We are pleased to announce that Opera is now a carbon neutral organisation.

Making Opera carbon neutral

Towards the end of 2021, we embarked on a project to align our own operations with a more sustainable future - we set out to measure our operational footprint, create a plan to reduce this in line with global emission reduction targets, and to offset any unavoidable emissions.

Now, we are proud to announce that not only is Opera carbon neutral for 2021, but we’ve also offset our historic emissions all the way back to 2014.

We know that offsetting is only a small part of our overall sustainability journey, but we are delighted to have been able to support projects to improve sustainability around the world.

Why we did this

At COP26, the warnings were stark – we are on course for >2.6 degrees of warming, but we have a chance of reducing this to <2 degrees of warming if we all act now.

We aim to lead by example by following good sustainability practices, to reduce the direct environmental impacts of all our activities, advance our positive contributions to the planet and our society, and to help our clients and partners to do the same.

In addition to this, our project aims to contribute to the industry’s transition to a net-zero carbon built environment. As the UK’s property and construction sectors push to support domestic and international carbon reduction targets, we aim to match these aspirations within our own day-to-day management and operations.

What we found

Based on these goals, we wanted to measure our footprint to find out our impact and find out where we could reduce this. We measured everything from facilities used to the coffees we drank, our day-to-day commutes and site travel, through to company merchandise ordered.

We followed the GHG Protocol to the fullest extent we could, aiming to take account for all the emissions we’re responsible for. We worked with Alectro, a carbon analytics company, who provided the 3rd party assessment of the data and resulting emissions.

Our 2021 footprint was 17.2 tCO2e, but that didn’t reflect the ‘business-as-usual’ case where employee commuting and wider business travel was included. Therefore, we also modelled the impact of activities that couldn’t happen because of COVID to arrive at a more holistic value of 30.75 tCO2e, or 1.28 tCO2e/person.

Our footprint was >90% in Scope 3, and high contributors included business travel, employee commute, and the food and drink we consume. We were surprised to find that coffee and milk were such large contributors, compared to the employee commute (where we travel 97% of our distance on public transport or zero-carbon methods).

Carbon Neutral to Net Zero

This project marks the first step as we aim to align ourselves with national net-zero targets. For us, carbon-neutral means calculating our carbon footprint and investing in carbon offsets to counteract this impact. At the same time, we’re committing to a net-zero strategy where we are doing everything we can to reduce our footprint as far as reasonably practicable. As a company with an already very low footprint, we’ll be relying on natural transitions (business and commute efficiencies) and wider supply chain reductions to help us reach our footprint. Our goal is to seek these out wherever possible in the coming years.

We’ve begun to undertake a number of actions to look at where else we can reduce our footprint, and how we can ensure we continue to track and reduce our impact in the future.

While offsetting is the simpler component, we are also committed to helping our clients and industry peers to reduce their carbon impact at the same time. There is a huge opportunity for us to continue to work with clients on their projects with their project teams, to save millions of tonnes of carbon in the coming years with innovation in the materials and techniques adopted, as well as educating them on what they can do to reduce their own impact.

Our Outcomes

After understanding the business-as-usual impact of emissions, we were looking to offset the 31 tCO2e with a project that matched the Sustainable Development Goals our employees had voted to support the provision of clean water access for families in Laos, an enterprise provided by Terraclear.

This project helps to reduce illness from drinking contaminated water, as well as reduces the impact on the Lao forest. Households that use Terraclear’s water filter reduce or eliminate boiling water for drinking. Families no longer spend hours collecting fuelwood or buying charcoal in order to boil drinking water. The filter requires no energy source to use. By reducing the need for fuelwood and charcoal used in the household, each filter reduces the stress on local forest resources and reduces the amount of greenhouse gas emissions.

Project impact and benefits:

• 15,000 tonnes of CO2e saved annually by the project
• 20-30 litres of clean water - the average daily household consumption fully met by each filter
• 65,000 households benefiting from filter use

We went one step further and decided we’d like to take responsibility for our entire historical footprint, too. We calculated the cumulative impact for the past 8 years. With this in mind, our impact was 172 tCO2e - and this is what we committed to offsetting this year.

With that, we’re excited to announce that Opera is now a historically carbon-neutral business.

What’s next for Opera?

We’re excited to announce that we also became a signatory to the United Nations’ initiative, Climate Neutral Now, joining a group of 400 companies around the world committed to reducing their environmental impact.

We’re supporting employees by investing in methods to upskill them and improve their knowledge of sustainability so that they can become better practitioners in the project environment and provide their clients with market leading knowledge.

From an operational perspective we will look at workshops we can put on, making small changes to our procurement strategies, and making sure we stay ahead of the curve when it comes to carbon emission tracking.

We also encourage other companies to follow suit and take stock of their own impact.