Smartly.io’s Path to Becoming a Carbon Neutral Company

A sustainable world is a better world for all of us. According to a report from Stanford, stabilizing Earth’s temperature to significantly reduce risks to our planet requires greenhouse gas emissions to reach net zero by 2050. At Smartly.io, we are committed to protecting the environment and conducting our business in an environmentally responsible and sustainable manner. It’s with this mission in mind that we decided to take action and become a carbon neutral company.

We want to do our part and encourage others to do the same and someday (soon) we would love to be part of a carbon neutral adtech supply chain.

Here’s How We Did It

Partnering with Compensate, a non-profit climate operator, we calculated our carbon footprint to understand where the company is producing emissions so we can determine a plan for reducing them in the future. In this calculation we included all Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions according to the Greenhouse Gas protocol. Due to the urgency of the climate crisis, we felt that reducing emissions is not enough and that is why we compensated the entire carbon footprint starting from year 2019 when we first conducted carbon footprint calculation for the company.

One of the reasons we chose to partner with Compensate was their science-based approach to compensation and dedication to not just compensation – removing the amount of CO2 we put into the atmosphere – but overcompensation. Because there are many uncertainties in carbon capture projects, Compensate helps tackle those uncertainties with an approach to purchase more than the minimum required credits. Specifically, Compensate defines an overcompensation factor for each project based on its Scientific Advisory Panel’s recommendations and project criteria, managing risks, and ensuring true climate impact is achieved with certainty.

With Compensate’s built-in overcompensation approach, Smartly.io has purchased and retired nearly 10,000 carbon credits – enabling the removal of over 6,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. True Climate Impact – or the amount of CO2 Compensate can confidently say has been sequestered – is 6,169 tCO2 with an overcompensation rate of 3.5 for Smartly.io’s 2019 emissions.

Here’s What We Found

The largest source of our emissions in 2019 was business travel, representing 85% of Smartly.io’s carbon footprint, in which flights accounted for 74% of the total emissions. Just under 5% was a result of indirect GHG emissions from purchased electricity, heating and cooling across offices.

Most of the carbon capture projects in Compensate’s portfolio support a vast majority of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. In Smartly.io’s compensation specifically, all 17 of the following goals are supported.

Further, of the nearly 10,000 credits that Smartly.io retired, 9,042 credits were used for traditional carbon capture, including forest conservation projects in Cambodia, Zambia and Peru, and reforestation projects in Timor-Leste and Myanmar. The remaining 841 credits were used in the United States and Germany for what Compensate classifies as innovative carbon capture – in this case, regenerative agriculture that aims to increase the amount of carbon that soil collects.

Here’s What We’ll Do Moving Forward

Our work will not stop here. Moving forward, we will continue monitoring all of our emissions to calculate the footprint using actual data to the largest extent possible. Our footprint calculation will be more comprehensive, as we will collect more detailed information on all flights, electricity consumption, heating, cooling and IT equipment for all offices.

To reduce our emissions, we will aim to optimize business travel and learn from best practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. Which meetings are critical to attend in person, and which work just as well virtually? For shorter distances, our team will prioritize train over air travel, whenever possible

If you have questions about our climate roadmap, please reach out to the Smartly.io team.