Arkivum Commits to Net Zero by 2040

Arkivum is really excited to announce that we have made an organisational commitment to go Net Zero for all of our carbon emissions by 2040, if not before.

We’ve made this a public commitment on the SME Climate Hub and we’ve even got a nice badge to show for it!   But much more importantly, Arkivum is now officially on the journey to Net Zero, we’ll be publicly reporting on our emissions and progress on an annual basis, and we will be reducing all our carbon emissions to net zero across all parts of the business and for all the services that we provide.

Most people think of net zero as being about direct carbon emissions from use of fossil fuels and indirect emissions from electricity consumption.  For example, reducing emissions might be by using electric cars instead of company owned petrol or diesel vehicles, or it might be by using green energy for heating an office or powering machinery.  This is of course an important part of the net zero story.  Under the Green House Gas Protocol this comes under what’s called Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions.

But net zero is much more than that!  This is where GHG Scope 3 comes into play.  This covers upstream and downstream emissions from products, services, goods and suppliers.  There’s a great picture in the GHG Protocol standards that shows all the sources of carbon emissions that need to be considered when going net zero.

Carbon emission scopes.  Reproduced from the GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Accounting  and Reporting Standard.

For Arkivum, this is about the emissions from Arkivum business travel, for example flying to conferences and events; it’s about the footprint of all those items of free merch that we hand out on stands; it’s about the emissions when employees commute into the office and it’s about the footprint of homeworking when they don’t; it’s about the emissions of our suppliers such as the finance, insurance, legal and pension services that we use; it’s about the laptops we supply to our staff, including their manufacture and eventual disposal; and being a SaaS business it’s about the cloud infrastructure that we use to provide our services, for example, AWS and the emissions that can be attributed to our use of their servers, storage, datacentres, power and cooling.  It’s everything.  The Arkivum commitment is to reduce all of this to net zero by 2040.

Many organisations make a commitment to go net zero by 2050, often because this meets legal requirements under the Paris Agreement.   We’ve gone for 2040.   This is partly because we are confident that we can achieve this – indeed we may well be net zero a lot sooner.  It is partly because we are a supplier and our customers are also committing to net zero on more aggressive timescales than 2050.   For example, in 2020 the NHS was the world’s first health system to commit to net zero, with a commitment to having a net zero supply chain by 2045 and a target of getting 80% of the way there by 2040.  As a supplier to the NHS, we’ll be doing our part to deliver this.  But for Arkivum, it’s also because going net zero as soon as possible is a good thing!

It feels like I’ve been blogging and talking about carbon emissions of digital preservation for ages.  You can read some of my posts on the DPC website, there’s an Arkivum webinar on environmental sustainability of digital preservation in the cloud, and I’ve presented on the topic at iPRES and other events.  Now that Arkivum has made the commitment to go fully net zero, it feels like the transition from talking-the-talk to walking-the-walk is well and truly underway!

We’ve already started to baseline our emissions and we’ll be doing more of this next year, not least because we plan to move up a gear and register our net zero commitment with SBTi which involves more rigorous and in-depth carbon accounting.  That means there should be plenty more blog posts to come as I report on the next steps of the journey and our carbon reduction initiatives.