Carbon footprints can be measured by the amount of carbon dioxide or other carbon compounds emitted into the atmosphere by the activities of an individual, company and country. In 2007 the government launched the Carbon Reduction Commitment/Energy Efficiency Scheme, aimed at improving energy efficiency and cutting emissions in large public and private- sector organisations, which are responsible for around 10 per cent of the UK’s emissions. Whilst this scheme is not just about the management of carbon emissions releated to information and communications technology, an increasingly important question is how organisations of all kinds can reduce their carbon footprint while their digital footprints are getting bigger.

Read the full article by Aasha Bodhani of E&T, the magazine of The Institution of Engineering and Technology – featuring expert comment by Ecometrica Operations Director, Gary Davis – either online at the following link, or the full print article via PDF below.

Digital footprints are growing >

London, 11th January 2012 – The Highgate Tech Fund today announced that, after several months of detailed due diligence, agreement has been reached to close the third investment in Fund 2. Highgate Tech Fund (HGTF) has invested in Edinburgh-based company Ecometrica, a leading Greenhouse Gas Accounting and Ecosystem Mapping business providing Software as Service (SaaS) applications. Ecometrica are a team of leading greenhouse gas experts and the solution is already being used by some of the largest companies globally, including RSA, National Express and Petkim (Turkey’s largest petrochemical company). The Ecometrica solution, named ‘Our Impacts’, is a Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) accredited web platform and is built on extensive research and content. ‘Our Impacts’ provides an easy to use carbon accounting system for all businesses that automates the calculation of greenhouse gas impact and enables them to identify areas for action or accurately calculate carbon offset.

Carbon accounting is rapidly becoming a requirement for many large and mid-sized companies around the world and is a pre-requisite for most Corporate Social Responsibility programmes. This trend was boosted by the recent Durban Agreement (12/2011), in which 190 countries committed for the first time to cut carbon emissions (individual country targets are yet to be agreed). This means that countries will need to impose reductions in carbon emissions on businesses within their country. One of the keys to cutting is to know how much carbon each business is emitting, ‘you cannot manage what you can’t measure’, is the famous quote (attributed to a number of people including Peter Drucker) or perhaps more accurately ‘what gets measured, gets done’ (attributed to Tom Peters). ‘Our Impacts’ enables businesses to measure their carbon impact and use accurate information to put strategies in place to reduce carbon output, or where reduction is not possible, offset their carbon impacts.

Ecometrica started life as a consultancy business in 2008 to provide GHG accounting and ecosystem monitoring services to FTSE 100, Fortune 500 businesses and governments globally. Recognising that this business model was not a scalable one, Ecometrica has developed a cloud-based solution that embeds many years of consulting expertise and knowledge, plus unrivalled data quality. The Highgate Tech Fund investment is part of a round of funding that will be deployed to grow global sales and marketing and for further product development.

Andrew Muir, Fund Co-Chair, said: “We are delighted to have made this investment. Ecometrica is a perfect company for our fund, with solid intellectual property, operating in a high growth market, demonstrating a clear proof of concept and some early stage, big brand customers already paying to use the product. We have identified Ecometrica as having the best potential to become a market leader in this space. Success will come from growing the customer base globally and adding new SaaS products to the portfolio.”

Richard Tipper, CEO Ecometrica, added: “We were impressed by the Highgate Tech Fund team, they have all succeeded in the software and technology space and the expertise that they bring to the table in addition to the investment gives us the confidence to accelerate the business to success.”

Highgate will take an active role in Ecometrica via a board seat and will use the inherent expertise of the fund team to work alongside the business to support success on an on-going basis. Highgate expects to make at least one more investment in Fund 2 before closing this fund to investors in April 2012.

