Taking MMT Digital Net Carbon Negative

Having spent a number of months reading and researching the true state of the climate crisis (“The Uninhabitable Earth” is a fantastically well researched but depressing place to start on your journey) Ben Rudman (my fellow co-founder) and I felt that decarbonising our business needed to be a central strategy for us going forwards. Our 20th anniversary was also a suitable time for reflection around what the legacy of the next 20 years should really be about.

And so, our Net Carbon Negative pledge was born. With immediate effect, MMT Digital is becoming Net Carbon Negative; we will reduce our carbon footprint over time but also commit to offsetting more CO2 than we produce.

It’s hugely well documented these days but, for the benefit of any doubt that this is far more than “just another CSR policy”, let’s outline a few key facts based on current climate models*:

1.      Most scientific models show us heading for between two and eight degrees of warming by 2100. We then enter “The Century of Hell”[1]. Two degrees is highly conservative and the current target for those signed up to the Paris Agreement (for which no country is on its targets and the US has pulled out). Eight degrees is equally unlikely, which is good news because that’s an extinction level event.

2.      The conservative rise of two degrees would see 150 million additional deaths just from air pollution issues alone[2]. That’s twice as many as died in World War II. And remember, limiting to “only” two degrees seems unlikely at this point.

3.      Each 0.5 degree could see a 10% to 20% rise in armed conflict due to scarcity of resource and climate refugees from poorer parts of the world (which are ironically, given their very low emissions per person, are the worst hit, aside from Australia). The most likely model of three to four degrees of warming in the next 80 years means we could be living in a world with 50% more-armed conflict than we have today[3].

4.      Models show that four degrees of warming could cause global damages of $600 trillion. That’s double the current global wealth[4].

5.      On our current trajectory, the UN projects 200 million climate refugees (many from the Middle East and Africa) by 2050[5]. Europe faced significant problems dealing with “only” one million refugees caused by the conflict in Syria in 2011.

6.      Of the five mass extinction events in the last 450 million years, four of them were climate related. 250 million years ago a five degree rise triggered the release of methane which caused a significant feedback loop. We are currently adding carbon at 10 times the rate of that event[6].

7.      With around 200 species becoming extinct every 24 hours (over 1000 times the “background rate”) many scientists claim we are already in the sixth extinction event (known as the Holocene extinction event).

8.      This is a human-made crisis. There is a lot of nonsense around, including “facts” like volcanoes producing more emissions that humans (in fact they produce only 1% of emissions from human activities at around 0.3 billion tons per year compared to our 29 billion tons). Nothing else, no natural events, can explain the exponential rise in CO2 since the dawn of the industrial age and the associated rapid rise in climate. It’s not sunspots or solar cycles driving this naturally either.

This isn’t about trying to fix this. We had our chance there. It’s damage limitation time now. Sure, science might just come along and save us. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for example (for anyone who watched the excellent “Inside Bill’s Brain” documentary will know) have founded a start-up that has a design for a safe nuclear power station (runs at atmospheric pressure and doesn’t require backup generators because it doesn’t fail if the power goes down) that can run on existing nuclear waste. There is enough stockpiled in one site in Turkey alone to power the US for the next 100 years. So that’s one potential solution to supply green energy to the planet. The only issue there is that it’s all on hold because of Trump’s trade war with China.:

You couldn’t make that up. If anyone knows how to get that unblocked, give Bill a shout!

So, science might save us. But the clock is ticking, and at MMT, we’re not prepared to wait around with our fingers crossed.

Apologies for the gloomy start to the blog post. However, the point is really to emphasise why our strategy on decarbonising the business needs to sit firmly at the centre of all our plans. And not be considered a “nice to have” CSR type policy off to one side.

Having only started work on this strategy over the summer we’re pleased with what we’ve been able to launch in time for Q4. It’s just the start with much more work needed on the carbon reduction aspects.

Our approach is made up of six steps which focus on the reduction and offsetting of our company footprint, supporting our people in reducing and offsetting their personal footprint and reporting transparently on all our sustainability activities to our clients:

1. Modelling and understanding our base CO2 footprint
2. Taking steps to reduce our CO2 footprint as quickly as possible over time
3. Committing to offsetting at our base level emissions while offsetting more CO2 than we generate.
4. Supporting and incentivising our staff to help them make personal reductions and offsetting
5. Personal Activity tracking to report on the wider impact of our people
6. Reporting transparently about our footprint and activities to our clients to help spread awareness

This plan means that we can spread influence through our staff and with our clients. By open-sourcing everything that we do we can also help to support other companies in our space to do the same more easily and quickly.

You can download the starter pack with all of our models, trackers and logs via our pledge page on the MMT Digital website.

To give a few more specific details around what we have so done so far against each of those six areas.

1.      Modelling our base CO2 footprint

We’ve calculated our company carbon footprint (Scope 1, 2 and 3 as best we can model it at this point) at 3.7 tons per person per year. We are referring to that as our 2018 Base Emission Level. It’s a simple model and we will refine it over time, but our approach and the model are available in the starter pack.

