Today is Earth Day 2021, and it coincides with KVALITO’s team growing to sixty employees. To mark this milestone, KVALITO is planting sixty trees, one for each employee, together with Catch my Carbon.
Catch my Carbon is an innovative start-up on a mission to plant trees in Ireland to offset carbon emissions, protect biodiversity habitat and create natural woodlands for future generations. The start-up’s activities also help educate, raise awareness, and engage communities and businesses on the importance of trees in our ecosystem.
The timing for this partnership couldn’t be better. KVALITO belongs to a growing number of companies aware of their environmental responsibility by joining the movement towards a sustainable future. 2020 served as a wake-up call for many of us. As social and environmental issues reach saturation point, grassroots organisations fight for our communities and our planet. The connection between the health of our planet, our communities and our economies is beyond question.
“Addressing climate change will require investment in technologies that help to limit future emissions, such as electric vehicles, and also the drawdown of carbon from the atmosphere. Nature-based solutions can help with both of these, but we will need thousands of solutions in combination. There is huge potential for direct carbon capture technology as part of a diverse climate plan,” affirms Tom Crowther, professor of Global Ecosystem Ecology at ETH Zürich and Chief Scientific Advisor to the United Nation’s Trillion Tree Campaign.
Businesses must take carbon exposure as seriously as any other business risk.
Companies that view carbon emissions as costly are on the right track. Increased scrutinisation of carbon emissions and regulation is leading to widespread emissions pricing, changing the energy matrix, and has the potential to revolutionise economies. Carbon pricing reduces carbon emissions by applying market mechanisms to pass the cost of emitting on to emitters and driving innovation in cleaner options. The increasing “carbon exposure” of a business affects profit, resulting in opportunities and challenges: A forestry company may find that it is just as profitable to remove carbon dioxide from the air by planting trees instead of chopping them down for paper manufacture.
Disruptive forces have the power to turn the world on its head, as the current pandemic, globalisation, and the digital revolution continue to show. Climate change may well surpass all three in terms of complexity and outcome. Businesses have a salient opportunity today to act on their values, build ethical and strategic nonprofit partnerships, and secure their resilience by integrating carbon offset strategies into their operating models. Businesses can be the agents of change to bolster the viability of markets, societies, and ecosystems at large.
