On this episode of Net-Zero Carbon, Danny Gomez, managing director of financial and emerging markets at FreightWaves, and Sam Stockdale, senior vice president of sustainability at logistics real estate company Link Logistics, discuss Link’s innovative strategy to achieve carbon-neutral operations in direct and indirect emissions by 2025.
Link Logistics on Thursday announced a nearly $5 million commitment to the American Forest Foundation and The Nature Conservancy to support landowners through the Family Forest Carbon Program over five years.
The company’s goal is to conserve more than 200,000 acres of forest and use carbon credits to offset about 250,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions. This should help Link Logistics achieve carbon-neutral operations.
“The key thing here is the operations part,” Stockdale said. The carbon-neutral operations goal only applies to Link’s scope 1 (direct) and scope 2 (indirect) emissions. About 93% of the company’s emissions are scope 3 (supply chain).
Link is gathering and evaluating the data available for scope 3 emissions before setting a target to reduce those emissions.
Carbon offset market
“There are many different offset types, and not all offsets are created equal,” Stockdale said.
Link Logistics’ carbon offsetting projects are located near communities where the company operates instead of on acres of land in another country.
Local foresters work with farmers to determine how much potential the land has to sequester carbon and ensure the amount of carbon sequestration that is expected is what occurs, Stockdale said.
There is some skepticism about the effectiveness of carbon offsets. Stockdale said he welcomes the criticism because it helps move the market forward and helps advance the science of measuring carbon sequestration.
In the past two to three years, the carbon offset market has seen “this groundswell of support that has allowed an influx of capital to take advantage of the tools that professionals have been developing over the last decade,” Gomez said.
The cost of carbon offsets is likely to go up over time, so Link wanted to lock in the costs for high-quality carbon credits now, Stockdale said. And the company is using carbon credits as one of the tools to reduce its carbon footprint.
View all of FreightWaves’ Net-Zero Carbon episodes and sustainability stories.
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