Becoming CO2 Neutral
| About BauWatch Sustainability | 23-03-2022 |
We all need to play our part in reaching climate change goals and improving air quality, and BauWatch is always looking for ways that we can stay ‘Enkelfähig’ which loosely translates to ‘making the world a better place for our grandchildren’. For these reasons, in 2019 we started a collaboration with a company called Land Life. They restore greenery across the globe by planting trees, with an aim of helping companies to reduce their carbon footprint. We wanted to tell you a bit more about how they work, and why this is such an important partnership for us.
Land Life Company’s mission is to restore the 2 billion hectares of destroyed land on earth by planting trees. They work to recover land that is unable to restore itself because of reasons like wildfires, global warming and urbanisation. Their slogan is ‘Bringing life back to land’ because their work goes beyond CO2 capture. The trees they plant create biodiversity and therefore promote ecosystem recovery, and the projects ignite socio-economic benefits for local communities.
Every year, we have our CO2 footprint calculated by an independent party that includes emissions from all the countries that we operate in. This is then passed over to Land Life, who will calculate how many trees they need to plant on our behalf. Our day-to-day functions don’t produce large amounts of CO2, but we do use a lot of fuel for the transportation of our towers and staff commuting. It is these emissions in particular that are compensated by Land Life Company. What’s more, they are strategic about the locations they pick, they work out where needs the most attention and where planting will have the most success. We receive regular photographs and updates on our investment as well. So far, we have trees planted in rural areas of Spain, Portugal, and Australia, and we plan on reforesting plenty more areas.
We want to make our footprint as small as possible, and eventually we want to operate in a way that is completely CO2 neutral. In the Netherlands, we have already started replacing diesel vehicles with hybrid and petrol vehicles, and we are aiming to have a full fleet of electric vehicles. This is not possible just yet, and we cannot say for certain when we’ll be 100% ‘Enkelfähig’, but we are working very hard to get there.