Greenhouse Gas Offsets Breakdown 2023
April, 2024
Since 2019, as part of core initiatives around sustainability, Otak has been quantifying and offsetting the greenhouse gas emissions associated with our business operations. Following last year’s advances, we recently wrapped up our efforts to quantify our 2023 emissions and wanted to share the results with you.
Our firmwide emissions increased by 11% from 2022 to 2023, a result of increases to our Scope 3 emissions associated with employee commuting and reimbursed mileage for business travel. The total increase to our Scope 3 emissions was 17%.
Our Scope 2 emissions remain nearly the same as last year. Because our office spaces are leased and we do not have visibility into Otak’s energy consumption through submetering, we apply regional emissions factors on a square foot basis. While there was a slight decrease, it was less than 1% overall.
Continued Offsets During Accelerated Growth
We are proud to continue to work with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF) to quantify and offset our carbon footprint. BEF provides third-party verified offsets and renewable energy credits. Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) are purchased to offset our Scope 2 emissions, which includes office energy consumption across all regions. All other emissions are encompassed in Scope 3. New this year, we have included the GHGs associated with our remote cloud servers; given the focus on data center sustainability, we were surprised to see that the total emissions from our Microsoft Azure servers was less than 1% of our total Scope 3 emissions (1.56 mtCO2e).
2023 Emissions Distribution
Because we have only been quantifying our emissions for five years, and three of those were during the pandemic, it has been challenging for Otak to establish a baseline for our emissions. Now that we can see business operations returning to a “normal” state, we are looking forward to performing some additional analysis in 2024 to develop a reduction plan. As our company grows, our emissions will undoubtedly continue to increase. But, it is critical that we implement strategies to curtail substantial increases that exceed proportional growth in our business.
For our Scope 3 offsets, Otak has decided to contribute to the following verified offset projects:
