Founding director, Clare Jones discusses why understanding our carbon footprint is so important.

At Grasshopper, our aim is to deliver positive change to the world around us, and central to this, is playing our part in tackling the climate emergency.

Day-to-day our team is working on a range of environmental campaigns, such as influencing climate positive action, increasing recycling rates, as well as supporting the delivery of low carbon technologies and infrastructure.

Therefore, ensuring we fully understand our own carbon footprint is clearly key to ensuring we are playing our part in tackling the climate emergency.  This will enable us to put in place a clear route map to achieve net zero that underpins our wider business plan and ongoing growth ambition.

We also want to ensure we can provide our clients with comprehensive information around our operational carbon footprint.  Relating to this, we want to be in a position to advise around the specifics of campaigns and events we are delivering, and how difference choices and approaches will impact carbon.

In order to achieve this level of insight, earlier this year we commissioned carbon management consultancy Auditel to produce our first detailed Carbon Footprint Report.

Based on our value chain map, the report provides a full overview of all our carbon emissions, breaking them down into key categories. This way, we can monitor our emissions moving forward and investigate ways to reduce our carbon output by developing short, medium and long-term carbon reduction initiatives.

As a business with 21 employees, our emissions were calculated to be just over 14 tonnes for the year. Overall, our carbon intensity metrics have been demonstrated to be well below average, at 0.7 tonnes per employee compared to 4.07 tonnes per employee on average for other businesses of a similar nature within professional services.

Following our assessment, although not surprising, we now know for a fact that most of the carbon emissions we produce are classified under scope 3, which is indirect emissions made by third parties in connection with business operations. Overall, the three areas currently having the highest carbon impact for Grasshopper are: commuting (9.6%); homeworking (30%) and business travel (28%).

We are now in a position to be confident that our choices and policies as a business are already ensuring that we have a lower-than-average carbon footprint for a consultancy-based business. Examples of this includes our no flying policy, as well as our decision to have a city centre office location in Cardiff to allow easy access by active travel and public transport.

And we also now have the knowledge that we need to put in place a longer-term net zero strategy for the business.

We know that this journey will be a marathon and not a sprint, and we won’t be able to make drastic changes overnight, but every small change we can make will all begins to add up globally, which is why we all need to play our part.

Watch this space for more information on our action plan for the future.