Highgate have calculated and double offset their 2022 carbon emissions, making them Carbon Neutral Plus for the second year running.

Highgate’s commitment to sustainability began in 2021, when Jenny Latimer joined the business as Head of Alliances & Operations. Fuelled by her own personal passion for sustainability, and with the support of her senior leadership team colleagues, Jenny began working on their sustainability strategy.

“To begin with, I conducted a lot of research. It is important to understand climate change and the impact it is having on our planet, as well as looking at industry specific issues,” explains Jenny.

“My research helped me to set goals for the year ahead. Firstly, I aimed to learn how to measure our carbon footprint with the plan to implement internal processes to track it as we go. Secondly, to form strategic alliances with partners in the channel that have similar sustainability goals to ours and enable us to provide services to our customers that promote sustainable behaviours. Lastly, to raise awareness and promote activity,”

Highgate’s first goal led them to engage with Techies Go Green, a community of like-minded individuals, predominately in the IT sector, committed to verifiably decarbonising their operations by 2030. Techies Go Green were able to give Highgate the information and tools required to measure their carbon footprint.

“As a 100% remote organisation, our Scope 1 and 2 measurements were zero. This made us carbon neutral by default. However, we also measure our homeworking and business travel emissions, which are Scope 3 activities. These calculations are what we base our goals and measurements on and what we offset.” Jenny explains. “Collating the data was not tricky but it was not all in the same place. Therefore, once we’d completed our calculations for 2021, knowing what data was needed, we introduced internal processes to capture the data in one place, hoping the 2022 calculations would prove easier, and they were! We are now moving our focus to calculate more scope 3 emissions, with the goal of measuring and reducing them too. This will not be such a quick process and our aim is to do so by 2030.”

Disclosing their 2022 data, Highgate’s total emissions were calculated at 19.19 tCO2e. Highgate double offset their emissions, offsetting a total of 40 tCO2e. This offsetting supports two VCS (Verified Carbon Standard) projects. Find out more about these projects here: https://www.carbonfootprint.com/americas_offsets.html