5 steps to calculating your total footprint

Calculating your total footprint using activity data

Green Media Summit

On the 13th of April 2023, I had the privilege of delivering a keynote at the Green Media Summit in NYC. It was truly amazing to see more than 200 people attending an event purely focused on sustainability for the media industry. When I first started working in sustainability over ten years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine an event like this.

Media has always been considered a low-impact industry. In fact, major carbon standards and disclosures still don’t have specific standards for media, but they have such standards for agriculture, forestry, or fashion.

The reality is that the digital world accounts for 4% of global carbon emissions, twice as much as the airline industry. Frank Maguire from Sharethrough clearly explained this in his opening remarks, where he also highlighted how this number is forecasted to double as all media moves to digital and our lives become more and more driven by digital experiences, like chatGBT, gaming, or cryptocurrencies.

During the event, we presented the ‘5 steps to build your path to net-zero’ for media players. While I won’t walk you through the entire session, I’d like to share a couple of key concepts that are at the core of our approach.

Richard Davis, CEO and Co-Founder 51toCarbonZero

The first is the need to understand your ‘total footprint’ as a media company. This is the combination of your ‘campaign emissions’ along the entire value chain and your ‘company-wide’ emissions. The latter refers to emissions from your business operations, like energy consumed at the offices, your travel, your materials, etc., and your direct suppliers, as per GHG protocol. At 51-0, we focus on the company-wide emissions, but we also partner with industry leaders like Scope3.com to look at campaign emissions.

Secondly, the key to an actionable Total Footprint is to measure it via ‘activity data’ rather than ‘spend data.’ Activity data is about the amount of ‘units’ of a good, service, or commodity that you use, for example, kWhs of electricity. On the other hand, spend data is about how much money you spend on electricity. The second method is highly inaccurate as you get a distorted and much bigger footprint: energy prices might go up or down despite your consumption staying the same. Also, with spend data, you get a highly inactionable footprint as the only way to reduce your footprint is to simply spend less, something that doesn’t usually go down very well in media.

These are the solid conceptual foundations upon which you can build your net-zero strategy with our ‘5 steps.’ I’d be very happy to discuss them with you directly!

Let’s work together to create a sustainable future for the media industry.