One of the most difficult part for companies and countries when talking about being “neutral” or “positive” is the ability to measure your impact correctly. Both you negative impact and maybe even more hard, your “positive” impact that you can achieve by “offsetting” or “insetting” throught different projects.

In a perfect world, it would be easy for an individual or a company to measure their exact footprint and than pay the correct price it would take to immediately “fix” your footprint. 

For individuals there are several tools to use for measuring your footprint. For example https://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx or https://footprint.wwf.org.uk/

For companies, it is a different story. The demands  are much higher and you need to be able to account for you whole supply chain but you need to divide it in to different scopes. More on that later. 

One global player in the measurment business is the SBTi-organization, https://sciencebasedtargets.org/.

In short, the science based target initiative is acting as a third party observer to the claims that you see from companies and organizations all across the world. 

First you have to sign up or commit to, that your organization will try to reach the targets, then you have 24 months to submit your application and within a couple of months you should have an answer on if you are accepted or if you have to fine tune your application. When you are accepted, this will be announced through that organization and you are allowed to use it in your communication. 

If measuring your impact is difficult, then measuring your positive offsetting is even harder.  Exactly how much CO2 does one hectar of a certain forrest actually bind? What activites should you be allowed to measure and which are you not allowed to account for.

These are important questions to  minimize the risk for “green washing” where companies or organizations claim to be good but are not. 

CDP is a global non-profit organisation that is focusing on voluntery reporting together with therafter scoring. It is an easy and relevant way of comparing different companies.