5 Steps your company can take to reach carbon neutrality

1. Calculate your emissions, then tackle them head on

It may seem a daunting task to figure out how large your business’ ecological footprint really is. What activities should you include and how do you find out how much CO2 is really generated as a result? If you want to become carbon neutral, you need to know. 

Luckily, several companies offer online tools that can help you calculate your carbon emissions. Just a few examples:

• Normative
• SINAI
• Planetly
• Greenly
• and many more

These tools make a lot of sense for small to mid-sized businesses that usually look for an easily available solution to start calculating their footprint. Some companies opt to work with an external company or use in-house capacities to crunch the numbers. TeamViewer calculated its greenhouse emissions for the fiscal year 2020 with the support of the scientific research organization DFGE – Institute for Energy, Ecology and Economics.

Whichever partner or tool you decide on, your calculations should be based on a comprehensive calculation method such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (abbreviated GHG protocol).

This GHG protocol considers all emissions distributed across 3 scopes:

• (Scope 1) All directly generated emissions
• (Scope 2) Emissions associated with purchased energy
• (Scope 3) Operational emissions such as business travel and commuting

[Green Fact] Interestingly, many companies have their largest potential for a carbon footprint reduction in scope 3.

Once you have calculated your footprint, you have your baseline: Time to set an ambitious goal and follow up on it. Reaching carbon neutrality is often a question of investing in green projects that offset the emissions your business is causing. However, reducing emissions by changing key parameters (think switch to renewable energy etc.) also goes a long way to achieve a greener profile.

Every company is a bit different, so consider the following when you set your specific climate goal:

• Are there any low-hanging fruits for your company to reduce its energy consumption within your current setup?
• Which changes would mean the largest reduction in your overall carbon footprint?
• Can you make a greener profile a part of your competitive edge?
• What types of goals do other companies in similar industries work with?

To highlight a specific and current example, at TeamViewer, we have defined our goals as follows:

• Goal 1: Continued carbon neutrality of own operations with a simultaneous 50% reduction in operational CO2 emissions per employee by the end of 2025 compared with baseline year of 2019.
• Goal 2: Achieving carbon neutrality (net zero; full scope 1-2 GHG Protocol) with a simultaneous reduction in Scope 1-3 emissions per EUR million revenue latest by 2030 with the baseline year of 2019.

Since 2018, TeamViewer has made the emissions caused by its own business operations climate neutral by purchasing certificates to compensate for them. We plan to continue down this road while taking steps to actively reduce our carbon emissions.

We focus our efforts to actively reduce our carbon emission in two principal areas:

• Hybrid workplace: Our switch to a hybrid workplace model reduced the need for employees to commute to work. This switch already allowed us to reduce our emissions with 53% per employee in 2020 as compared to 2019.
• Renewable energy: Our ongoing switch to renewable and green energy sources whenever feasible.

Whether this makes sense in your specific setup will depend on your industry, size, and access to technology to name a few.

Tip: Consider tying your goals to the number of full-time employees you have because this allows for a more realistic steering of reductions measurements. Put simply: Your emissions will inevitably go up with each FTE you hire, you need to commit to finding a way to counteract the added commute, equipment, workspace etc. Following the same logic, you can also consider tying your goals to your revenue stream.