2.      Reducing our CO2 footprint

We’ve switched energy supplier for our Midlands offices so that we are on 100% renewable electricity for our largest office. Other offices should be done over the coming months (just a little more logistics with being in shared buildings for those but we’ll get there). Around 25% of our carbon footprint is power to our offices so this will be a quick win for us.

We have electric vehicle charging points arriving at the Uppingham office soon to encourage adoption (but with lots of education and messaging about the carbon footprint of manufacturing a new EV, etc). We have lots of other ideas in this space too as the predominantly car-based commute into our Midlands office is a big culprit.

There are also a whole raft of smaller emission reduction and offsetting ideas (but that really help with awareness across the business) from sustainable toilet paper to buying birthday cards from a supplier that plants a tree for each card.

3.      Offsetting at our base CO2 level

At our current headcount our 2018 Base Emissions (i.e. emissions before taking any of the reductions above into account) is around 650 tons of CO2 per year. However, our commitment is to continue to offset at 3.7 tons per person per year no matter how low we can actually get our footprint down. Hence, we are a Net Carbon Negative company.

4.      Supporting and incentivising our people

For staff that want to offset their personal or family emissions we are rolling out a scheme that enables them to do this tax free and with a 50% financial contribution from MMT.

The salary sacrifice scheme offers tax free offsetting on up to 5.3* tons of CO2 per year. In addition, we are rolling out a salary sacrifice scheme for leasing electric vehicles and have been a long-time supporter of the Cycle To Work scheme.

5.      Personal Activity Tracking

We’ve created a simple model and a personal log for staff to add any carbon reduction activities that they do outside of work (e.g. change of diet, family offsetting, buying an EV, switching to renewable energy, etc) so that we’ll be able to report on both the company impact and our people’s personal impact. That way everyone feels like that are making more of a difference and helping to encourage and inspire others in a fun way.

Our Carbon Negative Slack channel is already one of the most popular and active channels in the business and we have an ideas log that is rapidly filling up with great ideas that we will look to rollout.

6.      Reporting

Our plan is to report quarterly to clients on the carbon footprint of their workstream (really easy to do because we know the kilograms of carbon per person per day that we generate and it’s easy to report on days spent on an account). The goal is to help spread awareness to our clients of what we are doing and to see if we can align with their own endeavours in this area (or help boost them).

We’ll start to report on the impact of all of this from January next year. We’ll be able to present company carbon reduction, show that we have offset more carbon than we emitted and also report on the impact that our people are having outside of work and through the salary sacrifice scheme.

The good news is that our sector can decarbonise relatively easily because we don’t manufacture anything. 85% of our footprint is travel, accommodation and power to offices and equipment. However, next year we’ll also start to look at our upstream and downstream (indirect) footprint by working with our suppliers too.

Finally we are hoping to work with organisations such as BIMA and BITC to see how we can support this type of activity across our sector and align with other sectors and standards.

Sorry for the slightly depressing nature of what is really the launch of an exciting initiative. Hopefully future updates will be more upbeat as we’re able to report on the impact of what we’re doing at MMT, what we’re doing with our clients and across the wider industry. We hope that our sector can decarbonise very quickly and become a shining example of low-carbon, commercially successful businesses. In tandem, it would be fantastic to see our sector shaping the way that technology can be used by other organisations to decarbonise as part of their own digital transformations. Alarmed by the situation as we are, we hope that other businesses will want to reduce their impact on the world we inhabit and join our Net Carbon Negative Movement.

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*This is based on a figure of 9 tons per year in the UK minus the 3.7 tons that the company is offsetting anyway. The footprint in the UK is down to around 6.5 tons per person but as offsetting isn’t expensive (and NOT the answer but a good thing to support) we’re sticking with the older, higher figure.

References:

1 - "Century of Hell": Brady Dennis and Chriss Mooney, "Scientist Nearly Double Sea Level Rise Projection for 2100, Because of Antarctica," The Washington Post, March 30, 2016

2 - "150 million people": Drew Shindell et al., "Quantified, Localized Health Benefits of Accelerated Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reductions", Nature Climate Change 8th March 2018, --291-95

3 - "for every 0.5 degree of warming": Solomon M. Hsiang et al., "Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict", Science 341, no. 6151 (September 2013)

4 - "$551 trillion in damages": R. Warren et al. "Risks Associated with Global Warming of 1.5 or 2C" Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, May 2018

5 - "U.N. Projections": Baher Kamel, "Climate Migrants Might Reach One Billion by 2050" ReliefWeb, August 21, 2017

6 - "at least ten times faster": "Maximum rates of carbon emissions for both the PETM and the end-Permian are about one billion tons of carbon, and right now we're at ten billion tons of carbon" the Penn State geoscientist Lee Kump, among the world's leading experts in mass extinctions in an interview with David Wallace-Wells, Author or The Uninhabitable Earth

N.B. These references are taken from The Uninhabitable Earth.