Celebrating Earth Week

Earth Day is a time for celebrating the diversity of life that calls our planet home. It’s also a time for reflecting on our own impact, and considering the actions each of us can take to safeguard Earth’s future for generations to come.  

That’s why this Earth Day, we’re proud to announce that we will be retiring credits to offset emissions associated with Rubicon’s core 2023 business operations. We will be retiring our own Rubicon Carbon Tonnes (RCTs), which are backed by our actively managed portfolio of high quality carbon projects. We’re excited to share more about the approach we took to offsetting, and discuss what will be next for us as we continue our sustainability journey. 

Calculating the carbon footprint of our distributed, remote workforce

The first step was to calculate our carbon footprint. One of the challenges we faced is that much of our workforce is remote. We had to estimate energy usage associated with working from home at “offices” all around the world. Fortunately in the wake of the pandemic, when many businesses transitioned to remote operations, there is more guidance available than ever before. We used energy usage estimates for different geographies from the International Energy Agency to develop baseline estimates for all work from home employees. We do have several US-based offices, so we also counted the annual emissions associated with those. 

For this initial inventory we limited our accounting to scope I & II emissions. However we did include one source of scope III emissions that is very important for remote companies: air travel. We accounted for emissions associated with travel to all of our annual company and team offsites, as well as other anticipated business travel. Collectively, air travel turned out to be our largest source of carbon emissions!

Offsetting our emissions

Once we calculated our footprint, we offset our 2023 emissions by retiring Rubicon Carbon Tonnes (RCTs). We retired RCTs from our nature-based and industrial emissions portfolios, in equal parts. When RCTs are retired, we work with the registries to retire credits from across the portfolio. This ensures these credits are not double counted, and are used only to offset our own emissions. 

Looking ahead

Offsetting our 2023 emissions is our first step. We’re now looking closely at how we can improve our carbon footprint accounting by empowering our team to collect their own detailed data. Soon we’ll look to support and encourage our team to achieve additional emissions reductions. We also want to extend our analysis to include Scope 3 emissions in future years. 

At Rubicon Carbon, we are supporting the development of an efficient and effective carbon market, and we are enabling the acceleration of capital into high impact climate projects. To be effective partners for our buyers, we must practice what we preach. We’re looking forward to sharing more about our own sustainability journey.