3.3 Reducing your carbon emissions

Climate change

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change defines climate change as:

Net zero

Net zero is achieving the balance between the carbon emitted into the atmosphere and the amount removed from the atmosphere.

In the video Stephen Peake, Professor of Climate Change and Energy at The Open University, provides an overview of net zero.

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STEPHEN PEAKE

There’s this phrase that probably a lot of you have heard, ‘net zero’. What does it mean? It simply means that we have to get our collection of greenhouse gas emissions, that’s carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and some industrial gases along the way as well, we have to collectively stop emitting these into the atmosphere like it the atmosphere is just a dustbin and we can just keep filling it up. And we need to turn them off so that has stopped.

But because of that little word ‘net’, what that means is we have to go further than that. So zero emissions into the atmosphere. But in some cases for some gases, we have to start sucking those gases out of the atmosphere temporarily and storing them somewhere, squirreling them away for some time, maybe a couple of centuries. And we need to do this to get the Earth’s systems back in balance.

So net zero is all about the emissions that humans put into the atmosphere. And we have to switch it off to zero, but we have to go through zero to negative. And that’s why we use the word ‘net’ because it’s not just reducing the positive emissions, it’s going negative and sucking those emissions out of the atmosphere.

About 10 to 15 years ago, scientists got together and they started to talk about global warming in less abstract terms. They started to say, well, how much warming? How much? What does that mean? We’ve all signed an international agreement to stabilise the climate change and stop it happening, stop all the bad things happening, but we haven’t really put a number on it. So it’s just kind of, at the moment, it’s quite of a woolly target.

So as they ran their models, they started to come up with a figure, kept appearing again and again, and that figure was about 2 degrees above the pre-industrial. And they had a lot of meetings about it and they stroked their chins and scratched their heads and said is that about the right number, that we should not aim for global heating 2 degrees above the industrial?

And it turned out it’s about the right number. So if you want to stabilise global heating at 1 and 1/2 degrees above the pre-industrial, which is the most aspirational that the scientists tend to go to in the Paris Agreement, for example. If you want to stabilise at 1 and 1/2 degrees, your global emissions must reach 0 and go negative quite early on in the next 20 years, by 2050.

If you accept that you want to stabilise at a little bit higher temperature, plus 2 degrees above the industrial, then we’ve got a tiny bit more time. And the emissions to zero has to happen about 2070. So either way, whether we’re shooting for 1 and 1/2 degrees above pre-industrial or whether we’re shooting for a bit more room with 2 degrees heating, it’s round about the period, 2050 to 2070, that global emissions have to have peaked and ramped right down. And at that point, they’re going through zero and they’re becoming negative as we suck more of these gases out of the atmosphere than we put in.

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Global warming

Global warming is the long-term increase in temperature of the Earth’s surface due to human activities, which increase greenhouse gases that have the potential to warm and change our global climate.

In the video Stephen Peake provides an overview of global warming.

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STEPHEN PEAKE

Let’s start with global warming. OK, the Earth has an atmosphere. It’s very thin if you look at it from space. But it’s a beautiful atmosphere made of air and lots of gases, oxygen, nitrogen, and some other gases.

And that atmosphere traps a bit of sunlight that would otherwise be just reflected straight back. So it just interrupts some of the sunlight temporarily. It traps it. It acts as a kind of, we like to say a blanket, but actually a blanket isn’t really a good definition. But neither is greenhouse, actually, if you’re going to get technical. But we call it the greenhouse effect because in a greenhouse it’s a bit warmer than outside, inside is actually warmer than the outside.

So that’s the greenhouse effect. That’s a temporary interruption of the solar radiation coming in and bouncing around a bit before it goes out. And while it bounces around it just warms the planet more than it would be if we didn’t have an atmosphere. We’d be quite a lot cooler on the planet. So the atmosphere performs a nice function. It keeps us warmer and allows life to be as it is.

