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Earlier this year Boffa Miskell launched a campaign to reduce our non-chargeable air travel by 10%. Climate change specialist Sam Parsons reports on our results thus far.
Why commit to a 10% reduction?
Boffa Miskell holds net carbon zero certification with Toitū Envirocare. To maintain this, we are committed to reducing our operational emissions to reach net zero by 2050. As a national consultancy working in sometimes remote locations, the vast majority of our operational emissions come from travel.
Aligning with ’science-based targets’ we need to reduce our gross emissions by around 4% every year, to maintain net carbon zero certification.
It’s important we continue to make meaningful reductions to our gross emissions, to meet the expectations of our people and clients as a leading environmental consultant. Some of our project partners only work with companies who are net carbon zero certified, and we are seeing many of our government clients releasing carbon zero policy statements and procurement standards which we need to meet if we want to continue to work with them.
Boffa Miskell’s company values speak directly to this; particularly “Takohanga: We own our actions and behaviours. We have a shared responsibility for our environment and communities”.
So how are we doing?
We have just been notified that we have achieved our Toitū net carbonzero certification, based on results from last year. 2023 was Boffa Miskell’s sixth year of reporting under the Toitū net carbonzero programme.
An absolute reduction in Category 1 and 2 emissions of 63.74 tCO2e has been achieved against base year 2018. Our total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for 2023 across all our emission sources was 466.24 tCO2e.
While this is slightly higher than our 2022 total, we are still currently tracking 25% lower than our 2018 base year and we are on track to stay below our annual emission reduction pathway. We are performing well against our science-aligned emission reduction targets, achieving a 28.5% decrease in total gross emissions between 2018 and 2023.
As far as 2024 goes, Boffa Miskell’s air travel during Q1 generated approximately 24.09 tonnes of CO2e, down from 33 tonnes during Q1 last year. It is important to note that we need to reduce air travel two years in a row to be deemed on track by Toitū.
Along with reducing air travel, we are also focusing on implementing a petrol and diesel fleet transition plan to deliver decarbonisation pathways for Boffa Miskell’s vehicle-related Scope 1 emissions.
As a company, we’re committed to keeping up this good work and we’ll provide a Q2 update when it is available.