Goals and scope of the programme’s second phase

Seamlessly continuing from the Greenhouse Neutral Programme’s first ten years, we launched a second commitment phase, which runs until 2020. However, after almost halving our CO₂ emissions per employee in the previous ten years, the potential for further reductions is now much smaller. Our new target is to keep our CO₂ emissions per employee stable at the level of 2013. In view of our expansive business strategy, especially in high growth markets, we consider this to be an ambitious goal.

For the programme’s second cycle, we also extended the scope of our emissions reporting and of our offsetting commitment. In addition to our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions (heating and power consumption) and a major source of Scope 3 emissions (business travel), our reporting now covers further activities along our supply chain (Scope 3): employee commuting, copy paper use, waste generation, water use and technical gases.

Based on this, we extended our commitment to offset the CO₂ emissions we cannot avoid to paper, waste, water and technical gases.

After a slight increase in 2014, total CO₂ emissions per employee (FTE) decreased by 4.3% during 2015, mainly driven by a further reduction in the energy intensity of our offices and decreases in the emissions from commuting and business travel (see “CO₂ emissions and underlying environmental data”). The latter was due to the fact that our employees made fewer business trips in carbon-intense flight classes, even though the total distance they travelled increased slightly on average. Compared with 2013, our CO₂ emissions per employee were 3.2% lower in 2015.