Greenwashing is a growing risk and these days everyone seems to be making claims about their environmental credentials. So, in this world of increasing misinformation and fake news, how can we (and others) be sure that claims about carbon reduction are legitimate? Being open and transparent about green claims will bring us very quickly to detailed nuts and bolts. Not the sexy headlines, but the really important work of calculating emissions and getting those verified. Here at Bates Wells, we are now well on the way in this journey of both discovery, and hard graft.
Earlier this year, the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) verified our target to reduce all our emissions[1] by 50% by 2030, starting from our baseline year of 2019, and at least 90% by 2050. A huge amount of work has been done over many years to get us to a point where we could set our target with SBTi, motivated by our desire to always have a positive impact on nature and our climate. Despite all our good intentions, setting our target caused us to pause because, in measuring our emissions we realised how little we can control the carbon cost of many aspects of running our business.
Until now, the emissions of our purchased goods and services (scope 3 emissions) have been determined by looking at how much we spend, and then feeding that into a carbon measurement tool to calculate our carbon footprint. This uses average data from a range of sources (including the Greenhouse Gas Protocol) to calculate an aggregated carbon cost. But this is fraught with problems.
For us, the deep frustration is that, because it is based on statistics and aggregated data, it does not consider some of the carbon conscious actions we’ve already taken to ensure our environmental impact is as low as possible. We have a policy that favours social enterprises, B Corps and other suppliers committed to reducing any negative social and environmental impacts. The tools used to provide a verified calculation don’t automatically take a nuanced approach that factors in supplier action on carbon reduction. For example, we default to vegetarian catering for our events. But when calculating our emissions from this activity, the carbon calculator takes the average emissions, which of course has a much higher proportion of meat. Yet evidence shows that on average a vegetarian diet produces around two and half times less emissions than a meat-based diet. So, our efforts to reduce our emissions cannot be accurately calculated by using the more general tools that are available.
As with any business, certain areas of our spend are unavoidable, but we were surprised by the high carbon cost that the carbon calculation tools generate in some of these areas. For instance, all solicitors are required to meet the standard set by the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA), they are required to have professional indemnity insurance and to stay up to date with developments in the law. Currently there are not specific calculating factors for some of these items such as practising certificate costs with the SRA. This means the calculations are based on spend data that, generically, covers general “business services”. It produces a figure for the carbon emissions, based on our spend, which seems unrelated to the true carbon cost of obtaining our practising certificates (which surely generates very little in the way of carbon emissions). It is not an option for us to reduce our footprint here by spending less – we can’t refuse to purchase practising certificates, or source them from a lower carbon supplier, and there are many other cases where our options to change suppliers to more sustainable ones are very limited or non-existent.
By taking a more supplier specific approach, we want to explore how this impacts our carbon footprint and to what extent we can influence the suppliers of our unavoidable spend items to reduce the carbon impact of the services that they provide to us and others in our sector. We’re still working this through, and we may need to collaborate with others to have an impact, but it’s in the interests of all our sector and the wider economy for key regulators and other service providers like journals and insurance companies to decarbonise their products and services, and to provide evidence of their emissions through accurate calculation.
In addition to all this, as a professional services firm, we know that the biggest impact comes not from our operational emissions but from the advice we provide to our clients. If we can improve the way we advise our clients and introduce a more systematic way of encouraging and supporting them to build carbon reduction into their work through the advice we’re giving, we can have a far greater impact on the UK’s carbon emissions than by working on our own emissions alone. With our clients, we have been open about our desire to give all of our advice in a way that takes account of social and environmental considerations (see our Sustainability & Responsibility Pledge) and we’re continuously working with our teams to find better ways to do this.
All of this brings a cost to the firm. There are significant resource implications of taking a more detailed and proactive approach to data gathering for our operational spend and to resourcing other projects that help us advise our clients in a way that protects nature, people and supports biodiversity. We’re working hard to develop our approach internally (our Real Estate team are leading the charge in implementing this into their advisory work) and externally we are working with a wide network of others in our profession and across the UK to drive change. We will all need to collaborate even more if we genuinely want to see our own organisations and the UK more generally meet urgently needed carbon reduction targets.
[1] When we talk about measuring all our emissions, we mean that we are measuring all our scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.