If a tree falls in a forest when no one’s around, does it make a sound? If a company emits carbon dioxide but saves a forest, has it achieved climate neutrality?

While both companies and outside stakeholders agree that reducing and/or offsetting emissions is a worthy corporate objective, there is no consensus on how to define and achieve this goal.

A new study from Clean Air-Cool Planet and the UK’s Forum for the Future considers climate neutrality and makes detailed recommendations for how to achieve it. Getting to Zero: Defining Corporate Climate Neutrality defines carbon neutrality as a condition in which “a company, or one of its products or services, can have no net impact on climate.”

Bob Sheppard, COO & Director of the Business Program at CA-CP, says that the study was produced

“…in the absence of any hard and fast standards for climate neutrality, and out of growing concern that the real value of the concept could be lost in a stream of inflated claims.
“Setting a course to reach climate neutrality is a laudable thing. We hope that the concept will retain credibility as a goal, and that’s why we wanted to define what it means to really do this work.”

The full text of the report can be found here. The executive summary on pages 2-9 includes CA-CP’s recommendations for companies “that have made claims – or are considering making claims” about their climate neutrality.