VLC has achieved carbon neutrality for the 2024 financial year, reaching the milestone for the fourth consecutive year.

VLC began calculating greenhouse gas emissions from its operations in July 2020 and has since reached carbon neutrality for 2021, 2022, 2023 and now 2024.

“We believe in supporting projects that have a positive impact on communities, individuals and the environment, and ones that do so in sustainable and innovative ways,” said VLC Executive Director (Operations and Finance) Susan Leonard.

“As a reflection of that, we’ve offset VLC’s carbon footprint for FY24 by supporting specific climate action and sustainable development projects across the globe.”

Following on from previous years, VLC has purchased carbon offsets from Gold Standard that fully cover the business’ Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions for the financial year. These include projects that provide clean energy and water, create sustainable employment opportunities, generate new habitats for threatened species and more.

One of these projects is supporting the planting of biodiverse forests in Panama, where 15 threatened animal species from the Red List have found a new habitat thanks to the more than 7.5 million trees that have already been planted.

Access to safe water is a major challenge in Lango, Uganda, creating a large burden on women and children to source water and firewood.

 

Meanwhile, access to safe water is a major challenge in many parts of the world, and in Lango, Uganda, the problem is exacerbated by boreholes falling into disrepair and hindering groundwater access. Knock-on effects of this include deforestation, increased CO2 emissions and a gender-biased burden on women and girls to gather firewood and water. By rehabilitating boreholes, this project has helped address these issues by delivering clean and accessible water to more than 40,000 individuals so far.

The third project VLC is supporting is the Sapphire 49.5 MW Wind Farm Project. Based in Pakistan, the project comprises 33 GE wind turbines and delivers clean energy to the national grid. From November 2015 to March 2024, the project has displaced 966,203 MWh of electricity from fossil fuel-based power plants in Pakistan. This amount of energy is equivalent to 483,100 tCO2e. The project delivers ~130,000 MWh/year and reduces ~65,000 tCO2e/year.

In previous years, VLC has supported a diverse range of projects, including reforestation in Nicaragua, improving cookstoves and delivering safe water in Rwanda, and the creation of a wind power project in India.