PAS 2060 - The Journey to Carbon Neutrality

Please feel free to download the slides here.

In many marketplaces, carbon neutrality is becoming an important attribute for consumers wishing to choose more sustainable products and services. There are many organisations and products that are now claiming to be ‘carbon neutral’ - but how can we be sure that those claims are independently verified?
 
Whilst companies can calculate their footprints, purchase credits and claim carbon neutrality, the PAS 2060 standard provides an internationally recognised framework for accuracy and verification. This is seen as becoming increasingly key as companies and governments move towards a net zero world by 2050.
 
PAS 2060 therefore helps organisations demonstrate the carbon neutrality of a specific product, entity or activity. It underpins reliable, credible claims that the subject of such a claim can indeed be considered carbon neutral.
 
The main benefits of the standard are:

• It is the only internationally recognised verification for organisational carbon neutrality.

• It guides companies to quantify their carbon footprint and supports subsequent reduction of emissions with a 12-month review.

• The inclusion of offsetting using certified credits encourages the support of climate finance projects that add social and environmental value.

• It enables companies to demonstrate a voluntary and ambitious commitment to climate action.

No matter what sector you operate in, your organisation can use the PAS 2060 standard to strengthen relationships with customers and contribute to the long-term stability of life on Earth.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
 
PAS 2060 – The Journey to Carbon Neutrality

00:03 - Good afternoon and welcome to this webinar. A very good Friday afternoon to you or Friday wherever you are. I notice there's a number of people in various parts of the globe so, wherever you are good day, good afternoon, good morning, good evening,
 
00:21 - and welcome to this webinar brought to you by NQA. You should all be able to see my screen. Just to make sure you're going to get what you're expecting, we're going to be over the next three quarters of an hour or maximum of an hour, we're going to be covering PAS 2060, the publicly available specification for carbon neutrality.

Our Purpose

00:50 - A couple of things I always semi-joke about this, I'm contractually obliged to tell you about NQA and I noticed there's a couple of NQA global staff members on the on the webinar.
 
01:05 - So I need to just to make sure that you can see you can see the slides a little bit about who NQA are and within the UK we're one of the top three now certification bodies across the board and particularly in America and China pretty big in aerospace.

Certification and Training Services

01:29 - A little bit about the standards that we certify and some of our particularly large clients both in the UK and around the globe.

Your Presenter

01:42 - And the important bit who I am, so I think many of you have met me before. I do know there's a number of people on the webinar who've just sat through an hour and a quarters discussion with me around PAS 2060 who I also then invited to join this webinar.
 
01:57 - So welcome there and you might understand because I've just spent an hour and a quarter talking, if I run out of voice by the end of this, I do apologize. So I'm NQA's principal assessor covering energy and environment or environment and energy as it says on there it sometimes gets changed round and that's me. I'm based in the UK I'm based in Halifax in West Yorkshire
 
02:27 - and I've been at NQA since November 2007 and one particular person I will say hello to is my old boss Stephen Sykes who's on the call used to previously work for a large environmental charitable organization called Groundwork and Stephen was my boss there, so I need to be on my best behaviour this afternoon not that you would expect anything other. So I've been around
 
02:54 - for at NQA for over 13 years now and I'm one of NQA's two principal assessors there's myself covering environment and energy and some of you may have sat through some webinars done by my colleague Terry Fisher who is our principal assessor for health and safety. Actually just
 
03:14 - realized we've consolidated a couple of the slides so I was thinking the next slide was going to tell me what I needed to know but it's now on this one so I always if you've been on any webinars with me before you'll know that it will take longer than it says we did allow for 45 minutes and that's maybe what we're going to get. I don't know we'll see how long that takes
 
03:38 - but there will be some time for questions. You can ask questions as we're going along so on your on the used on the right hand side of the screen you should see a number of options, one of them should be a chat box in that chat box you can type questions as we go along.
 
03:56 - I may answer them there and then if it's relevant to what we're talking about or I might save them to the end so if you think I've forgotten about you, you've asked a question don't worry it might be that we've just decided to cover it at the end.
 
04:10 - So that's asking questions, as I say there is time at the end for more formal questions and the important bit there is no need to frantically scribble down either everything I'm saying or everything you see on screen. Everybody who's registered on the webinar
 
04:26 - whether you attend or not so even if you've registered you will all get a copy of the slides and also this webinar is being recorded and there will be a link sent to you all with details on how to actually access the details of the webinar and to be able to see the actual or listen to a recording. If you like of what's going on so I think
 
04:58 - that's nearly everything I'm just going to double check something because for some rather strange reason I can't see the chat box on my screen just at the moment I can see the question box so it might be better if you can to ask a question in the question box for now because for some reason
 
05:18 - on my screen, the chat box isn't there and I'm not quite sure where it's disappeared to so hopefully it can somebody just say hello or something in the chat in the question box just to make sure that we can, that we can see that there's something there because it's there for some reason.
 
05:37 - I appear to have lost the chat box anyway. Thank you, hello, thank you Rita I'm going to get daily used by people saying no that's fine everybody can see that I can see all the questions.
 
05:47 - Now so that's great thank you right. So, I don't need to write everything down you will get the slides and you will get a link to a recording of the webinar. So, what are we going to do?

Learning Objectives

05:59 - We're going to have a look at what carbon neutrality is, try and cut through some of the terminology, we're going to look at the PAS 2060 approach we're going to look at what the standard actually is and we're going to then look at how we would walk through the standard with somebody who was wishing to seek to be certified against that particular standard.
 
