Hi BCorp community - we are certified Climate Active for the past 3 years, and as a SME of 22 in team, this is not a small task annually to continue our certification (equally its not a BCorp certification 
). I am becoming less enamoured with it as a process and what feels like a vehicle for greenwashing by the bigger end of town. I just wanted to enquire to anyone else’s experience and thoughts around Climate Active in Australia.
Continuing as carbon neutral and improvement of our emissions as a business is a non negotiable, and I find there is absolute value of reporting publicly annually on our progress, but wondering if the time / cost in certifying could be better spent else where.
Just curious on other’s thoughts…
Hi Amie, we pulled out of Climate Active this year for the very same reasons. We are a business of the same size as well. After years of “carbon neutrality” we are pausing to investigate our own greenwashing by not including the scope 3’s in our boundary that Climate Active was okay with. Our focus has shifted towards emissions avoided and deep diving into where we can actually reduce our footprint significantly. I can tell you, it’s more substantial and rewarding than the stamp. I think it served a purpose and is part of the collective journey, but the time and money spent on that particular exercise didn’t stack up to what we are really preventing by tackling the ones we couldn’t afford to take responsibility for. Hope that makes sense! xHolly
We were going down the Climate Active path, but then due to similar reasons and also due to the fact that they were unable to recognise/ include our USA operations in the certification - it felt pointless to certify. So we have instead opted to “self-certify” - we work with an independent Carbon Accountant, to annually track and report on our emissions, we still get our emissions independently verified and then we have our own public disclosure statement to substantiate any claims we make. We also work on reduction strategies and KPI’s for the business and this is a key focus area - and there are always improvements to be had here (I feel like we are only just touching the surface!). We are still offsetting what remaining operational emissions we have (these are small) using 100% VERs. And likewise we will be tracking the supply and movement of our rugs, which is considered “outside of our operational control boundary” in Climate Active terms, which is almost insane as this will be the largest emissions producer for our business.