Carbon Neutrality Consultancy Services: Here's How to Achieve Carbon Neutral Certification
Sustainability at Schneider Electric
By Atin Chhabra
As the world marks the fifth anniversary of the adoption of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, a propitious movement for carbon neutrality is taking shape. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, carbon neutrality is a state of balance between CO2 emitted in the atmosphere and CO2 removed from the atmosphere.
Getting to the target of net-zero emissions requires notable abatement of greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors of the world economy with a stringent carbon neutrality policy and other innovative strategies. For making deeper cuts in emissions, investment and innovation at a large scale are required to develop economically competitive and technologically viable alternatives to fossil-fuel intensive technologies in different sectors.
Though the COVID 19 pandemic temporarily lowered these emissions, carbon emissions are still at a record high – and rising. To mitigate the negative effects that such emissions have on climate change, there is an urgent need for proactive, collaborative, and coordinated carbon neutrality solutions, along with participation in terms of efforts and actions from all related stakeholders.
Furthermore, when we look closer and gain insights into these emissions, we will find the major contributors to such emissions are industries and corporations. Therefore, to significantly lower carbon emissions and achieve carbon neutrality, it would be wise to reduce corporate emissions with effective and practical carbon neutrality solutions.
For achieving this in a planned and strategized way, corporations are required to have resilient carbon neutrality solutions; otherwise, corporations’ effect on climate change will continue to accelerate, and repercussions will get worse.
However, before implementing any carbon neutrality solutions, it is crucial for corporations to analyze and comprehend a few important things, such as their current carbon footprint, what strategy they should deploy, how to attain carbon neutrality certification, and others. Well, attaining carbon neutrality certification can be a one-stop solution for industries to make a positive environmental impact by reducing their corporation’s effect on climate change and becoming a carbon neutral industry. Let’s find out how!
How to Achieve Carbon Neutrality Certification?
Usually, every carbon neutral consulting firm follows a different carbon neutral certification process. However, their process is more or less designed on similar lines. While attaining carbon neutral certification, you may choose to simply focus on your products, services, building, precincts or choose to certify the whole corporation.
So, here’s a standard and detailed process of carbon neutral certification that carbon neutral consulting firms typically follow:
Define
Firstly, it is vital to decide whether you want to make your whole organization carbon-neutral or a particular activity or product/service. It will set the floor for your next step and help in devising carbon neutral solutions and strategies.
Measure
At this stage, corporations need to measure their emissions based on concrete and reliable data. This is where digitalization, artificial intelligence, data analytics, and machine learning come into play. You might even require different data for each type of carbon neutral certification, such as on-site fuel consumption, purchased energy, business travel, etc.
This data plays a crucial role and helps corporations reduce negative environmental impact and move forward in a calculative way. There are some carbon neutral service providers who help you in collecting data about your corporate emissions with their innovative and technologically advanced data collection solutions.
Target
For receiving carbon neutral certification, you need to commit net-zero carbon emissions for the certification period. Then, over a couple of months, as your business achieves more internal reductions, it becomes easier to achieve a carbon-neutral target. Setting targets to achieve carbon neutrality enables businesses to make a statement or strategy of climate action which has absolute clarity with a 100% reduction.
Reductions
Internal changes have the capability of delivering a cost-effective reduction of carbon emissions, lowering energy and waste bills. But how does carbon
neutrality help here? It enables a way to quantify pricing for carbon by incentivizing this type of shift for businesses. Science-based targets and marginal abatement cost curves are effective ways for setting internal reduction goals aligning with the requirements of delivering a stable climate. Thus, helping you lower your carbon emissions and reducing your corporation’s impact on climate change.
Communicate
Corporations must deliver a credible and clear message about each stage of climate action to their stakeholders. You can do this via sustainability reports and many other methods.
After corporations pass through all the stages, they are eligible to achieve carbon neutral certification. However, there’s one important thing to note here – achieving carbon neutral certification might not be possible without the support of leading companies who offer a complete suite of solutions and services for carbon neutrality, which are supported by innovative products, robust systems, and integrated platforms.
A perfect example of such services is Schneider Electric’s Climate Action Advisory Service. This service helps businesses balance strategic vision and road mapping with the deployment of technology and tangible actions. This offers a fully integrated approach that spans resource efficiency, energy management, renewable energy procurement, value chain decarbonization, carbon offsetting, and AI-driven data collection, and disclosure. Additionally, Schneider Electric supports industries’ carbon neutrality solutions by helping them measure their corporate emissions, setting realistic targets, devising strategies for reducing their emissions, and encouraging them to communicate the same to their stakeholders.
Therefore, attaining carbon neutral certification is an all-inclusive process and proves to be a practical and effective way of reducing corporate emissions and making way for a sustainable world!
