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. We aim for net zero in our own operations by 2025 and assess our environmental impact yearly.

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

Our goal is to be carbon neutral in terms of direct emissions and purchased energy emissions (scope 1 and 2) by 2025. We have created a roadmap for reducing our footprint.

Sustera is a service provider, so our carbon footprint consists mainly of energy consumption in our offices and travel. In 2022, our total footprint in Finland was 600 tCO2e, and emissions per employee decreased by 18% from the previous year. In Sweden, the carbon footprint was 207 tCO2e. Sweden’s significantly lower footprint is due to lower emissions from electricity generation.

Our carbon handprint

In 2022, our energy-related services* saved our customers up to 58 GWh of energy. This means that our services reduced our customers’ energy emissions by up to 8 989 tCO2.

Through our new Geolo solution, we supplied our customers with a total of 338 tCO2e of renewable energy in 2022, and EcoReal’s energy renovations reduced our customers’ emissions by up to 66,700 tCO2e in 2022.

Based on the indicators, our carbon handprint was more than 76 000 tCO2e. This means that our positive climate impact is 94 times larger than our carbon footprint.

*Including energy audits in Finland in 2022 (excl. EcoReal)

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. Only 5.5% of Sustera’s turnover is EU taxonomy eligible and 70% of taxonomy eligible services are related to professional energy services.

We have recognised that our professional energy services, our energy renovation services and our Geolo innovation, which provides geothermal heating and cooling, fall under the taxonomy. We have also assessed the taxonomy compliance of each of our activities. In 2022, none of our services were taxonomy compliant. Our aim is to improve our taxonomy compliance during 2023. We aim to improve our EU taxonomy alignment during 2023.