Northrop celebrates carbon neutrality with Climate Active certification
This month, we received confirmation of being Climate Active certified as a carbon neutral organisation for our 2020-21 financial year!
This is a great example of how cross-organisational collaboration can successfully achieve a shared goal.
We consider this to be an important step towards a sustainable future and that it is a core organisational responsibility. It speaks directly to our values-based culture of realising potential, developing, and empowering our people to be leaders of positive change for the industries and communities we serve.
Becoming carbon neutral, meant we had to:
- identify our starting period to create a baseline, which was FY20/21;
- calculate the greenhouse gas emissions generated by activity, such as fuel or electricity use and travel, information technology purchases and refrigerant gases from heating and cooling plants;
- identify how to reduce our emissions by managing energy use, investing in new technology or changing our behaviours; and
- offset any remaining emissions by purchasing carbon offset units.
Achieving ’carbon neutrality’ means we offset our organisational emissions by purchasing products that prevent, reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions., Northrop’soffset purchase for 2020-21 was 1621 tonnes.
As a signatory to Engineers Declare a Biodiversity and Climate Emergency, we wanted our offsets approach - to encompass both biodiversity and climate emergency. With this in mind, we purchased a stapled product, which provides biodiversity and carbon offset emissions, the latter of which complies with Climate Active’s requirements for carbon offsets. The two projects we chose for our offsets are Mount Sandy Conservation biodiversity project in South Australia and Song Chung Hydropower scheme in Vietnam.
The Mount Sandy Conservation project brings together indigenous and non-indigenous communities by promoting traditional land management for biodiversity conservation in a rare pocket of wetlands and woodlands between the Coorong National Park and Lake Albert. This piece of land forms a strategic wildlife corridor and is of great significance to the local Ngarrindjeri people.
The Song Chung Hydropower project harnesses the flowing energy of the Con River to generate 60,000MWh of renewable electricity to bridge the supply-demand gap and provide local employment and improved infrastructure.
Being Climate Active certified as carbon neutral has several advantages including:
- aligning with our climate and biodiversity commitments;
- living our value of ‘We Care’;
- future-proofing our organisation;
- attracting and retaining talent;
- meet the growing expectations from stakeholders including our clients;
- standing out from our competitors;
- developing carbon management expertise; and
- connecting to the community
To maintain our Climate Active carbon neutral certification, we will continue to measure, manage, reduce and offset our emissions every year.