Unless you’re a certain former US President, there’s no denying the world is facing a very real and challenging climate crisis right now. This was recently highlighted further to those of us captivated by the latest David Attenborough Netflix documentary, A Life on Our Planet. This fantastic – if somewhat depressing – documentary draws focus on how our own planet is suffering due to the behaviour and actions of each and every one of us.
‘No Fakers’
This is one of our core value statements at Illustrate Digital. In a nutshell, it means we’re genuine as individuals and genuine as a company. It stems, very simply, from the fact that we care. We care about the work we do, about each other, and we care about our planet.
It’s easy to forget that what we do in our industry has an impact on the environment. We’re able to just fire up our laptops and crack on with what we’re good at, without much of a second thought.
But, the reality is that the global tech ecosystem actually has a huge environmental impact. So large in fact, that its carbon footprint is on par with the entire aviation industry’s emissions from fuel.
It is thought that the Information Technology sector contributes to around 3% of all global emissions, pumping around 1.54 gigatons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. A heck of a lot, basically.
Taking Action
At Illustrate Digital, we care deeply about our planet and are ever conscious about the impact we have as a business on the environment. But how can individual businesses take action to help slow down our trajectory towards a possible global catastrophe?
This is something we looked into very carefully towards the start of last year and we found a great solution, in the shape of Ecologi (formerly Offset Earth).
How Does It Work?
Ecologi are a social enterprise providing the means for businesses and individuals to make a difference, by investing in their tree planting programs and many other eco projects.
It’s as simple as signing up, inputting some simple details (such as number of staff and travel habits), and it’s all calculated to give a corresponding value in terms of offsetting carbon, which Ecologi then use to fund their various projects. In doing this you’re then able to see the direct impact your donation is having, via your own profile page and virtual forest, which is pretty cool.
Our progress as Illustrate Digital can be seen here, but here are some particular highlights;
- 2.252 trees planted
- Over 164 tonnes of C02 offset
This is the equivalent of 408,993 miles driven by car, or 126 long haul flights… setting aside the fact that we wouldn’t be able to actually travel this much even if we wanted to (#globalpandemic), these are stats we’re really proud of!
What’s Next?
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought a lot of things into sharp focus over the last year or so, environmental concerns being one of them. There’s no question that we’ll be continuing to support Ecologi and ‘grow our forest’, but we’ll also be looking closely at anything else we can change or improve to ‘do our bit’ for the planet. It’s important to us that we’re a responsible company, both for our team and for our clients, and we’re proud to be able to call ourselves a Climate Positive Workforce.
You can find out more about Ecologi here.