06:31 - So, to have a look at what is meant by the term carbon neutrality, to understand the background to carbon reductions, why are we doing it, I always assume on these webinars that everybody knows nothing apologize if I’m going over ground that you, you already know but I assume that everybody knows nothing and we'll all start at the beginning.
 
06:53 - So, we're going to look at the development of PAS 2060, what are the benefits of it, look at the different scopes of carbon emissions and then finally the four stages of the PAS 2060 process.

What is Carbon Neutrality - Definitions

07:07 - So, there's many different terms that are banded about, you've only got to switch on the news these days and if they're not talking about COVID they're going to be talking about carbon neutrality or net zero or global warming or climate change or something like that.
 
07:22 - So there's lots and lots of different terminology and I want to try and make sure that we can all sort of understand what it is that we're looking at, what we're talking about, the different things that are out there and that we all if you like singing from the same hymn sheet.
 
07:43 - So just going through the slide then let me just say I've got right sorry about that I've got the chat bot back the chat box back. It's better if you type in the chat box, sorry to change that but I've just worked out where it is. So the difference with a question box
 
07:59 - I can only see one question at a time if it's in the chat box I can see everything. So forget what I've told you five minutes ago, we're going to go using the chat box for questions thank you.
 
08:10 - So carbon neutrality, just to try and cut through some of this carbon neutrality defined as a state of balance between the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere and the carbon dioxide that's being removed from the atmosphere. So that's not saying that you're stopping emitting carbon but you're doing something to try and balance out that effect. Zero carbon or net zero is no carbon emissions
 
08:34 - are being produced and if I’m being brutally honest I always maintain that that's a physical impossibility. We'll never get to the stage where we're not producing any carbon at all but for purposes we tend to talk about zero carbon or net carbon and that's going to be getting as close to zero as we can. I do know with one of the universities I'm working with in
 
08:59 - Manchester working with what's called the Tyndall center, they've set net zero as actually a 95 reduction so they accept that there will be five percent of their current emissions that they're not likely to be able to remove. And then carbon negative there are some companies already  
 
09:18 - claiming to be carbon negative and that's reducing your carbon footprint to less than neutral so in other words what we're doing is you're actually removing carbon from the atmosphere rather than adding to it so you've tipped the balance of the scales the other way, and in fact there are some companies now committing to removing historical carbon.
 
09:38 - So looking at either offsetting or putting schemes into place to remove carbon from the atmosphere to not only look at removing what's being produced now, but to look at what's being produced or what has been produced in the back in historical times.
 
09:59 - So the carbon trust definition, so that's the UK carbon trust, they've defined carbon neutrality having a minimum requirement of covering scope 1 and 2 emissions with scope 3 being encouraged whereas net zero must cover scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions and we'll have a look shortly at what we mean by the different scopes of emissions.

Why Then Carbon Neutrality?

10:28 - So why do we think this is important, why carbon neutrality?
 
10:33 - Obviously to solve the problem of man-made emissions and their impact on climate change, as I say it's on the news constantly at the moment quite likely so and obviously later on this year we've got the COP26 climate conference taking place in Glasgow probably going to be the most important climate conference that we've had to date.
 
10:55 - But carbon neutrality is where I tend to sit at the moment, it's impossible to reduce our carbon emissions to zero no matter how hard we try but carbon neutrality through a scheme such as PAS 2060 allows us to close the gap by purchasing carbon offsets.

Carbon Neutrality – Why?

11:15 - So why are we doing it obviously the climate the earth's climate you know that's four and a half billion years old we've seen many changes as recent as eighteen thousand years ago most have Britain most of the UK was covered in ice and glacier but up to now. All of these
 
11:33 - changes in climate have been entirely natural some have been maybe related to the sun but generally everything's been in the hands in the control of mother nature. The changes that we see now are the result. It's expected they are or it's deemed that they are a result of increasing human population and associated commercial industrial and human activities.
 
12:02 - I speak to a lot of people around environment and I've come across three possible positions on climate change you may decide that there are others but actually these are what I've sort of come across this other three areas the three views that people have on climate change.

Climate Change

12:20 - At the top is a climate change denier that global warming isn't occurring, climate change isn't occurring, so neither is climate change at all so nothing's happening. It's all it's all a conspiracy nothing's happening at all the global warming and climate change are occurring
 
12:36 - but actually these are natural cyclic effects unrelated to human activity. So in other words all of the changes are still entirely natural and actually what we're doing do we really believe that it is having that effect. So that's one position that's somewhere in
 
12:54 - the middle or the final one that global warming is occurring mainly as a result of human activity and so climate change is also the result of that human activity. So obviously cyclical change does work but generally I think the view and I guess the view of most of us sat on here
 
13:11 - is that we would put ourselves in camp number three that global warming is occurring mainly as a result of human activity and so climate change is the result of that human activity and the reason it's happening is through the trend for the use of fossil fuels because
 
13:30 - releasing fossil fuels or use of fossil fuels releases carbon into the atmosphere that were actually buried or sequestered is the term millions and millions of years ago.
 
13:43 - So when you burn a piece of coal when you burn a kilowatt hour of gas you're releasing carbon that was locked away by the earth millions and millions of years ago and adding this old carbon to the world's current stock of carbon that's being sort of generally
 
14:00 - sits in the atmosphere in terms of parts per million, in terms of the atmosphere releasing that old carbon back into the atmosphere is what's tipping the balance and nature whilst it tends to be able to cope with the normal cyclical. Release of carbon releasing all  
 
14:18 - these old stores of carbon is actually tipping the balance if you like and nature can't cope and obviously more and more carbon starts to insulate the earth, carbon is a greenhouse gas, insulates the earth and leads to a warming generally of the climate which then leads to climate change.

