Greenstone publishes 2022 UN Global Compact Communication on Progress

Greenstone has published its annual Communication on Progress (COP) to the UN Global Compact. With this Annual Report, Greenstone continues to demonstrate its commitment to making the UN Global Compact and its principles part of the strategy, culture and day-to-day operations of our company.

In 2021, we established an internal Sustainability Committee to coordinate our ESG strategy and define a strategy for Greenstone to become a net-zero business. Although we already have a relatively low carbon-impact, we are fully committed to providing carbon-neutral software and services to our clients in line with emerging SME net-zero standards.

Below we have summarised some of the highlights of this year’s report:

Greenstone’s GHG emissions footprint

As part of Greenstone’s commitment to evaluating our environmental performance, our GHG emissions footprint is calculated across all relevant scopes using Greenstone’s award-winning Enterprise software. We opened an office in New York in Q3 2021 and have included data from this second office since the time of opening.

As part of our science-based target commitment to measure and reduce our scope 3 emissions, we are also tracking supply chain emissions derived from purchased goods and services. Changes in business operations associated with COVID-19 restrictions meant that business travel and employee commuting remained low in 2021 in comparison with our baseline year. We also continued to report on the GHG emissions associated with our colleagues working from home in 2021 as part of our increased Scope 3 data coverage.

Greenstone’s science-based target and Sustainability Committee

In 2019, Greenstone formally joined the Science Based Target initiative (SBTi) movement by committing to set a science-based target. Following this commitment, our target to reduce our absolute scope 1 and scope 2 GHG emissions by 50% by 2030 and to measure and reduce our scope 3 emissions was approved in 2020.

In 2021, we extended this commitment by establishing a Sustainability Committee responsible for coordinating our ESG strategy and defining how Greenstone can become a net-zero business. Although we already have a relatively low carbon-impact, we are committing to provide carbon-neutral software and services to our clients in the future. We realise that initially this may require us to offset some of our emissions and we will look to science-aligned methodologies to define our organisation as a net-zero business.

Greenstone’s Tech Zero commitment

Greenstone has also recently become a public signatory of Tech Zero. As part of this commitment, Greenstone will publish a net-zero pathway and target date within a year of joining. A member of the Executive Team has been appointed to own the net-zero target and pathway. The Tech Zero initiative further underlines our commitment to our SBTi emissions reduction target and we will continue to report on our progress in reducing emissions to the Greenstone Board and through our UNGC Communication on Progress.

To be confident that our actions are in line with climate science and to ensure that we follow a pathway that is consistent with addressing the climate crisis, our ambition is to attain a net-zero status in line with the SBTi’s net-zero standard. This standard is currently in development for SMEs and therefore, in the absence of this pathway, we have become a signatory of the Tech Zero framework.

Greenstone and the UN Global Compact

At Greenstone, we understand that we play a role in helping organisations to meet many of the UN’s goals and objectives, including the ten principles of the UN Global Compact (UNGC). Greenstone has been a participant of the UN Global Compact since 2013 and actively uses and promotes the UN Global Compact Principles as a standard for our clients and are dedicated to improving the transparency of corporate reporting in the 4 key areas of Human Rights, Labour, Environment and Anti-Corruption.

Greenstone also promotes engagement with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as the recommendations of the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) across our client base and in our software solutions. In addition, Greenstone is a signatory to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (UNPRI) and enables other organisations to engage with the principles through our sustainability and ESG software solutions.

We support public accountability and transparency and we are committed to share this information with our stakeholders using our primary channels of communication.

To read our Communication on Progress, visit Greenstone’s page on the UNGC website.

For more information on the UN Global Compact, visit: www.unglobalcompact.org