Every business needs funds to continue financing operations, business expansion, marketing, recruiting/training and numerous other requirements. A unique, new and really environment friendly way of raising funds – while reducing toxic carbon emissions – is by selling carbon offsets. Although it sounds complicated, it’s really simple in theory: If your projects reduce carbon emissions by a ton, you now have an asset in the form of a Carbon Emission Certificate that could be sold off.
The More Carbon Emission Certificates you have, the more you can sell thereby making you more money that could be used elsewhere for your business. Plenty of International brokers, retailers functioning both online and offline and several trading services all help with the transactions involved.
According to the David Suzuki Foundation[1], based out of Canada, there are also some basic standards in place so as to lend credibility to the offsets that businesses create by going green and reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. A few of those standards are The Gold Standard, Green-e, and the VCS. The Gold Standard is one of the most sought after and well-respected standards for carbon offsets where it’s represented by at least 70++ non-governmental organizations throughout the world.
Why bother?
Looking at the whole picture from just an economic standpoint – keeping aside the climate impact and environmental impact – picture this:
- Increased carbon emissions increase the risk of destabilizing the earth’s climate system itself (the risk is relentlessly growing each day).
- A whopping $276 million worth of losses occurred during the drought and wildfires during 1998 in the U.S, while causing 4000 deaths coupled with another US $ 30 billion in economic losses[2] in China.
- Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), have estimated[3] that substantial economic savings from emission reduction is possible with high savings in fuel costs.
Why are we talking about it?
Our previous posts on “Why Businesses Must Go Green – Part 1 & Part 2” have pointed out why, as a business, should you be concerned about going green and taking it easy on your energy use. To re-iterate, U.S alone spends a whopping 1.2% of the total energy produced just on data centres where we don’t even count the numerous other computer systems, servers, computers and networks in use in thousands and thousands of small and medium businesses.
What should be done?
Teeny-weeny steps, indeed!
Travel sustainably; opt for video conference wherever possible; take to the bike or walk instead of hitting the throttle; reduce your energy use – have a low-energy day and dim your lights out for an hour, for instance; and buy environmental friendly equipment that have good energy ratings. These are just to get you started with. If you have enormous projects you are working on, consider Carbon offsets and build your offsets which can work as an asset for your business.
What do you think?
References:
[1] David Suzuki Foundation
[2] Journal of Cambridge Studies: Macroeconomic Effects of Carbon Dioxide Emission Reduction
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