Covid-19 worked wonders for global net-zero targets. Back in April 2020, climate change information site Carbon Brief published research which found that lockdowns had led to a dramatic reduction in transport use, electricity demand and industrial activity across the globe. In China, carbon emissions dropped by 25 per cent in the initial stages of the pandemic while global emissions were expected to fall by 2,000 million tonnes across the year as a whole, the largest annual reduction ever recorded.
For companies keen to hit their own ambitious targets this was a boon. With the vast majority of workers supplanted from power-hungry, air-conditioned offices to their own homes, corporate carbon usage plummeted overnight. Research conducted by energy supplier Bulb and consultancy EcoAct reckoned that, overall, UK companies would see their carbon emissions drop by 470,000 tonnes over the course of 2020.
There was only one, very big problem with these numbers. The emissions figure was calculated based on what researchers thought that employees would generate while working at home. As we learned more about home emissions, these reductions became almost non-existent. Instead of reducing their carbon footprints businesses have merely transplanted them. A recent EcoAct white paper stressed that these emissions “have not been eliminated, rather they have been relocated to employee homes beyond the company’s direct control”.
Suddenly, all the companies that promised to meet net-zero targets in the coming years, could be thwarted by their own employees’ energy habits at home. With investors taking a keen interest in how — and when — companies plan to get to net zero, companies have started to gather employee data to try to solve the problem. Take Standard Life Aberdeen: last month the Edinburgh-headquartered fund manager, soon to be known as Abrdn, said it would begin collecting employee emissions data as part of a wider plan to cut its carbon footprint by 50 per cent within the next four years.
According to the company’s CEO Stephen Bird, the business’s emissions dropped from 65 per cent to 14 per cent as a result of corporate travel all but halting in 2020. The expectation is that greater use of technology such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom will keep that figure below pre-pandemic levels in future, but Bird acknowledges that simply relying on a reduction in long-haul flights is never going to be enough.
“Although we continue to roll out efficiency measures in our largest offices, in 2020 we went from having under one per cent of our employees working from home to over 95 per cent,” he says. “This meant that home working became the largest source of emissions, accounting for 55 per cent of our carbon footprint.”
So Standard Life Aberdeen has asked its employees to share their utility bills to help it offset its corporate emissions, enlisting the help of Edinburgh eco-tech startup Pawprint to do it. Staff can voluntarily use the Pawprint app to upload data from their water, hearing or electricity bills, which is turned into a carbon emissions score using a methodology validated by Lancaster University professor Mike Berners Lee - an expert in carbon footprinting and brother of World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The more employees sign up, the more accurate the company’s overall score will be and the more certain it can be that it is offsetting the correct amount.
Pawprint, which was established two years ago to help individuals reduce the environmental impact of their day to day lives, is seeing an increasing number of businesses take an interest in the technology it provides. Craft-beer maker BrewDog was its first corporate client, incentivising staff to sign up to the app by promising to “double offset” both their emissions and those of their dogs. International energy logistics provider Peterson and FTSE 250 oil and gas company Cairn Energy followed, with the former’s CEO Erwin Kooij saying the aim is to encourage employees to “challenge their own behaviours around sustainability”.
Yet the system is far from foolproof. Pawprint stresses that calculating carbon footprints “is inherently inaccurate” while its CEO Christian Arno says the process is “scientifically valid, but not scientifically precise”. Part of that is to do with the assumptions that have to be made when manipulating the data. Another part is to do with the fact that staff cannot be forced to take part, meaning data has the potential to be skewed by those who already factor carbon reduction into their daily lives.
In fact, some staff members will choose not to take part because they are opposed to the idea of showing their bosses data on their personal energy usage - whether it includes power for a work laptop or not. Luke Skillett, managing consultant at EcoAct, believes younger generations will be more willing to participate because they are less bothered about having their data tracked, and they are more likely to vote with their feet in order to influence the green agenda. “Increasingly, in terms of working practices, we are seeing many, many people saying that millennials are not willing to work for companies that don’t take climate change seriously,” he says. Older generations, meanwhile, are thought to be less happy about giving up personal data and rate staying in a job that offers security more highly than switching to one that offers the prospect of sharing in carbon neutrality.
Pawprint CEO Christian Arno says it is for this reason that his organisation — which does not share any of the raw data it gathers with employers — shies away from off-putting terms such as ‘monitoring’ and ‘tracking’ when talking about what it does with the information it collects. Instead it focuses on using language focused on collaboration and teamwork, and sees incentives as the key way to encourage staff to take part. Arno says perks being offered by corporate clients include helping staff switch to a renewable energy provider and subsidising their bills when they do, offering low-carbon food options in the staff canteen and adding subsidised transport options like cycle to work schemes and access to electric bikes or cars into their benefits mix.
But more work needs to be done if all employees are to be encouraged to come on board. “We’re working with behavioural scientists to understand what works on rewards,” Arno admits.
BrewDog staff were more likely to be engaged with this sort of programme because of the company’s track record as a carbon-negative organisation that will go further than is necessary to offset staff emissions. At Standard Life Aberdeen, which offers separate green perks such as access to an electric car-leasing scheme, bosses are still mulling how best to enthuse its 6,000 employees enough to sign up to the Pawprint programme.
When it announced its partnership with Pawprint, Standard Life Aberdeen said it was developing the strategy because home or hybrid working “is likely to be a lasting feature of working life”. For any other company that plans to offer flexibility, calculating the impact of people’s energy spend commuting and being in the office versus working from home could be a a nightmare without a similar strategy. The worst outcome, Skillet says, is that employers will simply write off any emissions that people generate when working from home, or discard the energy reduction projects put in place before the pandemic by assuming they don’t apply to a remote workforce.
“For businesses as a whole, the default assumption is that home working will be more emissions efficient because they are taking out all the commuting,” he says. “But it’s not so clear cut whether that’s going to be the case because there are large variances between what is a standard commute and where the office is located. We need to incentivise companies to measure and estimate as much as possible based on what can be gathered to keep us honest more than anything else. It’s all very well turning off a machine in an office, but you are just relocating it.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
