Building the Carbon Accounting Community with Andrew Griffiths

Andrew Griffiths is Director of Policy and Partnerships at Planet Mark, a sustainability certification that supports organizations and real estate to measure and continually reduce carbon emissions and increase their social value. Andrew co-founded the Carbon Accounting Alliance (CAA) representing 300+ organizations in the industry. He also sits on Advisory Boards, Councils and Committees for the Institute of Directors (IoD), BSI Greenhouse Gas Management Standards, and UK-Government backed initiatives like UK Business Climate Hub and Project Perseus. Having delivered a TEDx talk on the power of meaningful networking, he is a big believer in the power of communication and how it can be used to drive climate action.

Andrew Griffiths – Director of Policy and Corporate Development at Planet Mark, Co-Founder of Carbon Accounting Alliance

Andrew Joins the Carbon Accounting and Management Podcast to Discuss:

• Objectives of the Carbon Accounting Alliance (CAA)
• Ensuring consistency in carbon accounting methodologies
• Professionalization of the sector
• Engagement with policymakers and standard setters
• Public vs proprietary emission factors

Andrew brings a wealth of experience and passion to our discussion, highlighting the innovative work happening at Planet Mark, which is an internationally recognized sustainability certification helping organizations set credible net-zero targets. In addition, he sheds light on the formation and objectives of the Carbon Accounting Alliance, which has rapidly grown to encompass over 500 organizations from 45 countries, all working together to standardize and promote best practices in carbon accounting.

Throughout our conversation, you’ll hear about the Alliance’s three strategic pillars: technical alignment, professionalization of the sector, and engaging with policymakers. Andrew emphasizes the importance of collaboration in tackling the climate crisis, illustrating how sharing data, knowledge, and methodologies among professionals can drive significant progress.

Whether you’re a carbon accounting professional or simply passionate about sustainability, this episode is packed with insights and strategies to help you understand the value of working together to create a sustainable future.

Andrew’s Listener Takeaway: If there’s only one thing that our guests take away from this conversation, what do you think it should be?

If you’re in carbon accounting, play nicely with everyone else. Come and play nicely with everyone else. If you’re not in carbon accounting, it’s an interesting question if this isn’t a relevant sphere for you. I think the climate crisis requires radical collaboration. Carbon accountants have one role to play in this journey, but literally every other profession has its role to play. If there isn’t an industry forum or a professional forum bringing together people within your area of specialty and expertise, whether that is you are an artist, you are an engineer, you are a logistics company, you are a waste company, whatever it might be, if you don’t have some form of forum bringing you together with your peers to collectively solve the biggest, most challenging problems that you’re facing, do it. There are going to be some really naughty problems that are going to take massive collaboration to solve.

There are classic examples of that for things like green steel. Steel manufacturers, many of them are now getting together. They’re pooling resources and money together to invest in trying to evolve technologies, because none of them have the budgets to do it independently and come up with some magical solution. They’ve come together to try to do stuff. We have to see that in more places and in more sectors and in more industries. So find your allies, that’s the overall takeaway that is true for everyone. If you’re a carbon accountant, hopefully we can help signpost a whole bunch of those to you. We now have over a thousand people at the alliance.

We’ve got 570 member organizations, but over a thousand people. Plenty of allies for you there. If those aren’t your allies, find them within your business. There will be allies in different professions, different specialties. One of the first things I encourage people within companies to do is just go and start talking to people, because you will find that there are people who care about this just as much as you do, and you can form a rebel alliance inside your business. I’ve seen so many examples of grassroots activations inside businesses causing quite big companies to have to up their game in sustainability, because the staff are demanding it. They’re coming and going, we’ve got a proposal, we want to become a B Corp, we want to measure our carbon footprint, we want to have a net zero target. If a big enough group of you get together and say that to your board, they’re going to struggle to ignore you for very long because they don’t want to lose you, you have power, and there’s power in numbers. There’s power in coming together. Find your allies.