Labs
Crisis
We live in challenging times, with no simple answers. We acknowledge our responsibility to consider and address this crisis.
We're skeptical about easy answers, so we're exploring and tracking our experiments here.
Starting points
We're trying different things to find an approach that works for us.
Carbon accounting
We are now using Cogo for Carbon Accounting. This New Zealand based service has the right balance of automation, user experience and price for our needs. Their current estimate puts us at 2.9t for the preceding 12 months. Their current service doesn't fully capture our activities, including energy costs from working remotely. Given we use predominantly solar during the day, and purchase energy from a GreenPower provider (see Energy), we consider this a good validation of our original working estimate of around 5 tonnes per annum.
Land
We support Country Needs People, a not-for-profit coalition of over Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land and sea management organisations, supporting Indigenous Rangers and Indigenous Protected Area's in Australia. Funding for these programs has been radically cut in recent years, despite Indigenous land management being recognised as critical to addressing the climate crisis.
Research
We use ethnography and design research to understand shifting public opinions and behaviours related to climate.
ClimateTech
Pitchmark is our collaboration with product strategists More Traction. Pitchmark supports Climate Tech organisations to pitch and win investment funding.
Legal
The Environmental Defenders Office uses the law to protect wildlife, culture, community and climate.
Equipment
Equipment is a fairly low baseline for us. We aim to purchase well and keep running as long as possible. Our most significant equipment outlay is Macintosh computers, each of which carry approximately a 400 KgCO2e footprint, which we amortise over 4-5 years.
Sequester
We are now purchasing 0.25 tonnes per month (3 tonnes annually) of 100% additional carbon sequestration. We're currently purchasing bio-oil injection due to it's high durability and on-stream capacity (in other words, all purchases contribute to sequestration today, rather than project development).
Data
Our systems from major infrastructure providers such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon are already or working towards 100% renewable energy in their data centres. We also know from our auditing that most of our SAAS supply chain is based on AWS which has a 2024 renewable energy target. Our web services aim to achieve high Lighthouse scores and maximum caching to minimise data load.
Energy
We operate on solar during sunlight hours and purchase 100% GreenPower grid energy from Amber Electric. We're looking for ways to improve the reliability of this energy source.
Stewardship
We are looking for ways to establish and grow areas under protection. Our starting point is donating to Rainforest Rescue to buy and protect property in the Daintree in Far Northern Queensland. We're very interested in opportunities to do this in a more accountable way aligned to our growth.
We're tracking all our actions here
Carbon Accounting
We've started using Cogo for carbon accounting. They're local (New Zealand), have a good user experience, and are reasonably priced for a simple automated solution measuring emissions through our financial transactions. Their service doesn't currently account for remote working or historical emissions, so we have more work to do.
Inspiration
There's a lot happening on this issue, here are some projects and initiatives we find inspiring.
Studies in Ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel
Garfinkel's work has been a mainstay for many years, but I'm turning back to it lately as I've been thinking about the challenges of deconstructing and reconstructing imagination in creating futures. (Jaimes)
Educating for the Anthropocene, Peter Sutoris
Drawing on a multisited ethnographic project among schools and activist groups in India and South Africa, Sutoris explores education practices in the context of impoverished, marginal communities where environmental crises intersect with colonial and racist histories. Sutoris' idea of the Anthropocene as a forward looking design problem seems like a helpful way of looking at the imaginative challenges of the changes we need.
Kelpy
Kelpy has developed injection mouldable seaweed bioplastic as a packaging solution. Marine degradable and home compostable packaging made from seaweed.
Climatiq Explorer
Open access database of carbon emission factors. This stuff is hard, we know because we hand built an emission factors database to benchmark our activities over 2021/22. Climatiq have an open access database of 13757 Activities and 43945 Emission Factors, accessible via API.
Collaborators and friends
People and organisations we collaborate with that are doing great work.
