I have long assumed that the carbon footprint associated with SkyTruth’s work is more than justified by the positive impacts that result from it. But recently I’ve been wondering, shouldn’t we be able to say what our carbon footprint is?

I’m the Sysadmin at SkyTruth, and I’m incredibly fortunate to get paid to continuously learn new things. Back in 2018, it was my job to get up to speed on the GDPR’s 99 articles and other privacy laws so we’d know how to follow them. Now I’m learning how we can measure SkyTruth’s carbon footprint.

At SkyTruth, we spend a lot of time looking at the environmental impacts of human actions. By making the consequences of these actions transparent so that everyone can see and understand them, we help make positive change in the world. I have long assumed that the carbon footprint, or greenhouse gas emissions, associated with SkyTruth’s work is more than justified by the positive impacts that result from it. But recently I’ve been wondering, shouldn’t we be able to say what our carbon footprint is?

We’re not required to measure it; generally, only emitters of over 25,000 metric tons of CO2 have to report to the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States. But our goal is to try to understand the emissions SkyTruth is responsible for. If we can get reasonably accurate data, our plan will be to incorporate this information into future decision-making, and determine the ways that we can reduce our carbon footprint.

Step 1: What emissions are we responsible for?

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol) is a widely recognized, international standard for carbon footprint accounting. It helps businesses, organizations, and governments understand the emissions created from all their activities, and it gives guidance on how to account for them.

We started with GHG Protocol’s Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard. It’s 116 pages long and at first, it felt like trying to read IRS guidance when your tax forms are due by midnight and you just remembered you haven’t started. The accounting is complicated, especially for companies with lots of subsidiaries or for countries that have many state-owned companies. But for relatively small nonprofits like us, it’s fairly straightforward. Emissions are grouped by “scope,” and SkyTruth is responsible for emissions from Scopes 2 and 3:

Scope 1	Direct emissions, from anything we have total control over and pay to fuel ourselves. If SkyTruth had any company cars, a yacht, or a backup generator (we do not!), they would be considered Scope 1 items.
Scope 2	Indirect emissions, from the production of our electricity at the power plant. We have control over turning off the lights when we don’t need them in our little office in Shepherdstown, though our landlord has control over how high to crank the AC in summer.
Scope 3	Indirect emissions upstream and downstream, from travel, commuting, and purchased goods and services. The GHG Protocol outlines 15 categories of Scope 3 items in 182 pages. Carbon accounting service provider Sustain.life has an excellent graphic that helped me understand what’s included. These are typically the bulk of an organization’s emissions, potentially over 80% of the total. They are also the most difficult to get information for, because the data must be obtained from other companies and service providers. GHG Protocol (p. 25) states that reporting Scope 3 emissions is optional, but they are worth trying to estimate, because we have a lot of control over them. Scope 3 is useful in decision-making and in potentially reducing our carbon footprint.
Scope 4	A fourth Scope, avoided emissions, has been suggested but is not yet recognized by the GHG Protocol. When our team meets with a partner by video call instead of flying to meet in person, you would count the difference in emissions as “avoided.”

Step 2: What can we measure?

For each type of emission SkyTruth is responsible for, we’ve identified what we should be including and tools to help us out. We’ve also flagged questions, concerns and obstacles to getting data.

Electricity use

Our landlord pays the utilities for the entire building where we rent office space – we don’t have a separate meter. We’d need to consult with our landlord about the building’s square footage and make some calculations based on SkyTruth’s portion of the building. This includes our three modest offices and perhaps shared common areas, like the galley kitchen, restroom, and the conference room.

Purchased goods and services

As a conservation tech nonprofit, the bulk of this category is purchased services such as Google Cloud Platform, where we build and house most of SkyTruth’s projects, and Google Workspace. Google provides carbon footprint reports for their services.

We use the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator to help translate emissions numbers – expressed as metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, or tCO2e – into relatable comparisons. So, for example, for our carbon footprint from Google Cloud Platform use in 2023:

Source: EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator.

We may be able to get emissions data for other services we use, like Zoom for video calls and Jira for project management.

Business travel

This category includes flights and other travel to conferences and team gatherings. Carbon Footprint has a calculator for computing emissions from flights. The EPA and The Nature Conservancy have similar tools.

Employee commuting

The SkyTruth team is 99% remote, so while actual commuting is rare – and typically involves walking, biking, or electric vehicles – the GHG Protocol puts emissions associated with electricity and HVAC in remote workspaces in this category.

Avoided Emissions

According to a couple of studies (here and here), SkyTruth may have already reduced its footprint 50% or more by moving to an all remote workplace. That said, non-commute travel typically increases with remote work teams, and we try to get the SkyTruth team together in person at least once a year.

Avoided emissions should only be accounted for if you already have a good baseline for your Scopes 1-3 emissions, which makes sense. But I hope we’ll be able to show avoided emissions from the positive impacts of our work in the future.

What’s Next?

As we continue this process, we expect to have interesting conversations about how to balance the desire for reasonably accurate data against the amount of time and expense it would take to obtain it. We suspect that it will be impossible to get 100% accurate numbers, but what we are able to get will be good enough to make decisions in future.

It will likely be difficult to get Scope 3 upstream numbers from our electricity providers. And we will probably be unable to calculate our share of the climate cost of satellite imagery and other remote sensing technologies we use in our work.

Carbon Mapper CEO Riley Duren likes to say, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Which dovetails nicely with SkyTruth’s motto: “If you can see it, you can change it.” I’m hopeful that we can continue to move toward sustainability as an organization while becoming ever more impactful change makers promoting conservation for people and the planet.