Beyond Climate Solutions is committed to offer to our clients the best green certifications available. When we feel that the best avaiable does not meet our standard of quality, we will work at improving it.
Carbon Neutral Certification
The definition of carbon neutrality varies widely, leading to a high degree of skeptisism regarding the concept. Beyond Climate Solutions is leading the way to redifine the concept. We are working with many professionals in carbon management, business and environmental NGOs to raise the standard to the next level.
You will find below more information about the work that we are currently pursuing.
General Objectives of the Carbon Neutral Standard:
- Provide a North American Standard widely recognized. The Standard will be reviewed and updated by well known NGO’s, sustainability professionals and businesses taking action on climate.
- Shift the conventional own/control/manage emission inventory to what organization are responsible for. We use the principle of life cycle assessment (LCA) to achieve this objective.
- Provide flexibility for organizations that wish to become climate neutral, recognizing that they can be at different stages, but every steps and actions taken can be important. Our standard is a point system where organizations can attain 3 levels of certification.
- Counter the high degree of skepticism towards carbon neutrality by reducing the level of green washing with incorrect or incomplete environmental claims. Certification results will be transparent.
- Be educational. Life cycle thinking is still not generally understood by the public. We aim at giving public and corporations new tools to understand where and how GHG’s are emitted.
We used the climatecounts.org scorecard as a basis to develop the standard.
This standard is not design for the mandatory market. With the responsible approach, it could lead to double counting, since many corporations could claim responsibility of the same emissions. We feel however that double counting is a good thing: the more people will take responsability for GHG emissions, the more chance we have to see real reduction.
Two standards are currently being created: one for businesses and one for products and services. Events are considered at the moment as product.
The standard has 4 sections with a total of 115 pts:
Measure, Reduce, Support & Report and Offset
Inventory (30 pts available):
The GHG inventory goes beyond direct emissions (fossil fuel usage) & indirect emission (electricity, steam, or heat purchased), with an estimation of the embodied emissions from all the goods the organization purchased. As much as possible, we try to link the organization budget with their emissions.
Reduce (45 pts available):
The largest weight of the total score of the standard. Since ultimately, GHG’s reductions are the most desired outcome.
This section give flexibility to corporation to fix intensity-based or absolute reduction targets, but favors the later.
Support & Report ( 25 pts available)
Transparency is key to avoid green washing criticism. This section encourage organization to publicly shows their inventory and action taken.
Support for climate policy from the corporate sector is essential as well. To often, climate protection and economy are artificially put in opposition.
Climate change and climate policy brings a new range of risks for corporations. If a company relies heavily on fossil energy and/or good weather, the corporation is at risk and must address those challenges.
Offset (15 pts available)
Speed up the green economy with the purchase of high quality offset, while recognizing that offsets by themselves are not sufficient to reach carbon neutrality
Levels of certification
(1) Responsible (30 to 49 pts)
(2) Engaged (50 to 84 pts)
(3) Leader (85 to 115 pts)