-Ends-

Notes to Editors:

Highgate Tech Fund
Highgate Tech Fund 2 is the second fund from the combined team of Highgate Associates and Enterprise Corporate Finance. The Fund was founded by Andrew Muir and Ken Nelson both serial tech sector entrepreneurs with more than 25 years of experience successfully creating, building and exiting software and tech companies. Highgate Tech Fund was created in the government ethos of EIS to support investment in to early stage British based tech companies. Highgate Tech Fund invests in the best early stage software companies that have a need for investment to support fast track growth for an existing proven product. HGTF is also unique that it does not charge fees to investors and only makes money when companies within the fund make a successful exit and then only after 6% annualised has been returned to the investor. This ensures that the interests of the fund management team (all tech sector experts) are aligned with investors, unusual in the EIS and VCT Fund market. Highgate Tech Fund 2 opened in November 2010 and will close on April 4th 2012. The target is to have 4 or 5 good quality investee companies within the fund at that time.

www.highgatetechfund.com

About Ecometrica
Ecometrica is a company of world leading specialists and experts in greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting, ecosystem services, climate change policy, remote sensing and web based programming. With offices in Edinburgh, Scotland and Montréal, Canada, Ecometrica has unrivalled experience in the development and application of all major standards for GHG accounting, ecosystem change measurement and monitoring.

The mission is to make accounting for GHG emissions and ecosystem changes easier for all organisations, including business and government, by making our expertise available through a comprehensive range of web-based and professional consulting services. Whatever your business, we make greenhouse gas accounting and ecosystem measurement easier.

www.ecometrica.com

About Our Impacts
Our Impacts is the CDP-accredited greenhouse gas accounting service that brings together world-leading carbon experts and extensive research databases, all delivered through a flexible web-based platform. With its unique carbon calculation engine and full quality assurance process, Our Impacts is the natural choice for definitive, powerful and flexible greenhouse accounting.

www.ecometrica.com/our-impacts

Ecometrica Operations Director and Chief GHG Analyst Gary Davis spoke at the event, explaining how to set the scope and boundaries for carbon accounts and discussing how is it being done, how it could be done, and how it should be done.

You can see Gary’s presentation from the conference by using the link below.

This new Ecometrica paper explains the rebound effect in more detail, and discusses how it can be minimised.

Ecometrica and Brook Lyndhurst were commissioned to carry out a review of the CCF, with the aims of exploring the impacts of projects and identifying the factors which contribute to the projects‟ success. The review also explored questions around the potential of community projects to deliver behaviour change, emissions reductions and wider sustainability aims; the limits of what they can achieve; and how government can support them to do more.

The review methodology involved extensive qualitative research with a sample of 21 projects, and a quantitative carbon assessment of eight of these.

Use the links below to view the publications on the Scottish Government website:

Summary
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2011/06/13142135/0

Main Report
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2011/06/28142552/0

Appendices
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2011/06/28142748/0

This report, authored by Ecometrica and commissioned by the Department for Transport (DfT), considers the potential to reduce the risk of ILUC by actions taken at a regional level, for example by a region with a country, a national government or an international body such as the European Union.

Follow this link to the DfT website to read the full report on Regional Level Actions to Avoid ILUC.

Ecometrica supports a broad mandate in order to promote the idea of fiduciary responsibility on GHG emissions as widely as possible, and discusses this within the responses below.

This is just one of the conclusions of a detailed evaluation of NICFI carried out by Ecometrica, LTS International, Indufor Oy and the Christian Michelsen Instititue. Dr Richard Tipper led the evaluation of NICFI’s impacts on global policy developments, which was one of six reports commissioned by Norad. This work represents the largest evaluation ever commissioned by Norad and is a key example of climate policy evaluation in practice.

For further details and to download the reports:

http://www.norad.no/en/Tools+and+publications/Publications/Publication+Page?key=333472

Karin will describe the availability of forest data, recent developments in satellite observations, and how Ecometrica put these to the use in addressing the challenges of Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification of the benefits from forestry and land use initiatives.

The conference will take place in London on 12 and 13 May. See www.environmental-finance.com/events for more details.