Reporting on carbon emissions is a key component of the mandatory sustainability reporting for large firms. To better understand what’s required for compiling and auditing such reports, Reanda Netherlands made an internal report on our own firm’s carbon footprint. Here’s what we learned about the data and the process.
The purpose of our internal report was twofold. First, we wanted to increase our awareness about our carbon footprint and understand our internal performance. And as we’re operating in the Netherlands, we wanted to be ahead of the attempts and regulations to become carbon neutral by 2050. A lofty goal. The second reason is to become more aware of our clients’ needs and to improve our auditing services. By stepping into our clients’ shoes, we learned more about the kind of data points that would have to be collected to get an insight into our carbon emissions and how we as auditors can validate that data.
A team effort
Gathering the data was a team effort. We’d get information from our employees to learn more about homeworking and commutes. And we collaborated with our finance team to compile expenses and categorize the data into functional units; electricity, metric tons of water, fuel, and monetary units. Most of the data will come from your own bookkeeping.
To be fair, there is a lot of data. It can certainly be overwhelming and at first we weren’t quite sure where to start. A bit of advice: pick just one data source and start with the easiest. For us, it was sending out the employee survey. After that, the rest follows.
Help from a third party: Ecologi – previously Net Zero Now
Certain data points like fuel and travel might not require a lot of imagination on how it contributes to the Co2 footprint. But what about business activities, services, and purchased goods? For this project we cooperated with a third party, Ecologi, to rely on their expertise in how to convert Reanda’s business activities into a Co2 equivalent. Our task was to collect all of the data. Ecologi then converted it and compiled the final Co2 results in a dashboard on their platform. That’s the first step: to be aware of our footprint.
A continous process
The next step is what to do with these results. We are committed to become net zero by 2050. This is not something we can achieve in one or two years; it’s a long term effort and with the help of Ecologi we have a trajectory design on our dashboard. Ecologi offers ways to reduce the results or offset them by way of investments.
Reanda scored a little higher than average in the service firm benchmark. That’s something to work on for the next couple of years. But while benchmarking against other firms is important and tells us a lot about our usage, the most important thing is to benchmark against ourselves. We are excited to see how the figures of 2025 compare against 2024 and explore how we can develop from there.
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