Sustainability / Environmental sustainability

Encouraging environmental sustainability

As buildings account for 40% of our energy consumption and 36% of CO₂ emissions over their lifecycle, we need to start a new era of more sustainable construction and responsible building management.

Sustaining life

The built environment is a major source of carbon emissions and consumer of natural resources. Our services help developers, property managers and homeowners combat climate change and protect the environment by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating biodiversity loss.

Services with a positive impact

In all our operations, we seek solutions that reduce either our own or our clients’ carbon footprint, for example by improving the energy efficiency of buildings. A positive climate impact can be measured by a carbon handprint. A carbon handprint expresses the climate benefits of using a product or service, as opposed to a carbon footprint, which describes the negative climate impact of a company’s activities.

Our carbon footprint

We signed the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) commitment in 2023 to take action to mitigate climate change by reducing our carbon footprint. Our goal is to have an approved SBTi target by the end of 2024.

Sustera is a service provider, so our carbon footprint consists mainly of energy consumption in our offices and travel. In 2023, our carbon footprint was 6,792 tCO₂e, 25% more than in 2022. A total of 79% of our emissions originate from operations in Finland. Sweden’s significantly lower footprint is due to lower emissions from electricity generation.

Our carbon handprint

In 2023, the carbon handprint of our services amounted to approximately 51,756 tCO₂. The identified potential savings for our customers totaled 22,551 tCO₂.

Through our new Geolo solution, we supplied our customers with a total of 6,439 tCO₂e of renewable energy in 2023, and energy renovations reduced our customers’ emissions by up to 27,162 tCO₂e.

We have estimated that the potential carbon handprint for the year 2023 could have been as high as 160 000 tCO2 if we had managed to include all our services in Finland and Sweden. In 2023, our positive carbon handprint was more than 7 times larger than our carbon footprint.

EU taxonomy

The EU taxonomy is a classification system that lists the most emitting economic activities and defines criteria for their sustainability measures.

The services we provide are mainly consultancy, which in itself does not generate emissions. Total of 17% of Sustera’s turnover is EU taxonomy eligible. This indicates an increase in the proportion of our eligible services compared to the previous year (5.5% in 2022). Additionally, in 2023, we introduced new services, such as consultancy for physical climate risk management and adaptation, which also fall under the EU taxonomy.

We have identified that our professional energy services, energy renovation services, and
Geolo innovation, which provides geothermal heating and cooling, fall under the EU taxonomy

Furthermore, we successfully enhanced our alignment with the EU taxonomy in 2023. 93% of our eligible turnover aligns with the taxonomy, compared to 0% in 2022. This achievement indicates that we met our target of 50% alignment by 2023. We intend to continue our work to improve EU taxonomy compliance in the coming years.