The EIB group, as the largest financier of climate change mitigation and adaptation, is committed to Climate Action and protecting the environment. Our commitment to measure and manage our internal footprint is consistent with the environmental and social policies, principles and standards we require of the projects that we finance, and the responsibilities of the various parties. In respect of our internal operations, we aim to lead by example by measuring, managing and reporting the environmental performance of our own internal operations with the same vigour as our financial operations. This means “Walking the Talk”.

In 2016 our GHG emissions resulting from our own internal operations reduced by 48% to 6.16 tCO2e per employee from when we first started measuring in 2007.

Although absolute emissions have increased since 2007, this is primarily attributable to business volumes and a 119% growth in staff numbers, resulting in correlated increases across business travel and buildings-related emissions and the fact that we now include more within the scope of the internal footprint.

* Base line year

We first calculated the carbon footprint of our head office operations in Luxembourg in 2007, setting a target to reduce relative emissions by 20-30% by 2020. Through understanding our GHG emissions, we can identify and implement measures to reduce and to track performance. 

We have taken various measures to reduce our own GHG emissions such as optimising heating and ventilation systems, active lighting management systems, virtualisation and consolidation of our IT infrastructure, implementation of “follow me” print systems and many others. We have further implemented changes to our travel policy to address the largest component of our Scope 3 emissions, business travel as well as implementation more practical solutions such as, video conferencing, Internet (Voice over IP) communications platform to enable virtual meetings that further avoid the need for travel.

Compensating our residual carbon footprint

We started compensating our residual emissions in 2013 through the world’s first project to be validated and verified under the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS)  and the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Standard (CCB), the Wildlife Work REDD+ project in the Kasigau corridor in Kenya. In addition to the GHG benefits from the protection of natural carbon sinks, a number of local community based, sustainable development initiatives have also resulted from the proceeds of the project.