GoCardless’ latest sustainability news and activities

At GoCardless, we believe that collaboration is critical to achieving meaningful climate change and taking the necessary steps toward our own science-based targets. So, with the view of driving collaboration and embedding sustainability across GoCardless, we recently ran our first internal GoCardless Sustainability Week in the lead up to Earth Day on the 22nd of April.

Across the globe, GoCardless employees volunteered to make a positive impact on their local environment and communities. Our team from Melbourne spent a day cooking 150 meals from food that would otherwise go to waste and a group of employees from our Paris team volunteered at an Urban Garden in Paris which not only provides vital ecosystem services but also provides food and jobs to the community. This was followed by our team in New York spending the day with Partnerships for Parks to help enhance a community park in Manhattan. Finally, our London teams worked with Thames21 to help clear London waterways of plastic pollution. 

Action and education often go hand-in-hand, which is why we also ran a series of masterclasses that GoCardless team members stated a keen interest in. This included an energy masterclass with the Big Clean Switch, sustainable fashion with Katy Zack - co-lead of the UN Sustainable Fashion Communications Programme - and a talk from our pension provider on the impact of finance.

Climate Impact Report 2022

We are also pleased to publish our latest Climate Impact Report, which looks at our greenhouse gas emissions for 2021 and 2019. This also builds upon our previous report, improving accuracy and filling data gaps. You can read this report here. 

Report overview:

Our total market-based greenhouse gas emissions for 2021 were 7923.24 tCo2e. This is equal to 13.23 tCo2e per GoCardless employee. 

Our top 5 sources of emissions were: 

1. Financial Services 

2. Advertising Services 

3. SaaS and related services 

4. Homeworking 

5. Insurance and pension services 

Reducing Our Impact

As we set out in our Sustainability Strategy, reducing our impact is our priority and we have already reached a great milestone by reducing our direct market-based emissions (Scope 1 & 2) by 90%  since 2019.

In 2019, our scope 1 and 2 emissions were 31.68 tCO2e. Then in 2021, this was reduced by 90.4% to 3.04 tCO2e by measures such as changing our main energy providers to 100% renewable sources, backed by the Carbon Trust. This year we expect to see a 99% reduction from 2019.

We have gone further by working on a pilot project with the Big Clean Switch to match the energy used in transactions with 100% renewable energy. However, we still have a long way to go to get to net-zero emissions across our whole value chain (Scope 1, 2 and 3) - with our Science-Based Net-Zero Target for 2035 requiring a 97% reduction in emissions per employee - but getting to net-zero emissions for our direct impact is a great first step.

Find out more about our targets and plans in our Sustainability Strategy & Net-Zero Action Plan.

Visit our sustainability hub 

You can stay up to date with GoCardless’ climate action progress, activities and latest reports - including Payments, Plastic, People and Planet 2022 report - in our new sustainability hub.