What Are the Main Culprits?

14:42 - So we've talked about global warming we've talked about carbon dioxide isn't the only issue there are a number of gases that are leading to climate change and that's a slide that I put together roughly looking at the percentage so of all of our carbon emissions, roughly two-thirds  
15:06 - 65 percent come from carbon dioxide releases burning of fossil fuels and other industrial processes however there are then releases from forestry and other land use which is about 11 and then about a quarter or just slightly less comes from other gases that actually are much worse as global warming gases compared to carbon dioxide.
 
15:36 - So if we release methane into the atmosphere and methane comes from both natural sources and particularly intensive farming particularly sort of meat production cows eat grass at one end and emit methane at the other end in large quantities  
 
15:55 - as a global warming gas methane is approximately 30 times as severe. So one kilogram of methane has the same global warming impact of about 30 grams so 30 kilograms of carbon dioxide nitrous oxide through the production of fertilizer and use of fertilizer and also
 
16:19 - through vertical use things like that. We release nitrous oxides as part of our driving around to burning of carbon-based fuels. That's about 270 times as bad as carbon, so one kilogram of nitrous oxide is equivalent to about at 270 kilograms or over a quarter of a ton of carbon. F-gases  
 
16:40 - we find them in aircon in chillers places like that they've tended to replace ozone depleting substances which is great. That's allowed the ozone layer to start to renew but it's also now causing issues with climate change and the global warming they have a figure somewhere  
 
16:58 - between 800 and 10 000 times so if it's one of the worst F-gases, one kilogram of gas might be the equivalent of 10 tons of carbon. And then finally the worst thing I could come across was sulfur hexafluoride which we find as an insulator in some high voltage applications not very much of that but that is 22 and a half thousand times as potent as carbon dioxide.  

UK Carbon Budgets and 2050 Target

17:24 - So this is all to give you a little bit of background information. I appreciate those people sat around the world so this may be slightly less interesting to yourselves but certainly within the UK we have set and enshrined in law and I've had to just, over the last
 
17:45 - couple of days update this because it has changed slightly. As the UK we are setting carbon budgets and these carbon budgets are enshrined in law and are leading us down to the, about what's called the balanced net zero pathway. So round about the late 2040s, 2048 or somewhere, 
 
18:10 - around about there we are looking at as a country being as close to net zero. As we possibly can now obviously you can see the trajectory and the obviously we've got the carbon budgets now one to six the sixth one has been fairly recently announced the previous five are active legislative carbon budgets. I don't think the sixth one has been set in legislation just yet,
 
18:39 - but you can see as a country what our emissions are in terms of million tons of carbon equivalence a year so when we talk about carbon equivalence that takes into account the figures that we saw on the previous slide. So it's the equivalent of tons of carbon so sat here as we are in 2020 we are somewhere in the region of about 5 million tons of carbon  
 
19:04 - a year carbon equivalent going into the into the atmosphere, those are our current emissions and to put that into context the UK's carbon emissions are probably somewhere in the region of between one and a half and two percent of global man-made carbon emissions.

10-Point Plan to Get UK on Track for Net-Zero

19:25 - Not trying to score any political points either way but in order to work towards our carbon budget. This was the government's ten-point plan which I think was released towards the end of 2020 to get us towards and to get us on track for four net zero. I'm not going to read that out in detail
 
19:48 - you can see that for yourselves but there are the main ten points on the left hand side, going from offshore wind through hydrogen nuclear right the way down to assisting nature through planting of trees and innovation and finance. So, using tax methods and also investing in technology to reach these new energy ambitions so that's how the government are guiding us along.
 
20:18 - So, we've got to do our bit to try and reduce the amount of carbon that we and our businesses are emitting.

Going Forward

20:29 - So, going forward from where we are sat here now in the sort of third of the way through 2020, 2021, sorry we're at what's being called an important inflection point so government's industry and civil society everybody's coming together to take climate action.
20:47 - As I say it's on the news almost every day and there's a growing consensus around the world that a zero-carbon future is important and in order to achieve the Paris goals we must halve global initiations over the next decade now I suspect those are the Paris goals.
 
21:05 - We may find that there are some tighter goals coming out of cop 26 in Glasgow later on this year, but for the Paris goals we need to halve our emissions over the next decade and in order to do that to rapidly adapt and prevent our climate warming further so we need to move faster.
 
21:25 - This was just there are many quotes out there but this is one of the the quotes that I found that I thought was relevant from carolyn fairburne who was the past director general of the CBI, Confederation of British Industries, immediate and decisive action is needed to avoid the catastrophic impacts of climate change and to create opportunities in low carbon technologies.

Greenwashing

21:49 - Now one of my pet hates and this has been so for the 20 odd years now I've been working environmental, I think I started working environmentally when I joined groundwork in 1995 but greenwashing, so greenwashing is an attempt to capitalize on this growing demand for environmentally sound products  
 
22:08 - and ways of working but actually conveying a false impression that what we're doing both as a company and our products are environmentally sound.  Some very well-known examples of this, you know people like VW I would never trust any claim made by VW ever again, I don't think  
 
22:29 - but lots of people make spurious claims that their products, their services and them themselves are environmentally sound. However, a genuinely green product, a genuinely green business, organization backs up their claims with facts and further details. So how do we do this?

