Climate Report 2022-23

Our position

Businesses like ours are vital to ensuring a safe, livable, and thriving future for the next generations.

In our collaborations and partnerships with clients and suppliers and through our own footprint, we want to have a positive impact on the environment.

This is our first Climate Report. Here, you can read what we've been up to in the fight against climate change, the principles that guide us and our commitments.

The progress we've made

When we launched Manyone four years ago, we committed to becoming carbon neutral within the first three years. We achieved carbon neutrality at the beginning of 2022, mainly through offsetting.

Yet, the goal isn't just to focus on a low-carbon future for Manyone. We want to make a difference on a larger societal scale. After all, it's in our DNA.

Becoming the sustainability leader we want to be takes time and effort.

It requires constant attention to how we run Manyone, how we run projects, and how we engage with other organisations. Through this lens, we still have a long way to go.

Bottom-up with a boost

Several employees have been instrumental in getting us to where we are today. Their voices and actions have been crucial in mobilising Manyone and challenging the status quo. As an example, check out this inspiring presentation and call to action by our very own Lewis Atkins. Also, the publication of this Climate Report has in fact been made possible due to the efforts of a group of dedicated employees.

As we advance, our sustainability efforts should still be co-created through a bottom-up approach where the employees who want to lead or get involved should be able to do so.

As a company, we won't leave this process up to chance; we must create a platform for employees to get involved, ensure the necessary stewardship for change to happen, and keep ourselves honest about our impact.

We practice transparent and clear communication.

We are honest about our progress, and we invite our clients and peers to hold us accountable for our sustainability principles and commitments.

We strive to make our work more sustainable for people, planet, and businesses.

We aim to embed sustainability concerns and actions into all our processes – making them part of how we work and deliver.

We partner with values-aligned difference-makers to bring down our emissions.

Goodwings for offsetting and reducing the environmental impact of business travel and accommodation.

Jooll for low-carbon urban mobility as a service (currently only in Denmark)

We work with clients who are honest about their own footprint.

We don’t work on projects that deliberately portray misinformation about a company’s efforts to combat climate change or divert attention away from a company’s unsustainable practices.

We do not differentiate based on historical pollution.

Historic heavy-weight polluters can be part of a green solution; we want to work with them on the projects that kickstart and entrench that trajectory and enable them to be part of the change.

Commitments for 2024

Good intentions won't cut it. To make change happen, we commit to the following three change-driving initiatives for the coming year:

Why does it matter?

One word: Accountability.

How will we do it?

You're looking at the first concrete result of this commitment. Based on feedback from all Manyones, our clients, partners and friends, we'll continue to improve the format in the year(s) to come. It's progress over perfection.

Why this approach?

Sustainability is a vast and intricate field, and we must learn constantly – especially about climate change terms, concepts, and strategies. Knowledge is an essential first step towards creating real change.

How will we do it?

We'll design and run internal, company-wide training sessions featuring both our own and external sustainability experts. Besides getting a deeper understanding of key terms and concepts, we will educate ourselves on regenerative and circular business models, explore how to adopt more sustainable interaction design patterns, and how to design with the complete product life cycle in mind, whether digital or physical.

Why does it matter?

ISO 14001 provides companies like ours with a standard for measuring and improving our environmental impact. Besides the clear benefits of incorporating environmental issues into how we manage Manyone, we also see an increasing number of clients demanding such certification as part of their own environmental accountability.

How will we be certified?

We will work together with an accreditation agency to achieve the necessary certification.

Our footprint in numbers

Each year, we communicate about our carbon footprint as well as our efforts to improve our environmental impact.

2022

We promised ourselves and the world that we would be carbon neutral by January 2023, primarily through offsetting. We initiated a total emissions assessment project in early 2022 through the carbon management company, Planetly. However, they were acquired and shut down right before the final report landed.

We estimated a 4-ton CO2 emission/FTE based on the incomplete Scope 1-3 calculations combined with industry averages. With 225 FTEs we landed on 900 tCO2. 54 tCO2 had already been offset through our partnership with Goodwings.

To account for the remaining tCO2 we purchased an additional 850 Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) carbon credits from a nature-based removal project (ex-post reforestation) in Uruguay, resulting in the neutralisation of 850 tons of CO2.

• Climate impact certificate

• Goodwings statement

• Verra registration

What's next?

We will keep reporting on our emissions every year, and we will continue to be carbon neutral.

Air travel is the biggest contributor to our carbon footprint. We will cut emissions by travelling less and choosing transportation modes with less emissions, i.e. train instead of air when possible. We will reduce emissions from air travel by at least 10-15% by swapping out fossil jet fuel with Sustainable Aviation Fuel. The rest will be offset.

In the future we would like even more of our impact to come from reducing, not offsetting our emissions. To begin, we will explore more accurate ways to track and report the ratio between offsetting and reduction year over year.

Reach out

We’re always looking to learn and to share. If you have any questions about our climate efforts and methodology or want to learn more about the sustainability-focused work we’ve been doing for clients, contact us at sustainability@manyone.com.