Now, some of the powerful greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are water vapour. Well, that’s natural, but carbon dioxide. That’s natural. But when we burn fossil fuels, we put additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is not from a natural process. It’s the fossilised carbon that was in the ground that we dug up in oil, coal, and gas, burn it. And we push those emissions into the atmosphere.

So we get an enhanced greenhouse effect. We get an extra bit that we caused as humans, not that came from nature. So we slightly put that equation out of balance. So when you get extra anthropogenic, human-induced emissions, then we get the enhanced greenhouse effect. We call that global warming.

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Greenhouse gas emissions

The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol is a global framework to measure and manage greenhouse gas emissions to enable corporate accounting and reporting standards for greenhouse gas emissions from organisations.

The greenhouse gas emissions are grouped into three ‘scopes’ shown in the table and figure below. Scope 1 and 2 require mandatory reporting by organisations. Scope 3 emissions can be challenging to determine, but account for approximately 80% of organisations emission.

Maximise

Figure 11: Diagram of scopes and emissions across the value chain

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Image shows an overview of the GHG Protocol scopes and emissions across the value chain. At the top of the image are some clouds, with six circles spread across them, each containing one of the following terms: CO2; CH4; N2O; HFCs; PFCs; SF6. At the bottom of the image there is an arrow running left to right, split into three sections, titled ‘Upstream activities’, ‘Reporting company’ and ‘Downstream activities’. From the left side cloud, there is a wide arrow that curves down and back up towards the clouds. This is titled ‘Scope 2: Indirect’ above the arrowhead. Slightly inset to the right and lower, is a similar arrow, titled ‘Scope 3: Indirect’. On the right side is a further curving arrow, like the others, also titled ‘Scope 3: Indirect’. Between these arrows, in the centre, is an arrow pointing up to the clouds, titled ‘Scope 1: Direct’. Along the Scope 2 arrow is the text ‘purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling for own use’ with a plug icon. Along the left Scope 3 arrow are a number of icons and their associated text: ‘purchased goods and services’ with factory icon; ‘capital goods’ with lorry icon; ‘fuel and energy related activities’ with coal mining icon; ‘transportation and distribution’ with ship icon; ‘waste generated in operations’ with wheelie bin icon; ‘business travel’ with plane icon; ‘employee commuting’ with train icon; ‘leased assets’ with office icon. In the centre arrow, at the bottom is the text ‘company vehicles’ with a lorry icon and higher up is the text ‘company facilities’ with an office icon. Along the right Scope 3 arrow are more icons and their associated text: ‘transportation and distribution’ with ship icon; ‘processing of sold products’ with factory icon; ‘use of sold products’ with lightbulb icon; ‘end of life treatment of sold products’ with waste bin icon; ‘leased assets’ with office icon; ‘franchises’ with small business icon; ‘investments’ with money icon.

Figure 11: Diagram of scopes and emissions across the value chain

In the video Scott Stonham, an Independent Sustainable Tech Analyst and author of the Jisc Exploring digital carbon footprints report, explains the GHG Protocol.

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SCOTT STONHAM

When we’re thinking about climate impact and carbon emissions, it’s kind of shorthand to say carbon emissions or carbon dioxide. There’s actually many other gases that are doing-- that are being generated and emitted that are doing even more harm than carbon dioxide. So there’s nitric oxide, there’s methane, there’s many hydrofluorocarbons. There’s all sorts of other gases.

And each of these has its own level of impact on the environment. Some of them stay in the environment longer, some stay shorter but have much greater impact in terms of the greenhouse gas capability, so how much they help trap in the heat within our planet. So in order to try and avoid some of this confusion and mismatch between all of these, we’ve come to that term you might have heard, called carbon dioxide equivalent.

So the carbon dioxide equivalent creates a level playing field across all of those when we talk about these CO2Es, carbon dioxide equivalents. Now, there’s an organisation called the GHG Protocol, Greenhouse Gas Protocol. And what that does is it tries to put these emissions into various different scopes around an organisation, so the things that an organisation has influence on.

