently or helping nature do its thing by protecting forests which absorb CO2 as they grow.
When exploring options of how to remove carbon from the atmosphere, consider the PAVERS (permanent, additional, verified, enforceable, real, social benefit) principle. Is the technology or technique permanent (will it last in irreversible perpetuity)? Does the carbon offset project add to sustainable impact, going beyond business as usual? Can the project’s impact be third-party monitored and verified with supporting evidence? Are the emissions reductions enforceable (backed by legal contracts or instruments)? Are these carbon reductions real and not merely the result of inaccurate accounting? Does the investment also serve a social benefit like economic development in a challenged community?
Because these technologies and projects are evolving so quickly, it’s useful to enlist the help of a consultant to vet the companies offering offsets and to calculate the impact of these avoidance and decarbonization projects. Over time it’s important to evaluate these decarbonization investments to ensure the results match goals and strategies. While HED is currently working with Cloverly to offset our carbon footprint, TerraPass, Bonneville Environmental Foundation, and Center for Resource Solutions, among others, can provide similar investment strategies and guidance.
Decarbonization Technologies with Social Co-Benefits
Climate-positive efforts can also help support justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion goals. We asked Cloverly to align our decarbonization investment portfolio with several projects that are also supporting social justice. For example, the Bluesource – Kootznoowoo project not only supports preservation of 8,000 hectares of old forest growth but also provides living wages for those who manage it—Alaska’s native Haida and Tlingit peoples.
The range of technologies and community impact is vast. Companies like Project Bison (not currently in our portfolio) pull CO2 from the atmosphere with massive fans, while creating green jobs in historically oil-production heavy Wyoming. On the regional health and safety front, the A-Gas project, based in Rhome, Texas, disposes of abandoned refrigerants properly and Heartland Methane Abatement and Land Restoration plugs up orphaned, methane-producing wells in Oklahoma.
Clearly in addition to choosing well-vetted decarbonization projects to responsibly offset a company’s carbon footprint, supporting those that have ripple effects benefiting community health and global equity is a fairly easy co-benefit to require.
The Upshot
True carbon neutrality is a hard thing to achieve and it alone is not going to solve our global climate change problem. Just stopping output isn’t going to remove what already exists. We all have a role to play in not only reducing emissions but also pulling existing carbon from earth’s atmosphere. The technologies exist, and their evolution may even spur new business opportunities that prove you can decarbonize without causing economic grief.
This great potential to align business strategies and sustainability may be the key to gaining a wider sense of priority. We must resist the urge to give up under the overwhelming weight of thinking this issue is too big for humanity to solve. Eliminating (reducing plus offsetting) the GHG missions from something as small as a 5,000-square-foot office space will have an important impact.
Every effort to reduce carbon emissions and support decarbonization counts, no matter how small because we are all in this together.
