​Climate change continues to progress. It is getting warmer, sea levels are rising and glaciers are melting. All this has serious consequences for us and our lives. This was also impressively demonstrated at this year's GOPA Group Day and more than 2000 employees and experts joined an engaged and ambitious discussion on how we can contribute to a greener tomorrow.​

 "Let us walk as we talk", said Jonas Kaufmann who is the Environmental Officer in GOPA Worldwide Consultants but also represents the voice of the younger generation in the group as a whole. The GOPA Consulting Group has already laid the necessary foundation in recent years by avoiding and reducing its CO2 emissions as documented in our current environmental report. But this is not enough.

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 Since carbon dioxide emissions are one of the main causes of climate change, the group's governing body GGDF has now committed to achieving climate neutrality in all its activities with all its member companies by the end of 2022 at the latest.

Every company causes CO2 emissions, no matter how sustainably and economically it operates, says GGDF spokesman Thomas Franke.  Climate protection means recording all emissions in order to then continuously reduce and avoid them. A consistent approach is to offset all unavoidable emissions through a climate protection project. This makes the company climate-neutral.
 

“Our discussion during the GOPA Group day demonstrated GOPA Group´s deep afinitity and responsibility towards a greener tomorrow and we all have been deeply impressed by the project videos of our members and their positive impact to climate", Franke said when explaining the initiative. “But we want to walk as we talk. And this means that we do not stop at our frontyard. All our companies will go ZERO until the end of 2022 and this not only for our Headquarters – this is only the first step."

Even our complex Group structure with the multiple projects and local companies will be mapped in the second step.

 We follow two levels:

Reduce and avoid CO2

From the CO2 balance, you can see which greenhouse gas emissions you can reduce and which you can avoid in the long term. A few examples: Switch to green electricity, video conferencing instead of business trips, train instead of domestic flight, etc.

Offset CO2

We offset all unavoidable emissions through a climate protection project according international certified  standards.

 We might also develop our own projects as we do work in those countries of relevance and having access to the relevant know – how. To develop a holistic strategy for GOPA Group will be one of the tasks of the new task force "GOPA Group goes ZerO"  in strong coordination with GOPA Worldwide´s department RDE.