The scopes are-- there’s three scopes. Scope 1, scope 2, scope 3. Scope 1 is those things where we have-- well, scope 1 and scope 2, let’s pull them together because they tend to be the things that all come together, really. There’s the electricity we buy, the energy we use to run and maintain our buildings and our fleets, though those are all within scope 1 and scope 2.

And those generally are fairly small in terms of the overall GHG emissions of an organisation. So how small? Well, they tend to be-- I mean, in Apple’s case, I think scope 1 and scope 2 is less than 1%. In fact, I think it’s 0.1% of their total declared emissions. And the rest of it falls into what’s known as scope 3.

Scope 3 covers everything else, and things that you probably wouldn’t even think that you as an organisation are responsible for. So of course, in there, you’ve got things like the emissions generated when you transport things. You’ve also got products, goods, and services that you’re buying.

So the carbon emissions that are generated as a result of the things that you buy, or even the online services that you subscribe to, the cloud services, there’s the fuel that you may need that’s outside of your electricity. So maybe you buy steam or other fuel sources as well.

There’s the waste that’s generated, there’s where your money is being invested in your pensions, and there’s also the energy that’s consumed by the end users of your products or your team that are working offsite as well. So these scopes are-- scope 1, scope 2, scope 3. But most of an organisation’s current emissions fall within scope 3. And within that, most of them fall within scope 3 category 1, which is products and services.

So this is where we can start looking at scope 1, scope 2, scope 3, within the GHG protocol as well. So scope 1, just to recap, is the energy that we buy and we consume. Scope 2 is the energy and the emissions associated from running our buildings and our fleets around. And scope [3] is everything else.

And everything else goes from the products and services we buy and the emissions that have been generated in producing and distributing those through to where our money is being used in the pensions and our investments through to the energy being used by the end users of our products, and our staff and our teams.

There’s 15 categories of scope 3. It’s the lion’s share of all emissions for all organisations. I think Apple’s report said it was 99.9% of their emissions were scope 3. Two universities I won’t mention off the top of my head, around 80% of theirs are scope 3. And this is something-- and within that scope 3, the purchasing of services and goods is, again, the chunk of that.

That is around 90% of most people’s-- scope 3 is in that, 70% to 90%. So that is something that supply chain and procurement has control over. The challenge is that we’re making decisions around-- we’re trying to make decisions over whether product A or product B is better, and we don’t have the full amount of information.

There are some tools in the sector-- the HESCET tool is one I know of-- that is trying to score suppliers based on their carbon intensity. So you work out how carbon intense a supplier is, how much money you spend with that supplier, and then work out which of your suppliers have the biggest carbon footprint and then focus down on those.

And that’s interesting. That’s definitely a good place to start. Trouble is you might buy products from-- different products from different suppliers and different countries, and it doesn’t really tally up completely. So one of the challenges that we see right now-- I already companies that help and drill down-- is how do you get down to the product level?

Because at the product level as well, when you can say that product A is better than product B instead of supplier A and supplier B, when it comes down to an individual making an impact and an individual making a decision, they resonate much easier-- we resonate more by understanding that, actually, this mouse is half the carbon footprint of that mouse and they do the same thing. So I’m going to have this one.

So we’ve got to get down to that product level. But supply chain in general is not just about purchasing things, it’s about how do we make sure we have the contracts and support to make sure that we can use them for longer. That’s a big area. So when we’re talking about IT, that comes down to circular IT, refurbished, remanufactured equipment.

And then also what happens once we’ve finished using it? And they say that 80% of the recycled materials never actually end up in the places they’re promised to go. They end up in horrible places doing horrible harm to-- making people live horrible lives. So we’ve got to be more accountable for that. We’ve got to have the information to help us make the right decisions about that too.

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Carbon footprint

A carbon footprint is a measure of the greenhouse gases (GHG) that are produced directly or indirectly by the activities of an individual, organisations and community, and the activities for producing products.

In the video Stephen Peake explains what a carbon footprint is.

