Travel is a fundamental part of working at Lumenia. Our consultants travel to client sites to deliver advisory and delivery services. This means that our office-based footprint is small but our reach is wide. Modern collaboration technologies increasingly mean that remote working is often feasible and that client meetings may be virtual. However, on site work will always be an important element in every engagement.
We are very conscious that travel, and especially air travel, is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. As we cannot avoid it completely Lumenia decided to offset our emissions annually by investing in carbon offsetting programmes with added social benefits.
We first examined our travel-based carbon footprint in early 2019. We calculated that we generated 99 tonnes of carbon dioxide through travel in the previous year. We offset this by investing in a portfolio of Gold Standard Verified Emission Reduction carbon offsetting community projects.
We paused our offsetting activity in 2020 due to COVID challenges but with stability returning we decided to bring our offsetting back up to date. Naturally, with reduced travel our footprint was drastically reduced in 2020, and our 2019 footprint was thankfully down on 2018 too. We calculated that we generated 73 tonnes of carbon dioxide through travel over those two years. We again offset this by investing in a portfolio of Gold Standard Verified Emission Reduction community projects.
The projects included in this portfolio over the time we invested include:
- Improved Cookstoves for Social Impact in Ugandan communities
- India Breathing Space Improved Cooking Stoves (ICS) programme
- Uganda Borehole Project: Providing clean drinking water to a community in Africa
- Clean and Efficient Cooking and Heating Project in Shanxi, Hubei and Guizhou Provinces in China
Climate change is probably the largest challenge facing humanity today. The UN has called it a moral, ethical and economic imperative to slow global warming. Governments must drive the big changes needed but we each must make whatever changes we can. This is Lumenia’s first step on that journey of change.
Lumenia’s carbon offsetting is provided by Carbon Footprint Ltd.
