Carbon offsetting
Barclays met its goal to offset carbon emissions from its global banking operations in 2009.
When considering the direct impact that we have on the environment, we recognise that it is an important part of sound business management to use resources efficiently and we have set short-term targets to reduce our use of energy and water, and our CO2 emissions.
In 2007, we made a commitment to make our global banking operations carbon neutral. We have now met that commitment. We met this goal in stages, offsetting emissions first from UK operations, then from European operations and finally global operations. We will now review all aspects of our carbon management strategy and our progress against it, and set out our medium-term goals.
In 2008, Barclays carbon emissions totalled 678,746 tonnes of CO2. We have purchased 679,000 carbon credits from projects in the USA, China, India, Russia, Kenya, Ghana, Brazil, Argentina and South Africa. To date, Barclays has purchased and cancelled over one million carbon credits.
Measurement of emissions is independently verified by SGS to ensure that calculations are robust and where we have made estimates, these have been calculated on a reasonable basis.
We purchase credits known as Verified Emissions Reductions (VERs). These are credits that have been independently verified, and are bought and sold for the purpose of voluntary offsetting.
Our credits meet the Voluntary Carbon Standard, a set of rules developed to ensure that carbon credits genuinely reduce CO2, are audited and are traceable.
Read more about Barclays process for measuring and offsetting emissions in the document on this page.
Looking forward
Making our operations carbon neutral represents an important stage in our journey and some important lessons have been learned. We must now look ahead to how a global financial services provider should be operating in the low-carbon economy.
One of the challenges in meeting our emissions reductions target is that the global economic downturn has had an impact on our carbon management programme, with some projects being postponed. As a result, our energy efficiency programme has not progressed as planned in 2009.
We believe that all companies should strike the right balance between taking ownership of emissions reduction in their own operations, and carbon offsetting. As a result, Barclays will now review its carbon management strategy for 2010 and beyond with the aim of stimulating more investment in energy-efficiency within Barclays operations.