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STEPHEN PEAKE

So what is a carbon footprint? Your carbon footprint of say an activity like going on holiday or eating a steak or leaving the lights on, your carbon footprint is the amount of greenhouse gases which is associated with that thing, the activity that you’re doing. So you could calculate the carbon footprint of your meal, of a banana, you could calculate the carbon footprint of everything that you do in a year, you could do it on a yearly basis, you could calculate the carbon footprint of your household on a per weekly basis.

So carbon footprints is just this idea that you find a way of accounting for and adding up all the carbon dioxide or if you’re a farmer, nitrous oxide or methane, or other if you’re in industry, other industrial greenhouse gases that you are responsible for and that you chuck into the atmosphere. You add it up. And then that gives you a measure of the impact that you’re having. And we call it a footprint because, of course, footprints are the impact of people who’ve been walking on the sand or the soil. So it’s a footprint.

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If you wish to understand more about your own carbon footprint, you can use The Open University’s Carbon Calculator on OpenLearn.

The circular economy

The circular economy is a framework to tackle global challenges including climate change that is based on three principles:

• Eliminate waste and pollution
• Circulate products and materials
• Regenerate nature

In the video Dr Alice Moncaster, Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Built Environment at The Open University, provides an overview of the circular economy.

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ALICE MONCASTER

Yeah, sure. So circular economy I think, might be a really useful term for people to start to understand how to live for the future, how to live to minimise our impact on the world. But I think it could also be used in the wrong way as a bit of a, let’s support business as usual. And I’ll try to explain that.

So the circular economy I think, grew out of this sense of not looking at products from cradle to grave, from this birth to death, if you like, but looking at them from cradle to cradle. So this was back 15, 20 years ago, this idea of cradle to cradle came into being. And the circular economy basically says that. It says if you take a product at the end of its life and reuse it, put it straight back in, then you have a circle.

But it’s kind of a notion that is a bit like a perpetual motion machine. It doesn’t really work. Because actually, at the end of the life of a product, it’s at the end of its life because it can no longer achieve its function. And so what really happens is it gets downgraded. Even if it gets completely reused, it gets downgraded.

So in construction for instance, if concrete gets demolished, it doesn’t get reused as a piece of concrete. It gets reused as a bit of aggregate or a bit of hard core, which is a much lower value in terms of function and cost actually, material. So you’re not actually keeping all of that value in the chain. You’re actually losing masses through that circle.

So the circular economy says yes, you should do that. You should reuse materials at the end of life as much as you possibly can and in any way you can. But it also says you should extend the life of that material for as long as possible. Because as soon as it reaches the end of its functional life, it’s going to drop in value. So you have to extend its life.

And it also says, reduce, as far as you can, the materials that you put in in the first place. So it’s these three things. It’s not just closing the loop, if you like. It’s also narrowing the loop, and it’s also extending the life of a product.

So in building terms, I think this absolutely supports the idea of retrofit. If you can retrofit a building, you keep it in use for as long as possible. You retrofit it with the lowest carbon materials and the lowest amount of materials to do the best job that you can.

But when I say amount, I don’t really mean tons. I mean in terms of their impact on the earth, the lowest impact materials. So that’s the circular economy, in short. And it’s a great idea, and it really works well with manufactured products. In something like a building, which is lots of manufactured products, all put together, all of different lifetimes, all needing replacing at different times, it’s a very much more complicated process.

Something which makes a big impact on the whole life, impact of an office building is how often the lease is renewed. So if you have a new lease with a new occupant every year, then everything will be ripped out and replaced every year. So all the internal fittings and finishes of an office, if you include them and your whole life assessment, will come out as a huge proportion of the whole life carbon of that office. So yes, you’re quite right. It’s fittings and finishes that matter too.

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There is a growing focus on the circular economy, an area you may wish to come back to explore further. The Beyond Recycling area of the Welsh Government website, that includes its strategy to make the circular economy in Wales a reality, and the wellbeing assessment, provides an insight into what organisation need to consider to develop more sustainable ways reduce waste and preserve resources.

• What is the circular economy and why does it matter?
• What is a circular economy?