Race to Zero Carbon: Footprint Report 2023-2024
In July 2021, Efeca joined the United Nation’s Race to Zero campaign.
Race To Zero is a global campaign to rally leadership and support from businesses, cities, regions, investors for a healthy, resilient, zero carbon recovery that prevents future threats, creates decent jobs, and unlocks inclusive, sustainable growth. It mobilizes a coalition of leading net zero initiatives, representing 1,162 cities, 52 states and regions, 2,998 businesses, 7,277 SME’s, 661 financial institutions, and 1,193 Higher Education Institutions. These ‘real economy’ actors joined 146 countries starting in 2021 in the largest ever alliance committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 at the latest. Collectively these actors now cover nearly 25% global CO2 emissions and over 50% GDP, and SMEs represent over half of the members.
As a small business, Efeca joined the Race to Zero through the UK’s SME Climate Hub, along with many other small and medium sized UK businesses. Efeca pledged to halve emissions before 2030 and achieve net zero emissions by 2040. The first step in this journey was to measure our baseline emissions, for the year 2019-2020. We then measured and reported our emissions for 2021-2022 so that we would have a comparison for a more normal (non-Covid) year. We also measured our footprint in 2022-23.
The following report contains the calculations of our GHG emissions for our baseline year 2019 – 2020, as well as 2021 – 2022, 2022 – 2023 and 2023 – 2024.
It includes information on our company, background on our choice of baseline year, information on our scope of reporting and methodologies, and information on our GHG emission totals. It also compares our progress over the years and shows how we are performing against the more specific targets we set in 2022. Our overall carbon footprint of 7.74 tonnes is lower than our baseline year of 17.39 tonnes, and has reduced by 55.5% since our baseline year. For the first time since we began measuring, homeworking makes up the largest portion of our emissions. This reflected this year’s lower rate of business travel (mainly through a reduction in flights) as well as our efforts to lower our emissions in our office space and the fact that the majority of our team worked primarily from home (10 out of 12). We have also improved our methodology to measure our commuting and business use, which we were not doing in our baseline year.
We agreed to achieve carbon neutralisation of our total emissions for 2019/20, 2021/22, and 2022/23, as well as 2023-24, which we have achieved through the purchase of carbon offsets in 2023 and in 2024 from a Plan Vivo project called CommuniTree in Nicaragua. Our total emissions in 2023-24 equalled 7.74 tonnes, so we purchased 8 tonnes of carbon credits. We chose Plan Vivo as Emily is a Trustee and we chose CommuniTree for their work with smallholder farmers in Nicaragua to grow native trees alongside their existing farming practices and their beyond carbon removals approach including encouraging agro-forestry.
For more information, please contact us.
