Carbon Tracing & Offsetting - What can we do now to build the future of tomorrow?

Last Wednesday, the Climate Tech Subcommittee event was all about Carbon Tracing & Offsetting. We as co-chairs of the subcommittee feel that this is an important topic which needs a solid conversation. We wish we achieved that last week.

We started off with an insightful keynote by Karina Cady with three key messages below. Reach out to us to receive the slides which are kindly provided by the Fuller Academy.

• Drastically slashing emissions in your operations and investments by transitioning clean energy
• Efficiency efficiency efficiency: energy, water and resource efficiency
• Restore and protect nature - clean up industrial impacts causing risks to human health, stop deeply damaging practices of deforestation and deep-sea trawling

The panel was then joined by Priyanka Metha, Boon Yaw Song, Rajesh Sundaresan and we gathered diverse insights and perspectives. One key aspect was that we need to clean up oil spills (representing carbon offsets) and at the same time, we also need to reduce the number of oil spills (representing the reduction of carbon emissions). Only when placing energy and focus in both areas, can we push the needle. While awareness and actions to reduce carbon emissions are almost intrinsic to large corporations, the motivation to do so for SMEs is heavily dependent on government incentives and market requirements.

The panellists also agreed that a net-zero strategy starts with the reduction of energy consumption and waste and only as a supplement, we add carbon offsetting to our strategy. A final key insight was that if we start now with carbon reduction and offsetting, it is an asset in our balance sheet; if we wait it will very soon become a liability. Feel free to connect and reach out to the four speakers for more information.

Learn more about the Climate Tech Subcommittee of the SwissCham and follow SwissCham on LinkedIn to receive news about our latest events! Looking forward to talking to you soon.