PAS 2060

22:53 - In terms of carbon neutrality, one of the keyways now that people are looking at is the use of this standard PAS 2060 publicly available specification. I always make the same joke, it's a publicly available specification but you've got to buy it so it's not that public. I'm also just going  
 
23:13 - to say at the moment nobody appears to have asked any questions or has written anything in the chat box now it does look as though there is a question, but if you remember, here we go right 
can I just ask there are a couple of questions in the question box, could I ask you from now to start writing them in the chat box rather than the question box.
 
23:42 - I am going to come back to some of the questions towards the end because I think we'll come back to those I think they're more appropriate to look at the end so we'll look at those because there's some fairly technical questions around... Where is the chat box, is the chat box not under the question box on the left, so the right-hand side of oh you can't find the chat box either right, keep going with the question box then sorry to confuse you right.
 
24:12 - Either box if you can't find the chat box write it in the question box if you can find the chat box write it in there I can see both so that's fine.
 
24:20 - So PAS 2060 publicly available specification has been around since 2010, so it's 11 years old as this standard. So you might ask yourself why are we suddenly having an interest in it now?
 
24:32 - It came into effect in April 2010 so it's exactly 11 years old and it was reissued seven years ago now in April 2014, in its current form and if I’m honest, if you'd asked me about this in April 2014 I wouldn't have heard of it and I suspect you were all the same.
 
24:52 - What it does it's a specification on how a business demonstrates carbon neutrality specifies requirements to be met by any entity and that's the phrase that the standard uses, it uses a term entity by any entity seeking to demonstrate carbon neutrality through the quantification, reduction and offsetting of greenhouse gas emissions. Well what the standard calls a uniquely identified subject. Now somebody's already beat me to that and said can you help me out by giving examples of uniquely identified subjects?

Business Benefits

25:33 - I think we'll come on to that shortly, if we don't I'll come back to it in about two minutes, because I want to talk a little bit about those. So hold that question and we'll come back to uniquely identified subjects. So why might people want to use a formal standard now? 
 
25:56 - Principally the same as you might want to be registered to 14001 or 50001 or 9001 or any other standards. It demonstrates environmental integrity first of all, so it's something that you can show with facts and figures if you like that it's not just a spurious claim you can demonstrate that you are carbon neutral. It provides a clear and credible message to instill customer trust in in that overall environmental message.
 
26:31 - There is an increasing customer demand for environmentally friendly products and services some of the larger investment organizations are starting to remove their investment in businesses that maybe are in the heavily carbon sector, so people who are involved in mining, oil exploration they're finding that a lot of those companies are finding that some of the larger pension funds are divesting their investments in them.
 
27:02 - Having a formal system in place also helps to engage and motivate our staff and other people who might have an interest in what we're doing, so be that stakeholders, be that shareholders, be that our neighbours, be that our customers, our suppliers  
 
27:18 - that we are doing something through operational and behavioural changes. But ultimately it's about differentiating your business from the competition which will also then allow you to make that plan and to give you a bit of a head start in the market share because people will be making informed purchasing decisions, and if you can demonstrate carbon neutrality in a fully verified manner then then that gives you a little bit of a head start. 

The Basic Principles of PAS 2060

27:48 - I still haven't forgotten about your question, derricks just said internationally recognized do we think it should wait until it becomes an ISO standard, how can you be certified to pass standard if it's not? It is internationally recognized if you track back and look at how most of the standards started ISO 9001 started as a British standard, ISO 50001 started as a British standard, ISO 14001 started as a British standard.  
 
28:23 - All of these standards started out as British standards and eventually became ISO standards now, all of these standards started out as British standards and eventually became ISO standards. Now I’m not aware that there is any work going on to be for this becoming an ISO standard at the moment somebody may know better than me, I don't sit on the relevant committee, my director would probably be a better person for me to ask but I'm not aware of any plans at the moment.
 
28:49 - But there is global uptake of this standard so there are quite a number of people overseas at the top that are looking at using this standard.

What Can Be Certified?

29:00 - There we go. So entity, so basically anything almost can be considered within PAS 2060 as an entity, and the next slide actually gives you some examples. 
 
29:18 - So it's a little bit like setting the scope within a management system so in other words what is this declaration relating to? So the entity that's declaring itself carbon neutral has to uniquely identify itself, so who are we that's making the declaration  
 
29:35 - and then what is it that we're declaring. So one of this one of the one of the PAS 2060 certificates that we've already issued relates to a company quite a large company based in Scotland.  
 
29:48 - So that they have identified themselves with their business name and I'll tell you who they are they're a company called Petersons so they've identified themselves as Petersons limited.
 
29:59 - The subject of their declaration of carbon neutrality is one of their sites at the moment so they have said that one of their sites in Scotland is now operating fully carbon neutrally, so they've identified themselves and they've identified the subject of that declaration as part of the process.
 
30:19 - They then established all of the characteristics of that site, what does the site do, what does it what does it achieve, what's the site's objectives and then as part of this determination they then have to go through a workout and take into consideration everything that happens on that site that are material to the fulfilment achievement and delivery of the carbon neutrality status.  
 
30:45 - There we go thank you thank you Anya so 14068 thank you I could have probably found that but thank you.

Entity

30:54 - So, what can be an entity? So under PAS 2060 anything on the right, so on the left-hand side can declare itself or can declare something carbon neutral. 
 
31:10 - So public sector, a community so you could have your town declare itself carbon neutral organizations, companies or parts of companies clubs, social groups families, or even an individual now whether it's an individual you would want to say PAS 2060 certification I'm not sure.  
 
