Yunus Environment Hub Impact Report 2023 Published

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Our Guiding Principles for Going Carbon Neutral

At Yunus Environment Hub, we have directed all our business activities and operations towards the aim of organizational carbon neutrality. We have analyzed our carbon emissions and introduced measures to reduce our carbon footprint to the minimum and off-set the unavoidable emissions. Our guiding principles for going carbon neutral:

  1. At Yunus Environment Hub, we have a friendly workplace policy that allows home and remote work reducing emissions for commuting.
  2. Furthermore, we only travel for business meetings that cannot be held in a digital form. While being one of our guiding principles long before, the Covid-19 pandemic has further strengthened our intuition that most meetings may be held equivalently efficient through online platforms.
  3. All our staff consider their ways of transportation carefully and with regards to their environmental impact. Thus, travel policy for short-distance travel is to choose trains or buses and where appropriate public transport instead of taxi. Long-distance travels are reduced to the minimum required.
  4. We have designed virtual workshops as well as an online learning platform for training and incubation programs. When conducting physical meetings and trainings, we refer to local staff or our global network of affiliate organizations to avoid long-distance travels.
  5. As the fight against global plastic waste pollution constitutes one of our key areas of expertise and action, we understand ourselves as a plastic-free organization. We don’t use single-use items or packaging and segregate waste for recycling and composting. Where waste segregation is not available, we promote and advise on a respective adoption.
  6. We prefer reused or recycled materials over new products or virgin materials for our work equipment and materials. For example, we use refurbed computer and phone hardware from Refurbed or AfB.
  7. We positively promote a vegetarian/ vegan diet in our organization, at events, workshops or business meetings.
  8. We are a digital and paperless organization. This refers to both our internal as well as our external communication.
  9. We carefully choose suppliers and business partners that have the same environmental and social standards with a particular preference for collaborating with other social businesses.
  10. Our bank account is with GLS Bank, the first German ethical bank with a focus on cultural, social and ecological initiatives, initiated by people, and not anonymous interests seeking capital or maximum profit. The name stands for Gemeinschaftsbank für Leihen und Schenken which translates as Community bank for loaning and giving. With the main focus on cultural, social and environmental ventures, GLS tries to deal with challenges in the society by developing creative solutions.
  11. Our web host is Greensta using a 100% renewable energy from Greenpeace Energy eG. Greensta wants to contribute to the climate crisis through the use of renewable energies and abstains from profit maximization.

While these guiding principles help us to minimize the carbon emissions associated with our organizational activities, we use ClimateSeed – one of Yunus Environment Hub’s portfolio social businesses – to offset our unavoidable carbon emissions. Through ClimateSeed, we are able to acquire carbon credits from Gold Standard certified sustainability projects, many of them located in developing countries. We have chosen ClimateSeed for the offsets of our carbon emissions in order to support and promote social business practices that aim at reaching carbon neutrality. ClimateSeed is not only driven by its social mission of zero net carbon emissions, but also applies the UN Sustainability Development Goals as a baseline to select projects and measure their impact.

Contact us if you want to learn how to reduce your carbon emissions and for going carbon neutral with ClimateSeed.