However, running a remote organization comes with many challenges when calculating your carbon footprint.

In a traditional office environment, it is easy to review your energy bills and attribute 100% of your energy use to work. These offices are typically in one location or province and energy bills provide all of the information you need. In a remote organization, there are now 50 different “offices” across the country, coworking spaces, and additional barriers to determining the environmental impact of our work. How do we delineate work from general home use in remote office environments? 

Anyone who works in sustainability or ESG knows that this is an imperfect science. Quantifying your GHG impact is always a best guess with the best information available at the time. We relied on values from an Anthesis Whitepaper on Estimating Energy Consumption & GHG Emissions for Remote Workers. This whitepaper was helpful in determining key variables such as an average remote worker’s energy usage per day on a country by country basis. We also heavily relied on the Government of Canada’s published factors for CO2e emissions per energy type in each province. This gave us a good estimate of our impact—but we wanted to go deeper. We have an employee who lives in a completely passive house, and others who want to explore upgrades for reducing their home energy consumption. 

So, we took a deep dive look into each of our employee's locations, energy needs, living arrangements, and other factors to determine how accurately we can quantify our impact.

It became clear that this made quantifying our carbon footprint even more complex and difficult. But, we like to lean into difficulties at Foresight and find innovative ways to learn and grow with problems. 

The first barrier we encountered was determining where the line is between work and home. Do we calculate home energy usage based on the employee’s time at their desk every day? If they have roommates or family members this complicates that value significantly. Do we divide total energy usage by number of occupants? How do we make the best guess for this information? 

To answer all of these questions, we had to develop our own protocol to calculate energy consumption per employee in the most representative way possible.  

Technical Methodology & Calculations

The first step in determining our footprint was to evaluate each of our emissions by scope.

It is important to understand the definitions of each scope to set boundaries for your inventory. This blog post by Plan A identifies the boundaries for each scope:  

Scope 1 emissions are direct emissions from company-owned and controlled resources. In other words: emissions that are released into the atmosphere as a direct result of a set of activities at a firm level. These are divided into four categories: 

Scope 2 emissions are indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy from a utility provider. In other words: all GHG emissions released into the atmosphere from the consumption of purchased electricity, steam, heating, and cooling.

Scope 3 emissions are all indirect emissions—not included in Scope 2—that occur in the value chain of the reporting company, including both upstream and downstream emissions. In other words: emissions that are linked to the company's operations. According to the GHG protocol, Scope 3 emissions are separated into 15 categories. 

After reviewing each definition we identified that Foresight does not create any Scope 1 emissions, as we do not produce any products, commodities, or energy. Our Scope 2 emissions are limited to offices and coworking spaces—which, as identified earlier, are difficult to quantify. Finally, our Scope 3 emissions are limited to business travel, and commuting. In the future, we may expand our Scope 3 emissions to review additional categories like electronics and/or waste generation as we refine our methodology and improve our accuracy.

The second step in determining our carbon footprint was to identify employee working behaviours by developing a survey.

Once this information was collected we were able to allocate energy usage to employees, assuming a 40 hour work week for 48 working weeks per year. If the employee had access to their utility bills, we were able to use published provincial data values to estimate emissions based on usage. If the employee did not have access to their utility bills, we estimated their usage using the values suggested in the Anthesis paper along with published provincial data. This provided a representative calculation of our home office usage across the country. But, what about co-working space? 

Co-working space posed a unique challenge. We reached out to all of our partners that we rent desk space from to determine if they have calculated their own footprint—most of the time the answer was “no.” However, two of our co-working offices did have information we could use to calculate our usage in their space. We used these values and our estimated usage time to create a representative calculation of our co-working space across the country. 

This provided us with an estimate of 33 tonnes of CO2e per year for our Scope 2 emissions. 

For Scope 2, we evaluated our business travel first. We collected data for all flights, trains, ferries, or vehicle commutes taken throughout the year through our travel booking partners and our expense reports. For flights, we utilized the data from Google Flights to determine the average CO2e emissions per flight. In some cases, this value was not available, but we graphed the data and could establish a reasonable estimate based on distance travelled. For trains and ferries we went through the travel operator’s sustainability reports to find average values for each person travelling. Calculating the emissions for traditional gas-powered cars was easy as there is a wealth of published data available. We followed this same methodology for calculating commuting emissions to co-working spaces, determining which mode of transportation was used, how often, and the distance travelled. 

This provided us with an estimate of 12 tonnes of CO2e per year for our Scope 3 emissions. 

Overall, we estimate our total emissions are 45 tonnes of CO2e per year.