Counting Carbon: our 2023 emissions

As part of Shape History’s Plan for the Planet, we’re disclosing our GHG emissions assessment for 2023. From January – December 2023 our operations were responsible for 97 tCO2e. Keep reading to find out more about what this means.

Climate change boils down to two key factors: the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in our atmosphere and the resulting rise in global temperatures. Burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas releases CO₂, which traps heat and leads to global warming. This warming disrupts weather patterns, leading to more extreme events such as heatwaves, storms, and floods — impacts we’re already witnessing today.

To tackle this, we must reduce CO₂ emissions. But first, we need to measure them accurately:

What is our carbon footprint?
Which activities contribute most to our emissions?
How have our emissions changed over time?

By quantifying our emissions, we can identify the main culprits and track our progress in reducing them. That’s why it’s essential to count carbon.

Carbon accounting is a massively growing field. Using it, we can calculate a business’s carbon footprint and understand where its emissions come from.

We measure this through tCO2e, or “total carbon dioxide equivalent,” – a way to measure all the greenhouse gases a process or activity produces in terms of their impact on climate change. It adds up the emissions of different gases, like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, by converting them into a common unit.

Calculating tCO2e relies on two sets of data: business data and emissions factors.

Business data

Business data describes the activities performed by a business. This can be either:

Spend data – how much money was paid to company X for a certain good or service. This is less accurate but easier and less resource intensive to work out.
Activity data – how many litres of fuel or kilograms of material were bought, how many miles were travelled in an economy flight, how many kilowatts of energy were used in a given year?

Emissions factors

Emission factors are the carbon accountants’ currency converters, specifying the associated greenhouse gas emissions per unit of business data. They allow us to know the difference in carbon emissions from 1 kWh of electricity on the UK’s electricity grid versus 1 kWh on France’s, and that burning 1 kg of coal for electricity generation emits between 2–2.46 kg of CO₂. These factors are a crucial ingredient in enabling us to reveal the environmental impact of companies’ activities.

These emissions factors also give way to two types of reporting and disclosure of emissions. Location-based reporting reflects the emissions from the electricity we consume based on the average emission intensity of the power grid you are physically connected to , while market-based reporting accounts for what we purchase, such as renewable energy. At Shape History, we primarily use market-based reporting for our overall emissions, but for transparency, we also disclose and publish our location-based emissions.

SO WHAT WERE SHAPE HISTORY’S EMISSIONS FROM 2023?

We first commissioned Greenly in 2021 to conduct our assessment, which found that we were responsible for 74 tCO2e. However, due to the pandemic, this did not provide us with accurate figures for our ‘typical emissions. Therefore we use our 2022 emissions – where we were responsible for 110 tC02e – as our baseline to reduce emissions from.

The findings for the 2023 calendar year are now in.

what does this mean?

This data is invaluable — but only if we act on it. We’re already using these insights to refine our processes and policies, driving meaningful change towards a more sustainable future for our company and our planet.

Our progress is encouraging, with a nearly 12% reduction in total emissions (market-based) between 2022 and 2023, or 5.41% on a location-based approach. But we must go further. With a bold target of a 50% reduction by 2030, we’re committed to accelerating our efforts.