What is carbon tunnel vision?
“How are you reducing your carbon footprint?”
It’s a message we hear a lot, from businesses, from the news, even from our friends and family. And it’s always worth asking. We know that greenhouse gas emissions are heating our planet, and we know that things are going to have to change.
We are incredibly proud of our sustainability interventions at Naked Sprout, and foremost among them is our comparatively low CO2e footprint, which we print on every box of our environmentally friendly toilet roll.
But is carbon footprint the be-all-and-end-all of environmental progress? What if the focus on carbon footprints could be overshadowing other crucial aspects of sustainability? What if we’re developing carbon tunnel vision?
The power and pitfalls of being carbon footprint aware
First things first: let’s talk about carbon footprints. A carbon footprint (we prefer to call it a climate footprint) measures the total amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted directly or indirectly by a person, product, or organisation. There are standard rules for how you should calculate and report this footprint, and some well known methods for bringing it down.
For many businesses, calculating this footprint and reducing carbon emissions has become a central part of their approach to sustainability.
And for good reason! The science is clear that greenhouse gases are driving climate change, leading to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, and countless other environmental challenges. Cutting emissions will help to slow these changes.
But businesses are damaging the environment in ways that go beyond greenhouse gas emissions, and here’s where things get tricky. Laser-focusing on reducing their carbon footprint, they might start to see carbon emissions as the only measure of environmental impact.
This is what we call carbon tunnel vision - a narrow view of sustainability that can lead to overlooking other important environmental factors. And beyond this it opens the door to the unproven, untested fix of offsetting.
What’s the problem with offsetting?
Imagine a company that wants to make environmentally friendly tissue products, let’s call them Green Roll. Green Roll have calculated their climate footprint, and they’re pledging to bring it down.
There are two approaches they can take here. They can minimise greenhouse gas emissions by bringing alternative renewable sources of energy into their operations. That’s what we’re doing at Naked Sprout, and it’s the approach recommended by the Science Based Targets initiative, an international body that provides guidance for companies (like Naked Sprout) seeking to reduce their emissions in line with the best climate science.
Or Green Roll can decide that this is going to be too costly or time consuming (or both!) and turn instead to offsetting. This means they can send money to fund tree planting or renewable energy, with the aim of cancelling out their CO2e footprint.
It’s a tempting approach, but it doesn’t cut the mustard. We’ve written about why offsetting doesn’t work elsewhere on our blog. The summary is that it’s impossible to prove that a given offsetting project is actually leading to a meaningful reduction in atmospheric levels of greenhouse cases, how much reduction is actually happening, and over what kind of time period.
Offsetting programs often suffer from a lack of accountability, and many are located in developing countries where local communities may not see the benefits or may even suffer from land use changes or displacement.
Meanwhile, wealthier countries continue their emissions-heavy lifestyles, and companies like Green Roll can keep manufacturing their tissue products using natural gas and other fossil fuels, while saying that their climate footprint is nothing at all.
And with the offsetting paid for, and carbon tunnel vision in full effect, there’s no pressing need from Green Roll to do the thing that desperately needs doing - actually move away from using fossil fuels. In fact, there’s no need to look at the environmental impact of any other part of their process at all.
The bigger picture
Reducing CO2e emissions, with real reductions in fossil fuel dependency rather than offsetting, is incredibly important. But focusing on that footprint over everything else invites the kind of “bookkeeping tricks” we see in offsetting, and it ignores the rest of the story.
Businesses that are truly committed to sustainability need to be clear about their CO2e footprint - and they should be providing that clarity as part of a much wider transparency into all of their products and processes.
It’s a tall order, but we don’t need to go it alone. The UN’s list of Sustainable Development Goals features 17 ways in which organisations and businesses need to reform themselves to be more sustainable. Reducing your CO2e footprint comes under goal 13, climate action, but there are 12 other goals that responsible companies should consider, including clean water, protecting life on land, and providing decent work.
To really start making a difference, Green Roll should take off the blinkers, take a good look at the goals, and roll up their sleeves. There’s plenty of work to be done.
Conclusion
You can take it from us, running a business in a more sustainable way is a complex challenge. It means thinking about many different aspects of environmental stewardship; from raw materials and how you collect them, to transport, to providing clarity and transparency on the whole process.
You can read stories from every part of our production process right here on our blog, and if there’s ever any questions we can answer about how we make things, we’d love to hear from you!
Want to try tissue products made with more than just carbon in mind?