31:31 - But it is entirely possible and any of those entities that are shown on the left-hand side can declare anything on the right-hand side to be carbon neutral. So it can be an activity, it could be a product, it could be a particular service, it could be a building or a suite of buildings,  
 
31:52 - it could be a project, an event or a development. So for instance in the news at the moment in the news being released just at the moment Volkswagen, I said I wouldn't believe anything they said.
 
32:04 - Volkswagen have now launched two fully electric cars, the id3 which is golf sized and the id4 which is I think tiguan. Their marketing states that both of those cars are carbon neutral. So if we were to take that example the overall entity would be VW, the scope would be the product of the id3 car,
 
32:31 - if we take the example of the one I've worked with the entity would be peterson limited the scope would be there what they call their edsel site in Scotland. It could be anything it could be an event I was somewhat hoping that somebody might come along and want a large festival to be done as carbon neutral something like download festival or somewhere like that that would be my  
 
32:54 - taste in music but anything Glastonbury could be they already do declare themselves carbon neutral, they could actually be declared carbon neutral in the PAS 2060 if they're so wished.
 
33:07 - So basically scope can be almost anything that you can ring fence put some sort of a boundary round and then work out the carbon emissions of that area. I hope that answers your question Suraj if you want to add anything or add a sub sort of supplementary question feel free.

1. Measure

33:29 - So, going through the process excuse me so how would we start or how would a business start around going through this this process?
 
33:41 - So the starting point is for the business to actually calculate their carbon footprint for the declared entities, so once you've decided what it is you've got to work out the carbon footprint.
 
33:54 - PAS 2060 towards the back gives a number of what are what it considers to be accepted or it says recommended, so it's not an exhaustive list but gives a number of recommendations on how you might go around working out your carbon footprint. So 14064-1  
 
34:17 - is one methodology. The world business council for sustainable development greenhouse gas protocol, wbcsd, that's another one that it recommends, then your national government environmental reporting protocols. So here in the UK the one I just kept talking  
 
34:38 - about petersons, they use the same methodology that they will use for sccr reporting which is a UK requirement for businesses reporting energy and carbon emissions and that uses carbon calculations of carbon values that are updated on an annual basis by the UK government. And then for products and services there there's other ones, so PAS 2050 for instance is another PAS but it's a specification for assessing life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of goods and services.
 
35:14 - There isn't a right way and a wrong way of doing this but the standard says that you might like to think about some of the better ways of actually measuring your carbon footprint.
 
35:27 - Now the standard doesn't expect you to cover absolutely everything as with a lot of these standards that there is a de minimis so PAS 2060 expects that the calculations that you undertake cover a minimum of 95 percent of your total calculated emissions, and you can exclude emissions that constitute less than one percent of the total. Now what I didn't quite  
 
35:58 - make clear on that slide is really the emissions that we're talking about are scope 3 emissions and you can exclude emissions that constitute less than one percent of the total, so long as the sum of all those excluded emissions doesn't come to more than five percent.  
 
36:18 - If that makes sense. So if something you tried to exclude is one and a half percent of your missions you can't exclude it even though it comes within that sort of five percent. 
 
36:29 - So scope one emissions direct emissions from owned or controlled sources, so if you've got some gas boilers in your company, if you're driving around in a company lorry, in a company vehicle you're burning fuel, you're burning gas, that is a direct emission from something that you own and control and that is a scope one emission.  

36:54 - Scope two emissions are indirect emissions from the generation of purchase electricity steam heating and cooling, so your electricity bills particularly which is where most people will have scope to emissions if you're using, I don't know 150 000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year,  
 
37:13 - there is a direct figure within the UK that's about 220 grams at the moment per kilowatt hour, that will give you the emission figure for the electricity that you are using.
 
37:26 - But that also applies if you are purchasing it as one of my clients does they're purchasing steam from an adjacent business, they're not generating the steam they're buying it in from next door.  
 
37:38 - So again that's actually an indirect emission.  Scope 3 emissions are everything else that occurs within an organization's value chain and are generally a lot harder to quantify.
 
37:51 - So treatment of waste purchasing of goods business travel employee commuting one of the questions that that cropped up in the discussion I was having with a number of the consultants early on this afternoon, was about calculating scope three emissions for people working from home.  
 
38:10 - Right good questions and one that we picked up earlier on for scope 2 the electricity emissions figure does it matter if the electricity comes from renewable sources?  
 
38:19 - Well yes it does matter but when you're doing the conversion you're doing the conversion based on the actual figure that the government provides in the UK.  
 
38:28 - So whether you're so if you're on a green tariff that's good but actually when you put your plug in the wall you're not getting green electricity you're getting a cocktail of electricity coming out of the wall, so generally it's when you're reporting greenhouse gas emissions you use the  
 
38:44 - conversion figure that the government provides which takes into account the amount of carbon that's in the grid and takes into account the amount of clean electricity renewable sources if you like. About five years ago the figure was and I'm talking in very round figures now about five years ago it was somewhere approaching 500 grams per kilowatt hour that's more than halved down to about 210 to 220 now so that's already been taken into account by the calculations I'm afraid.  
 
39:19 - So scope 3 missions are the hardest one as I say one of the questions that came up early because a lot of our businesses are working from home.  
 
39:26 - Yeah I haven't time to get into market based greenhouse gas calculations of power that's a much more detailed question and yes Kurt you're quite right about that but within a 45 minute to an hour webinar on PAS 2060, I can't get into that level of detail at the moment but yes technically you are right about market-based greenhouse gas calculations.  
 
39:54 - So yeah the question was asked about homework and I'm sat at home at the moment sat in my study with a light on because it's raining outside and the heating on a little bit but my carbon calculations have not been taken into account by NQA if we were to work out our carbon footprint although they probably are scope 3 emissions.  
 
