Climate Change Taking Action

Defining your strategy to tackle climate change and achieve carbon neutrality

We work with individuals, businesses and organisations to both create and implement carbon management strategies of reduction and neutralisation.

An effective and robust climate change strategy or programme can help you in dealing with any risk associated and technical matters related to this issue, as well as to effectively communicate any taken action.

Each time we heat our homes, take a flight or drive a car, fossil fuels are burnt and CO2 is released into the atmosphere, causing climate change. We all need to take steps to reduce our CO2 emissions and there are many ways to reduce your carbon footprint that we develop in the following sections: Countries; Businesses and Institutions; Governments and Municipalities; and
Households and Individuals.

Defining a strategy to achieve carbon neutrality enables you to take responsibility for the carbon emissions resulting from your current activities (as an individual, or as an organisation).

Taking action means to adopt the “Reduce and Neutralise approach” – besides taking steps to actively reduce your carbon emissions, for those you cannot avoid emitting - the remaining - you can opt for offset them through the purchase of high quality carbon credits , and thus help funding high quality emissions reduction projects – through these the transfer of clean and low carbon technologies is possible, as well as the promotion of local sustainable development within the communities affected by the projects.

It is important to notice that to neutralise your carbon footprint should always be a complement procedure of an active reduction strategy of your emissions.

Countries

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Businesses and Institutions

The responsibility although might seem to reside in the governments, the true is that the firms, industries and institutions have their share of responsibility in the way climate is changing. This fact can’t be denied, so they too have to assume their ecological responsibility. By doing it they will try to find ways to manage the reduction of emission they generate.

There are some key steps for any firm or institution to manage their carbon emissions which consist in:

Making a commitment to reduce your company’s impact on climate change (make sure this is championed from the top and is communicated widely to your employees), audit the amount emissions (decide which emissions should be included in your inventory, measure these and benchmark your performance);

Defining a targeted plan for the annual carbon reductions targets and what the method to meet these stepped improvements;

Then setting up systems to measure and review performance (add the cost of carbon into your budgets);

And finally engaging the employees by communicating and encouraging energy saving working practices and reward reductions emissions in the office.

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Governments and Municipalities

It’s more than time to governments and municipalities especially in the so called developed world, to take action and assume an ecological responsibility. There are many different ways to take the matter in hands.

The principal one is of course the consideration of alternative energy generation options (e.g., solar and wind) in any future municipal buildings, for example the installation of solar photovoltaic systems in public buildings. Other alternative is to adopt a green building ordinance for new and existing municipal buildings, using for example materials that don’t come from industries heavy on carbon emissions.

A simple solution for the reduction of the carbon footprint is simply to purchase green tags or renewable energy certificates, giving this way the example. Furthermore, a more critical selection can be even made by choosing to maintain commercial relations only with firms or organisms that have too some kind of carbon free certificate.

An area where big progresses can be made is at solid waste management. The challenge will be to adopt policies that support environmental priorities, like for example reduce waste. Good solutions are the implementation of a duplex copying/printing policy in municipal office buildings, increase on-site composting and mulching of municipal plant debris, more recycling in municipal facilities, etc.

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Households and Individuals

There are many ways for a single person to reduce his emissions. One of the methods consists in first measuring the amount of emissions, find ways to reduce the emissions generated and then calculate how many carbon credits will be necessary to offset those that are not possible to reduce. This option is not actually very used nowadays, unfortunately.

But there other cheaper and maybe simplest ways to contribute to a sustainable way of living that consists in knowing a big amount of tricks and putting them to a use, for example, unplug the TV and computer at night.

This type of tricks are already used widely, especially in the most developed societies, which points out the ecological conscience of people and rises the probability of people offsetting the emissions that can’t be reduced, in the future.

Another option is to get more proactive, for example, participation in residential food waste collection program (for composting) and recycling/reuse programs for paper, cardboard and plastic film or participation in residential curbside recycling programs and collection of yard debris and food waste.

Besides that, there are other ways of reducing GHG emissions that may imply some investment. They are the installation of small-scale wind turbines to augment commercial and residential energy supply, solar hot water heaters and solar pool heaters

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