Why and how we offset all our unavoidable CO2 emissions.
Atmosfair is an independent German non-profit for CO2 offsetting that has been found in many rankings and reviews to have a very high degree of transparency and accountability.
This is how we went about offsetting our emissions for 2021:
We began by determining the exact CO2 emissions in tons of all our flights and car trips for the whole year, using the travel calculator on Atmosfair. Next to that, we also wanted to take into account CO2 emissions that we emit through our cloud infrastructure. Calculating a perfect number is difficult here, we all use so many different tools and providers now. So for each team member, we assumed 1 ton of emitted CO2 for all our cloud infrastructure.
This gave us the sum of all our combined CO2 emissions from business travels and cloud infrastructure. To this sum, we applied a factor of three in order to overcompensate for any potential miscalculations.
Finally, we entered the total CO2 amount (after the factor of three) into the offsetting calculator in Atmosfair and donated the suggested monetary amount to them.
Atmosfair allows you to choose between a variety of project that they in turn support – from efficient stoves in Africa and India, biogas plants in Nepal and Thailand to solar or hydropower in Ethiopia and South America. For 2021, we decided not to choose between one of the projects but make a general donation to Atmosfair.
In following years, we will refine our CO2 offsetting strategy and will continue to update on our progress and approach here.
The BFP Team
We would love to hear your ideas and frameworks around sustainability in VC! Whether it comes to developing ESG policies or finding the best ways to compensate our emissions, we look forward to hearing from you.