40:18 - Right I'm going to move on because again Tony’s asked a question about how far do you go into the supply chain as a distributor would be emissions produced from the manufacturer?  
 
40:30 - There it's a there's a whole webinar I could probably do on purchasing and supply chain if you want to look into that further if you're in the UK and I think you probably are.  
 
40:42 - I think the institute of purchasing managers have got quite a lot of detail about how to work out the carbon foot printing of purchased items and there's a huge amount of assumptions made and in most cases it's done on the spend. So you would say last year I bought five million pounds worth of goods and the carbon equivalent of that is x tons and there's a huge amount of assumptions made.  
 
41:07 - I've not really got into the that's right yeah in my experience go for 90 percent of scope 3 on overall spend absolutely that's what most people do and I don't know the figures off the top of my head but there are some figures based on spend and that's how people tend to work it out.

2. Reduce

41:27 - So having worked out what your carbon footprint is what to buy whatever method and then having had an organization like ourselves validate that figure, the next thing is to actually start to reduce that carbon, those carbon emissions. Now in the first year the standard allows for you to fully offset  
 
41:48 - 100 of your carbon emissions. So let's say if we take the company I've talked about numerous times now Petersons in the first year their carbon emissions for 2020 which was the period that they were claiming and remember buying credits for,  
 
42:06 - their carbon emissions were 221 tons. So as at the point that they were certified to PAS 2060 they hadn't made any reductions they're fully offset their 2020 emissions. The next stage is for them to plan to reduce these carbon emissions and as part of that a business has to produce
 
42:27 - a carbon management plan. One of the main parts of that carbon management plan is a public commitment to continue, not only to achieve but to maintain carbon neutrality and to produce a time scale for achieving the carbon neutrality and setting specific targets for greenhouse gas reductions.  
 
42:49 - So it's very similar to objectives and targets within say 14001 or 50001 standards. So you're setting specific targets and as part of those specific targets how you're going to achieve them, so going back to the company that I’ve mentioned Peterson’s, their carbon management plan  
 
43:11 - said that over the first 12 months they were going to reduce their emissions by approximately 20 percent. They talked about how they were going to achieve them, they gave they gave me details of the thing, I'm sorry let me just get rid of that somebody's calling me, they gave me details of the products they were going to buy, they were going to remove a lot  
 
43:32 - of the older lighting and replace it with led they showed me the calculations on the type of lighting, the parameters for the lighting they'd also talked about the different the changes they were going to be making to the on-site forklift trucks and things like that. So they set out a plan on how they were going to achieve in year one the targeted greenhouse gas emissions. So they  
 
43:57 - have to justify the techniques and the measures they're going to use, you can start to take into account historic reductions, they chose not to they decided to set a baseline of 2020 and move forward from there and that's the easiest way to do it and then finally to let me know  
 
44:20 - what the offsetting strategy was. So they had to offset 221 tons and at this stage they tell me what they are going to buy in terms of their offsets. The plan has to be updated annually and there is a formal requirement for continual improvement, so this is very similar to 50001,  
 
44:40 - there has to be a continual improvement in carbon emissions. Now the declared reduction can be absolute or it can be in carbon intensity. So it may be if it's a manufacturing organization that actually let's say for instance they've doubled their sales they've doubled their manufacturing output over the year which means they're going to be using  
 
45:03 - more energy and therefore they're going to be producing more carbon, if they have worked out as you would with 50001, a performance indicator, they may say it's kilograms of carbon per item of product. So that carbon intensity has to show a reduction.  
 
45:22 - So you can claim reductions in either absolute or reductions in intensity the standard does allow that it's not penalizing people who are starting to up their production.

3. Offset

45:34 - PAS 2060 then requires that the total amount of carbon emissions at the end of a reduction period are offset by high quality certified carbon credits which meet one of the following criteria. 
 
45:51 - Sorry yeah it's meet the following criteria, but one of a number of approved schemes. So within the standard there's a list of approved schemes so the clean development mechanism, joint implementation, gold standard, voluntary carbon standard, there's a whole list there's about a dozen or so that are listed as being acceptable offsetting schemes. They have to be genuinely  
 
46:14 - additional, so in other words they have to be reductions that wouldn't have happened anyway and they have to be verified by an independent third party to ensure that the reductions are permanent. Now if you buy from a PAS 2060 approved scheme, then they've already been verified by an independent third party.  
 
46:38 - If you come along and want to find a scheme that you wish to support yourselves, then there's we've it's a lot more complicated and that then has to be verified independently.
 
46:51 - Also, one and this is one of the issues sometimes with some offset-ed schemes to avoid leakage, so in other words the emissions are not increased in another area as a result of the project reductions and also to make sure that things are not double counted  
 
47:06 - and also, that the carbon emissions are retired after a maximum of 12 months. So obviously you can't buy carbon credits now and use them for 10 years you've got to keep buying them.  
 
47:20 - So what have we got, so a company can claim a carbon reduction based on a plan that is still has to be put in place. Right the company no you're not claiming a carbon reduction at Kurt, what you're claiming you're claiming carbon neutrality because you're fully balanced out if you remember at the start carbon neutrality was removing from the atmosphere the same amount of carbon you're putting into it. So you're claiming carbon neutrality right from the outset because you're offsetting the equivalent amount that you are putting into the atmosphere.  
 
