As a company, we were meant to be at ‘Net Zero’ by 2025 and we definitely aren’t.
There, I said it. Feels good to get that out.
I’ve been putting off writing this for a few months, but it’s time to bite the bullet and say that I messed up when it came to net zero. What follows is a bit of a brain dump in which I’ll try to cover off my own misunderstandings, my disillusionment with the whole idea of net zero, and a rough plan for where we go from here.
So…how it started.
In 2021 I went to an event for business owners about net zero. As someone who cares deeply about people and the planet, running a business that shares those values, I was all in. The organisers shared the urgency of the task ahead; the “Race to Zero” as the UN calls it. At the end of the event, everyone was encouraged to commit to net zero and to set a target year for when they would reach that point. Clearly that’s not a bad thing in itself, but given that this wasn’t an audience of experts (me included) there wasn’t a lot of detail about the ins and outs of how net zero is defined by the SBTi (Science Based Targets initiative) and how it’s obstructed by many uncontrollable external factors.
I set a target for Studio 91 of 2025. It felt ambitious but achievable. It’s also a nice round number, just like in the Paris Agreement (45% reduction by 2030, net zero by 2050). Understandably the whole UK needs decades to get there, but why shouldn’t it be much sooner for us, a micro business that’s already doing a lot for sustainability? After all, most of our emissions came from travel to shoots, so we just needed to find ways to reduce transport emissions, ensure our office energy was renewable, and offset the remaining Scope 3 emissions. Right?
Wrong.
First of all, renewable energy tariffs don’t mean your Scope 2 emissions are zero, because you’re still getting your energy from the grid, and the UK’s energy mix is woefully gassy. I knew this already, but I assumed that for the purposes of net zero, 100% renewable meant zero carbon. Otherwise net zero is physically impossible until our energy mix is cleaned up. I tried to argue this with the company behind our carbon footprinting software…I lost.
Then we come to the minefield that is Scope 3 – also known as indirect or value chain emissions. In 2021 when I made our net zero commitment, my understanding was that in order to achieve net zero, Scopes 1 and 2 needed to be eliminated altogether, while Scope 3 needed to be reduced as much as possible with the remainder offset. However, the SBTi’s net zero definition goes further than that, requiring at least 90% of emissions to be cut, with the remaining 10% neutralised using permanent carbon removal and storage. If this had been mentioned at that 2021 event, I would never have set the target at 2025.
Yeah, about that 90%…
The 90% requirement makes total sense: it prevents companies from putting in minimal effort to reduce their emissions and sweeping the problem under the carpet with offsets. But it’s a major problem for us because we never had a very big carbon footprint to begin with! If we’d spent our baseline year burning trees and driving everywhere in diesel vans, the 90% reduction would be easy. But in practice, we’ve reduced emissions by 33% since our baseline year. A decent achievement in three years, but nowhere near 90%.
At our current rate of reduction, we’d get our absolute emissions below 10% by 2033. But I don’t think we can maintain our current rate, because our biggest source of emissions isn’t transport any more – it’s purchases like camera and IT equipment, which are much harder for us to control. The whole thing just feels impossible.
There’s that word again – impossible.
I’ve mentioned it a couple of times now, and it sums up the whole problem. Companies should absolutely work to reduce their emissions year on year, but we can never hit net zero until major changes are made in the wider systems that make up our economy and society. To illustrate this point, have you ever considered if ANY company in the world is net zero already?
Google it. Nobody is there yet.
Until those big systemic shifts happen, we can do one of three things. We can go round in circles beating ourselves up (me); we can ignore it all and absolve ourselves of responsibility (most people); or we can focus on what we can control.
Net zero – where do we go from here?
As SMEs we should stop swearing by net zero and offsetting, and re-evaluate the impact we can have. A webinar a few months ago by Rob Cheesewright from Pinwheel and Malin Cunningham from Hattrick really solidified my thinking on this. They talked about a “contribution model”, i.e. an emphasis on supporting specific projects that make a tangible difference, using that to tell positive stories, and inviting clients and teams to be part of it.
That’s what I want us to aim for this year, alongside our ongoing efforts to reduce our emissions. I’ll try and keep you up to date on both of those fronts when I remember!
TL;DR
We’re still heading in the right direction. We’re still on a journey to net zero. But a lot of external things need to fall into place before we can truly get there. In the meantime, we will maximise the positive impact we have on our environment and our community.
If you made it this far, congrats – I owe you a pint or a coffee.
📸 NASA on Unsplash
