Earlier this year, we outlined our approach to measuring and forecasting our emissions. We decided against taking a typical annual reporting approach, with a commitment to both improving how we measured and providing full transparency to our own process of emission measurement and reduction.
After updating our carbon forecasting and reporting approach with much more granular and geographically applicable emission factors from EXIOBASE (rather than the older, global numbers from the GHG Protocol Scope 3 Evaluator), we have downgraded our forecast emissions to 17.88 tCO2e for the period September 2021-2022 (down from 24.8t).
Our actual emissions after 6 months were 9.18t against a straight-line 6-month projection of 8.94t, meaning we are 2.6% over budget at the halfway mark of the year, with the 6 coldest (and therefore most carbon intensive months) behind us. This leaves us in good stead to hit both our overall and per-employee targets.
”Hotspots” and areas for improvement are:
Areas where we are doing well:
As we scale up our infrastructure, it will become more important to understand in detail the footprint that our emission intelligence services have - both for our own accounting and for clients who are using them. We intend to use our own services, such as the cloud computing endpoint, to understand this better, and will be working closely with partners in our tech stack such as Fastly and Fauna to provide more detailed estimates on a per-API-call emission basis.
