Whilst Liberation begins a more pointed journey to lower our impact on the world and work strategically in line with certain SDGs (2, 10, 12, 13, 15), what comes with the excitment and motivation of making long-term, integrated changes is a complex process of unpicking our supply and value chains and thinking about where we can have the most impact.
Without doubt this is a long and arduous process!
But as we do this we also want to look at more immediate contributions that we can make along the way.
And surprise, surprise travel is undoubtedly a low-hanging fruit!
To give ourselves a little social impact boost to kickstart the process, we calculated international staff travel in 2021 and came to the total of 35,600km, an equivalent of 4.66 tonnes of CO2 emmited through air travel and a sum of £116.50 due in carbon offsetting.
Now, admittedly the pandemic restricted our ability to travel, but nobody’s ability to eat nuts! So, we decided to double the value and mitigate a longer legacy of carbon emissions from air travel to include 2019 and 2020 as well.
With an initial total of £233 in hand, we wanted to make sure our money was going to a trustworthy carbon mitigation initiative, making truly impactful changes not only to the environment and the fight against rising temperatures but also to our community of interest - smallholder nut farmers.
We couldn’t have found a better fit than in Neno Macadamia Trust who:
“support smallholder farmers adapting to climate change through macadamia agroforestry, enabling income generation, improving nutrition and to increase their resilience to unpredictable climate shocks. Macadamia agroforestry recovers the land from deforestation, regenerating the sustainability of the ecosystem and increases food security.”
They work on a carbon mitigation initiative rather than offsetting (paying those people that are already taking the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and mitigating the damage caused, in this case through climate smart macadmia agroforestry), deforestation recovery, food security and nutrition, sustainable energy production and income for farmers. All big ticks by our standards!
And what next? There are loads of impact plans bubbling away but as our focus here is transport we will stick to the topic!
We will continue to work with NMT to develop a more comprehensive way for measuring not just air travel emissions but also freight and road transportation of raw materials (ie. nuts!), tracing all the way from the source in the countries of origin. This will all go into the pot to support further carbon mitigation initiatives and run alongside the longer-term goal of heavily reducing emissions through alterations within our supply chains.
It's just the beginning of this journey!
