Climate positive: Should removals be based on emissions or revenue?
Being climate positive mean to remove more CO2 from the air than one emit. There is still no international standard on how CO2 accounting and reporting should be done before a company can call itself climate positive. Let’s look at two options.
Removals based on emissions
One way to be climate positive is to remove, say 110 %, of CO2 emissions. If a company emit 100 ton CO2, then they would remove 110 tons. When that company succeed in reducing their emissions the following year and only emit 50 ton, they would remove 55 ton. So the positive impact on the climate during the first year was 10 ton removed and for the second year they removed 5 ton. At Albin Social we said, hold on, this approach mean that our positive impact decreases over time. Is there a better way.
Just to be clear, we’re not criticizing this method. It’s a good approach if the goal is a net zero society. We aim higher though and dream about a restored atmosphere.
Removals based on revenue
Albin Social want to keep making a climate positive impact as our emissions goes towards zero. This is our proposed method:
1. We look at the previous year and analyse how much CO2 we must remove to be a net-zero company.
2. We remove CO2 and become net zero. Maybe we call this net zero removals.
3. In addition to this we use 2 % of revenue for climate positive CO2 removals.
If we reach a state where our emissions are close to zero, this method keeps removing CO2.
By basing our climate positive removals on revenue it also means that when our company grows, more CO2 are removed. A bigger company with bigger revenue leads to a bigger climate positive impact.
Some people say that no one should start a new company and grow it, that it would be better for the climate to stop using apps. We believe people will keep using social apps no matter if Albin Social exist or not. What we’re doing is to offer apps that are better for the climate. A climate positive app is better than a net zero app. As far as we can see none of the big app companies are net zero for all three scopes, they are still climate negative.
People are not increasing consumption by choosing Albin Social. All they’re doing is being on our app instead of the other apps. There isn’t even a need to fully switch, you can have two apps, but any time spent on our app will mean removed CO2.