April 21, 2021 Suston is 2020 Climate Neutral Certified!

Producer of Suston Magazine and several other outdoor and travel publications, NORR Agency is thrilled to announce it has partnered with Climate Neutral to become Climate Neutral certified for 2020.

As a company focused on guiding the outdoor and travel communities towards sustainable solutions, NORR Agency has itself been committed to working on its own impacts for years. This has included ensuring renewable energy in nearly all its operations, and offsetting its emissions related to business travel, paper, printing and transportation of all its publications. But much of this has been on an ad hoc basis, and NORR saw the need to systemize these efforts towards concrete reduction targets.

“Norr Agency wanted to lead the way by becoming 100% climate neutral,” explains Victoria Reim with Norr Agency, who continues:

“But before we could reduce and offset our footprint, we first needed to know what our full carbon footprint actually was. Not only for our operations, but also for our partners and companies we work with, external employees and freelancers and our content recipients – we wanted them to know that we take responsibility for carbon emissions related to our products.”

To do so, NORR turned to Climate Neutral Certified, the leading consumer label designating carbon neutrality. It is carried by brands that have voluntarily stepped up to take responsibility for the greenhouse gas emissions generated in the production, operations, and shipping of their goods and services.

Climate Neutral’s certification is based on internationally recognized standards for carbon measurement, neutrality, and offsetting. Each brand must measure Scope 1, 2, and 3 cradle-to-customer greenhouse gas emissions for the prior calendar year. Then a brand must buy verified carbon credits to offset its entire footprint. This directs investment into critical carbon sequestration projects such as forest conservation, renewable energy, and carbon capture technologies. Finally, brands commit to a reduction action plan to cut future emissions within a 12-24 month timeline, reporting progress on those plans annually. All of the brand’s data is publicly available on Climate Neutral’s website. The process is repeated annually when companies must re-certify.

“We learned that Climate Neutral was able to offer an accessible and holistic measurement that accounted for the entire company, not just the running of its editorial offices but also processes of its external printers, shipping and more,” shares Victoria.

“We are ultimately responsible for climate‐changing greenhouse gas emissions associated with activities both inside and outside of our organization, and we agree with the science that shows these emissions must decrease steeply in order to halt dangerous climate change.”

Help from the BEE (Brand Emissions Estimator)

Many companies are initially overwhelmed at the daunting task of estimating emissions. It’s here that Climate Neutral’s Brand Emissions Estimator steps in. By simplifying the carbon footprinting process in a single online platform, Climate Neutral says it was able to take “carbon accounting from wonky to workable, greatly reducing the time and expertise it requires to complete a carbon footprinting exercise.”

According to Victoria, having already done work outside Climate Neutral made some things easier and provided a bit of a leg up on the onboarding process:

“As a small company it was easy to collect the information we needed to get measured with the BEE – the Brand emission estimator. With this tool we calculated last year’s emissions. The Bee tool calculated almost 100CO2e but we refined them down to 72 tCO2e because of the developments we already made as a company. This is our carbon footprint for 2020 we want to remove from the atmosphere. With CN we can purchase carbon credits to so. That’s how we can become ‘neutral’: one carbon credit removes or avoids one tonne of carbon emissions.”

From here, Climate Neutral offers a standard pool ((Verified Carbon Standard ‐ Verra) of projects that NORR then supports. Projects like reforestation remove carbon from the atmosphere, while renewable energy projects avoids emissions from traditional fossil fuels.

The Road Forward

Having become Climate Neutral certified for 2020, the next step for NORR is to implement a reduction action plan (RAP) to reduce its emissions over the next 12‐24 months. Here, purchased goods and services as well as fuel‐ and energy‐related activities are first in line.

“Our plan is to make sure that our own magazines, and magazines we produce on behalf of other companies are printed using renewable energy and that our freelancers’ travel avoids flying on assignments from us, when possible, and that they’re emissions are compensated if they have to fly to some destination,” shares Victoria, who continues:

“We’ve formulated ambitious targets and are determined to achieve them by the end of the year.”