The GIGA’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions Significantly Reduced between 2019 and 2022

The GIGA is committed to reducing its ecological footprint. To identify effective measures for the declared goal of reducing emissions and to monitor our success, we regularly calculate our CO2 emissions. A specialist company was commissioned to carry out these calculations, which initially performed a greenhouse gas balance for the base year 2019. You can find the GIGA’s first Corporate Carbon Footprint here and the balance for 2022 here.

Results:

Compared to 2019, the Institute’s emissions were around 42 per cent lower in 2022. This reduction is partly due to changes in the way we work (e.g. mobile work, hybrid and online meetings) that were initially pandemic-related and then permanently maintained. The largest source informing our carbon footprint is business travel-related flights (Corporate Carbon Footprint 2019: approximately 240 of the 531 tonnes of CO2 equivalents). These activities were reduced to a minimum during the peak phase of the pandemic, but resumed in 2022 (partly with catch-up effects).

We are aiming to take further measures to reduce our CO2 emissions, particularly with regard to business travel-related flights. The GIGA’s Sustainability Management Task Force is in contact with the Institute’s management and staff on these matters.

Further climate protection activities of the GIGA are:

• Electricity from renewable energy on all GIGA premises

• District heating on both Hamburg premises

• Only vegetarian catering at GIGA events and meetings

• Binding guidelines for the investment of the foundation‘s capital assets, including social, ecological, and ethical standards

• Only recycled paper with Blue Angel certification for printers and photocopiers

• Climate-neutral printing of the GIGA Annual Report 2022 and on Blue Angel paper

• Reducing electronic waste by offering discarded IT hardware to team members free of charge

• Participation as a team in the city cycling initiative (“Stadtradeln”)

• Survey among GIGA staff about mobility to identify options to reduce CO2

• Use of online and hybrid meeting formats, where feasible and suitable

• Subsidising certain public transport tickets (HVV-ProfiTicket, now Deutschland-Ticket) for employees

• Provision of suitable facilities for bicycle parking

• Mainly cloud-based IT infrastructure (substantial reduction in energy consumption compared to on-site solutions)

• Enabling mobile work (“home office”)

• Permission to take domestic flights being granted only in very exceptional cases