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 in 2013, 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): copy paper use, waste generation, water use, technical gases and employee commuting.

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

In 2016, total CO₂ emissions per employee (FTE) increased by 6.2% and were thus 3.9% higher than in 2013. The main reason was a significant rise in business travel, which outweighed further gains in our energy intensity (see Reducing energy consumption). A second factor was that we created jobs in countries where power consumption is relatively carbon intensive, eg in India. This situation is one of the reasons why we helped to establish the Climate Group’s RE100 initiative (see CO₂ emissions and underlying environmental data box).