As we come to understand and combat climate change, transparency and accountability are becoming just as important as scientific innovation. That’s why the OC4C project, is taking a look not only at the Ocean Carbon uptake—but at its own carbon emissions.
Our internal carbon accounting includes emissions from:
- Workstation: We monitor daily general use considering office space, laptop, printer etc. and any extra high performance computer and secondary computer usage.
- Digital infrastructure: We also consider local or Cloud computing and data processing for modelling and analysis, and our usage for online meetings and information storage.
- Travel: Flights and ground transport for events, conferences, and collaboration meetings. Including food consumption and hotel estimates.
- Procurement: We are trying to not buy anything and instead ask is there one available we can use. If not, we are looking at the carbon footprint of buying new.
With the help from online calculators, that estimate general emissions from things such as flights or digital services, and usage updates from the team we create a monthly internal report of our estimate of carbon emission for that month.
We then share this with the team at our monthly meeting and use an equivalent example to help put the amount into perspective (eg. This month we used the equivalent carbon of someone driving 800 miles)
The project views this not as a one-time effort, but as a long-term commitment. As our project evolves, so too will our approach to sustainability. By measuring our approximate emissions impact on the OC4C project it helps us make better informed decisions on our day-to-day work and keeps us mindful of our responsibility at every level.