Calculators and Metrics for Sustainability: June 2008 Archives

Clean Air-Cool Planet and Forum for the Future have just published Getting to Zero: Defining Corporate Climate Neutrality  (Download — PDF), a joint project "developed in the absence of any hard and fast standards for climate neutrality, and out of growing concern that the real value of the concept could be lost in a stream of inflated claims."

"There's no agreed-upon definition of how much of a company's carbon footprint it needs to offset or what's needed to offset it," states Joel Makower in Two Steps Forward.

Getting to Zero attempts to make sense of all this, laying out the boundaries, providing definitions, and recommending company approaches. Among the recommendations:

Embrace a stretching boundary. The key tension surrounding any claim of neutrality remains reconciling the absolute nature of the claim — implying zero net impact — with a practical boundary-setting process. In the spirit of the term, we recommend that companies accept that claiming neutrality implies some responsibility to consider and address broader value-chain emissions. This is not to suggest that companies accept legal responsibility for the direct emissions of others, but rather that indirect emissions be explicitly considered as part of the neutrality process.