47:59 - You then have to declare an intention to reduce, so at the end of year one you then have to show the reduction. Now if you again within the standard there is quite a complicated flow chart that shows how this actually works in practice so at the end of year one you then have to show some degree of reduction in carbon emissions but right from the outset the initial verification,  
 
48:24 - the initial declaration of carbon neutrality can be entirely based on carbon offsetting, but only right at the start. Now some businesses are choosing not to do that some businesses are choosing to actually make the commitment but actually say we won't declare carbon neutrality until we've actually made some reductions. In some ways that's a better way but technically  
 
48:46 - the standard does allow that declaration right at the start, so only in year one at the end of if you like the baseline year you can fully offset but not going any further forward than that.
 
3. OFFSET – APPROVED SCHEMES

49:00 - So that's a list of the sort of approved schemes that are sort of kicking around at the moment so there's a cure to a compliant one so the clean development mechanism, joint implementation, EU allowances, there's some non-cure to a compliant one's gold standard that's the one that Petersons used I think they're paid about 12 pounds per tonne for their for their  
 
49:22 - carbon offsets and there's some domestic schemes to in the UK. There's the woodland carbon code which is quite a popular one it's very difficult because I think this the user with the woodland carbon could there's more people wanting to buy than there are ones available. The issue being that a lot of these offsets are probably somewhere  
 
49:44 - between 10 and 20 pounds or maybe somewhere if you're in dollars maybe sort of 15 to 25 a ton. Whereas the suggested value of a carbon really should be in the region of about 60 pounds a ton I think that's the figure that the UK government are banding about, that that's  
 
50:03 - actually should be the cost of actually carbon it should be 60 pounds a ton however that is charged whether it's taxation or whether it's through an offsetting mechanism.
 
50:17 - What is involved in a scheme? I'm not quite sure what you mean by that, those are the approved schemes you can search for any of those online and basically you can once you know what your carbon footprint is you can go on and it will give you a price and if you need to buy as Peterson’s did 220 tons or 221 tons will give you a price you buy those and they send you a certificate and then they retire those and you have then a validation.  
 
50:45 - The schemes themselves are schemes that are reducing carbon emissions somewhere in the world. So a lot of the schemes are in developing countries usually things like installation of solar power, renewable technologies the scheme that Peterson’s use was a scheme that was  
 
51:04 - building wind turbines for villages or towns in in certain parts of Indonesia. So those are the sorts of schemes that are operational. You've got to be careful there's a lot of snake oil salesmen out there that there's been a lot of bad press about offsetting recently or maybe not recently but historically and that's why the standard only really permits the use of approved schemes.  
 
3. OFFSET - TYPICAL QUANTITIES NEEDED

51:33 - To give you some idea of where people the amount of things people are needing to buy, and I'm not going to enter any discussions about these you might think that some of these are right some of these are wrong, these are just to give you a very very rough idea.  
 
51:50 - So the average territorial emissions from a person in the UK are about six and a half tons a year, that's your personal carbon footprint. In America as you can well imagine that might be starting to come down with a change of change of administration but at the moment it's about 16 and a half tons per year in America. Across the EU it's slightly lower than the UK about  
 
52:16 - six and a half, 6.4 tons. A return flight from New York to London economy is about 1.7 tons if you fly business class, if you can afford to fly business class that's about 5 tons.  
 
52:30 - Construction of a building, sort of embodied carbon in the instruction of the building, about half to one tonne per square meter, depends on the size of the buildings of course, so construction of a 10 000 square meter building is somewhere between 5 000 and 10 000 tons of CO2.  
 
52:51 - And use of office space in a typical office for about a hundred employees you're talking somewhere between 50 to 100 tons. Those are just to give you some idea I don't claim those to be 100 accurate they are just some idea of the types of figures that we're talking about people needing to offset.

4. Document & Validate

53:11 - The final stage in the PAS 2060 cycle is to then document and validate, so the final stage is to produce what's called a qualifying explanatory statement and this is a public document. If you go online go on to Google, other search engines are available,  
 
53:30 - if you go to google and search for qualifying explanatory statement you will find quite a number because it's a public document, it's a document that's out there that discloses all of the relevant supporting documentation that's leading  
 
53:46 - to your declaration of carbon neutrality. So it includes proof of emission reduction not in the very first year obviously, it talks about proof of withdrawing of offsetting credits, so the ones that you've bought proof that they are being withdrawn, it talks about the carbon footprint, so there's a little bit in there about what your carbon  
 
54:08 - footprint actually is, how it's been calculated, what methodology you've used the calculated, talks about the carbon management plan, the carbon reduction plan what is it you're going to be doing, and then the statement itself. And the requirement is to provide all of this information.  
 
54:27 - We as a certification body assess that and then providing that that's all in place we then provide certification valid for one year on carbon neutrality status.  

Validation

54:42 - Now the standard itself permits three types of validation.  
 
54:49 - Now the first one is self-validation, now bearing in mind what I said about green washing, do we trust a business to self-declare that they're carbon neutral. The fact that they've used the standard does that add any value? So for instance if I talked about qualifying  
 
55:09 - explanatory statements, if you search for Marks and Spencer's qualifying exponential statement, you will find that they have self-validated, they have self-validated their statement. Now those of you that in the UK have seen the Marks and Spencer's advert you might  
 
55:30 - argue this is not just carbon neutrality it's Marks and Spencer's carbon neutrality but ultimately they are self-declared, nobody has double checked that they've just produced a qualifying explanatory statement and said, we're Marks and Spencer's with carbon neutral and here's the  
 
55:44 - supporting evidence make your own mind up. The middle one is validation from a non-accredited organization, just as you can get accreditation to 14001 from a non-accredited organization.  
 
56:00 - The final gold standard if you like, is independent third-party validation.  
 
