It’s not been an easy journey. The task has been complex, often challenging, but ultimately highly rewarding: Fleet Alliance has become carbon neutral.

It’s not a legal requirement for our company, but we believe carbon neutrality is essential to our business as a sustainable mobility provider.

Walking the walk, and all that.

But what does it mean to be carbon neutral and why?

Let me deal with the why bit first. Climate change is affecting our world in a way we have not seen before: the terrible and devastating floods in Valencia bear witness to that; rivers of hailstones in Saudi Arabia; heavy snowfall in Turkey; and the terrifying hurricanes that torment the Caribbean and the Florida coastline.

Quite simply, we have to turn the clock back on carbon emissions – or continue to face further and more ferocious natural disasters.

So that’s the why. Now, turning to carbon neutrality: it’s a state where the amount of carbon emitted is balanced by the amount of carbon either absorbed or removed from the atmosphere.

Reaching carbon neutrality can assist in cooling the oceans, securing food produce, reducing the likelihood of flooding, and reducing biodiversity loss.

Like all management activities, it should be measured. So it involves an external audit to understand the extent of your carbon footprint, targets for its reduction, the reduction of all internal emissions, and then informing customers and non-customer alike to encourage wider participation in carbon reduction actions.

In broader terms, it’s part of the UK Government’s net zero ambitions for 2050, part of which is the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate. This ZEV lays down the proportion of cars and vans that must be zero emission each year, something which Fleet Alliance very much supports through its client fleet management policy that encourages electric vehicle take up and our EV Salary Sacrifice programme for greater encouragement of Environment, Social And Governance (ESG) programmes.

What have we done?

We have taken substantial action to reduce our carbon emissions wherever possible.

The key areas are reducing our energy consumption by 57% and switching our energy to a renewables supplier where the majority of our power is generated by wind.

Meanwhile, our company car policy went fully EV in 2021, while we have also introduced a zero-emission policy for all staff salary sacrifice cars.

These actions – and many smaller ones – have contributed to a 90% reduction in our carbon emissions.

The remaining 10% will be eliminated through fully audited Gold Standard verified carbon offsets, which ensure that the projects we invest in benefit their neighbouring communities and progress the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Three schemes have been chosen by Fleet Alliance staff as part of our Fleet Alliance Loves outreach programme.

So, we are now carbon neutral. What Next?

Our efforts to reduce carbon will continue as we plot our path towards net zero and include Scope 3 emissions in our reporting.

Scope 3 emissions are those for which we are indirectly responsible – such as the supply of goods, transportation and distribution activities and business travel.

But for now, we have covered Scope 1 emissions (those we are directly responsible for) and Scope 2 (emissions we are indirectly responsible for, such as the generation of purchased energy).

Becoming carbon neutral is a major step towards our net zero ambitions, and we’re justifiably proud of our achievement. It’s also an essential aspect of our sustainable mobility proposition, where we genuinely are walking the walk.