In a simple, six-step approach we help you to become climate neutral.

The six steps are:

1. Calculate your Carbon Footprint
2. Engage your employees
3. Improve your energy efficiency
4. Purchase renewable energy and resources
5. Offset your remaining emissions
6. Communicate your achievements to employees and other stakeholders

Below, each of these steps is described in more detail.

1-Calculate your Carbon Footprint

Calculating your CO2- and other greenhouse gas emissions is an essential first step on the road to Climate neutrality. To help you with these calculations, we have developed our Carbon- or Climate footprint tool. It is a practical tool, based on the internationally accepted Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the Dutch ‘CO2-prestatieladder’. It provides you with a reliable starting point from which to track your progress over time, as you work toward your goal of becoming climate neutral.

Calculating your Climate Footprint is also a useful step to help you make savings. Once you know your greenhouse gas emissions and where they originate from, you can start drawing up efficiency measures to reduce your emissions.

Finally, calculating your Climate Footprint is also a no-regret step. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol is at the heart of many greenhouse gas certification and reporting schemes like GRI G4, ISO 14001, and CO2-prestatieladder. To calculate your Climate Footprint is useful for meeting your obligations under these schemes. And it is useful for meeting potential commitments to address UN Sustainable Development Goal #13 (Climate Action).

2-Engage your employees

The second step is to engage the people in your organisation.
They know better than anyone else where emission reductions and cost savings can be made. They are the ones that make the difference through their day-to-day behaviour on the workfloor. And they are the ones that uphold your organisation’s reputation, when talking to friends and family.
Together with our partners of Global Action Plan, we can help you to truly involve and empower your employees.

3-Improve your energy efficiency

The third step is to improve your energy and resource efficiency.

Together with your people, we develop a SMART set of measures to save energy and raw materials. In doing so, we also help you to comply with regulatory requirements, such as MJA agreements, European Energy Directive (EED), and obligations resulting from the Paris climate agreement (‘Klimaatakkoord’).

The savings from this step are more than enough to finance the next two steps of the Trias Energetica, i.e. switching to renewable energy and offsetting the remaining emissions.

4-Purchase renewable energy and resources

The fourth step is to switch from fossil energy to renewable energy.

You can generate your own renewable energy, e.g. by installing solar panels or investing in wind power. This has two advantages:
-You know 100% sure that it’s renewable
-It probably generates a positive return.

If you don’t have the opportunity to generate your own renewable energy, you can buy renewable energy certificates. Unfortunately, there is some debate about how renewable these certificates are. To ensure the certificates meet the additionality criteria, most environmental organisations in The Netherlands demand that the certificates are from Dutch origin.

5-Climate compensation

The fifth step is to offset your organisation’s unavoidable emissions.

Technically speaking, any organisation can become Climate Neutral today by buying carbon credits. For unavoidable air travel, whereby there is no alternative, this makes a lot of sense.

Generally speaking, however, we recommend looking for savings and renewable alternatives first. This is more effective and sustainable. And better for your bottom line. But this should be no excuse to postpone climate neutrality until 2050, as some organisations seem to do.

6-Communication