56:08 - An independent third-party validation is using somebody like ourselves, now the standard itself PAS 2060 gives some indication of what is acceptable, pardon me, what is acceptable as accredited independent third party. NQA as a fully accredited energy and environmental  
 
56:29 - management system certification body so we're fully accredited to offer 14001, 50001 and one that gives us the right to offer PAS 2060. As an aside UKAS are now working on putting together a full accreditation scheme for PAS 2060. It's not there at the moment, so anything that's offered  
 
56:54 - is accredited but accredited indirectly using the standard, but it there will not be a UKAS logo on the certificate as you would find on a 14001 certificate for NQA. 
 
57:10 - I don't want to get too much into why in the same flight economy is 1.7 tons and flying business classes much more. It's a generally accepted principle that if you fly business class or first class you take a bigger share of the emissions because you have a lot more  
 
57:32 - room on the plane. I guess that's part of it, yes you could argue that there's 200 people on the plane so divide the carbon emissions by 200 but it's weighted, because if you're sat in if you're starting economy you're taking up much less room on the plane that tends to be why, but again it's not really for this discussion but it's a fairly well  
 
57:54 - accepted principle. It's the same if you travel by train if you get your carbon emissions from Virgin or whoever it is now on west coast they will tell you that first class ticket has a slightly higher carbon footprint than standard class because you're taking up more space.

Tips for Achieving Carbon Neutrality

58:12 - So finally, just some tips we're drawing towards the end of my little bit we're going to come on to the questions in a minute, so as a business we believe and we would say this but I think it's generally the case certification from an external body bolsters the credibility within the industry  
 
58:31 - and also provides guidance if you're needing support if you need support in meeting your carbon neutral goals. So we walk people through this process, we can't act as consultants but we walk people through the process. Obviously in terms of making the most of technology we're talking about using dashboards database solutions to find out where the carbon is, so this  
 
58:57 - is talking about how you might measure your carbon footprint, so this is very similar to what we might talk about on 50001 where do we get the figures from, can we get figures from automatic meter readings and things like that. As with anything leadership has to come from the top.  
 
59:14 - So embedding large scale changes on success that there's going to be buying invisible support from senior leaders that's why within all of the standards now there is a section on leadership.  
 
59:25 - Sharing responsibility so employees and departments looking at their own carbon footprint maybe empowering people to find ways to all work together. Businesses collaborated together, one of the consultants that was with me earlier on this afternoon is part of a wider group of businesses that are working together to share expertise in sort of a carbon management club.  
 
59:51 - I know there's a number of these areas around the UK that people are working together to do this and also there's a lot of work around science-based targets to make sure that you're playing your fair part in cutting carbon to reach the global goals of attaining net zero emissions.  
 
60:08 - Now looking down some of the questions working the way back Javier as an NQA agent can we talk about that separately can you issue a PAS 2060 certificate if you qualify, technically yes but you would need to come and talk to myself and Nick Wright about the process for doing that, so that's an internal issue going back through, the I'm just seeing if there's anything else somebody can't find the chat box that's fair enough what's involved in a scheme?  
 
60:44 - Sorry I'm just moving the, I’m moving the slides now. Sorry about this, right I'm just going through the questions to see if anybody else.
 
60:55 - To best scope three missions most on spend is rather like being an ostrich trying to ignore the approaching tsunami, that we can all say yes it does I agree entirely if you can come up with a better way of working out carbon footprinting on purchase goods feel free to try and put one  
 
61:11 - forward but at the moment the general accepted method for scope three missions is to use it based on spend. That's the generally accepted way it's based on assumptions but as with everything else this will develop over the time what else have we got in terms of the questions I think I've covered most of the others. Right I think I've answered all of the questions today, does anybody else have any questions I'm not doing bad I've kept it to just over an hour.
 
61:51 - There's a couple of slides towards the end just a little bit about NQA again the fact that we've got training courses in a lot of this stuff as well and we do a number of what we call advanced training courses that look at individual areas maybe within some of the standards that's just another part of the stuff I'm contractually obliged to say. So yeah question and answers  

Q&A

62:13 - I think you all know my email address, I am happy to receive individual questions if there's anything that you think I wished I'd asked him and I didn't get chance or I've tried to if you think I've fobbed you off because we haven't got time my email address is richard.walsh@nqa.com  
 
62:31 - richard.walsh@nqa.com, drop me a line and say hello drop me a line and ask me a question drop me a line and say everything you've said is rubbish this is why I don't mind any of those maybe not the last one but I'm happy to engage with any or all of you either collectively or on an individual basis. Just remember by sometime middle of next week probably by Wednesday you will all have received a copy of the slides and the recording of this webinar.  
 
63:00 - I don't think there's any more questions coming so I’m just going to waffle for a little bit more, so you will receive all of that the it's a YouTube link to our channel you will find on there recordings of all the webinars we've ever done. So I'm on there there's loads of  
 
63:17 - my webinars on environment on health and safety a little bit on integrated management systems, on environment, there's stuff on quality all sorts of stuff on there as well that you can go back and watch if you're bored or want to get to bed want to sleep at night other than that I thank you  
 
63:35 - all for your time thank you have a good weekend have a good rest of the day whether that's I noticed or somebody from Indonesia it must be bedtime if you're in Indonesia. 
 
63:47 - So thank you for bearing with me and sorry about the confusion on chat box and questions that was my fault at the start so thank you very much. No more questions so have a good weekend keep in touch and remember richard.walsh@nqa.com if you have any individual questions thanks everybody and maybe catch up with you again on another webinar sometime bye.