HIFK – compensates all League team travel CO2 emissions with Compensate

Purpose

CO2 emissions from travelling are one of the biggest contributor to increasing hockey club’s carbon footprint. We want to create a change in our travel emissions and also compensate the emissions we can not yet make smaller. HIFK wants to be sustainable especially considering that hockey is a winter sport.

Results

HIFK started the cooperation in 2020. Since the beginning of the cooperation HIFK has compensated 60 tCO2e of emissions through Compensate. With Compensate’s built-in overcompensation, HIFK has bought and retired 239 carbon credits. This has enabled the removal of 145 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, thus resulting in more carbon removals than HIFK’s emissions.

The impact is the same as/equivalent to:
• Conserving 2 648 m2 of rainforest
• 5 826 grown trees sequestering CO2 all year round
• Saving 1 213 850 cups of coffee

The carbon capture projects in Compensate’s portfolio support a vast majority of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. In HIFK’s compensation, all 17 goals are supported.

Implementation

Every year all the travels are documented and then the CO2 emissions calculated. To compensate for the emissions, 80% of HIFK’s money flow directly towards the high-quality forest conservation and reforestation projects in Compensate’s portfolio, while 20% are used to purchase credits from innovative projects. Compensate does not take any cuts from the compensation money, all bank statements and credit certificates are available on their website.

Due to the many uncertainties in carbon projects, which are not always rigorously taken into account or mitigated, Compensate can’t be confident that one carbon credit equals one tonne of CO₂ removed from the atmosphere.

Compensate scores projects in order to estimate the true climate impact of one carbon credit. The result is that one credit sold as equivalent to one tonne CO₂, actually correspond to less: e.g. 0.6 tonnes of CO₂ removed from the atmosphere. Thus, Compensate buys more credits than it would be technically necessary to ensure a robust compensation claim.

Overcompensation is important not only to ensure real climate impact, but also to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than a product or a service emits. Even though emission reductions are the primary way to fight climate change, we have surpassed the point where that is enough. The safe levels of CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere were already exceeded in 1987. In addition to radically reducing emissions, we need to remove excess CO₂ from the atmosphere. Overcompensation makes this possible.