Are you counting the carbon of your professional advice?

Whether you’re an architect, lawyer, PR executive or consultant, it’s likely your biggest carbon emissions are the ones you enable through your professional service. Now Race to Zero and Oxford Net Zero are challenging you to count that carbon up and reduce it.

If you’re an agent or a construction lawyer on a major regeneration project, that could mean adding up the hundreds of tonnes of embodied and operational carbon of a major development. 

 “Serviced emissions” (also known as advised or advertised emissions), are those created or impacted by client activities – such as sales increasing due to an advertising campaign or emissions from the manufacturing of materials resulting from an architect’s advice.

The paper, led by Oxford Net Zero Fellow Alexis McGivern and Oxford Net Zero Senior Associate Ranjita Rajan, urge professional service providers to acknowledge their role in facilitating emissions, map their serviced emissions and seek to reduce them.

The paper also points out the potential risks from not considering serviced emissions – including increased liability for advice and services given increasing legal climate claims and financial liability from stranded assets and the physical threats of a warmer world.

“Professional service providers have the power to supercharge the global net zero transition by aligning client advice with 1.5ºC goals. This influence has been largely unaddressed by existing net zero guidance,” the authors write.

“Through their provision of advice and/or services, they can significantly influence their client’s strategies and actions, enabling system transformation across critical sectors of the economy.”

The paper sets out a roadmap for acknowledging and reducing serviced emissions. The process starts with the mapping of a firm’s clients, services and projects to “identify the matters on which you advise that result in high emissions, the matters on which you advise that already support transition to net-zero and where you have the greatest potential in terms of influence and emissions to make a positive difference.”  

The map is then used to set targets to reduce serviced emissions, which “may require [service providers] to transform their service offerings and client portfolio mix.” The plan should accept the “phasing down and out of all unabated fossil fuels as part of a just global transition.”

The roadmap also includes advocating for regulatory and policy changes where these are “inhibiting the sector from achieving 1.5ºC alignment.” Measuring the carbon emissions and impact of services provided is considered a key part of the “continuous improvement cycle” on serviced emissions. However the roadmap is not overly prescriptive – the paper is described as a “work in progress”, designed to spark further debate and refinement.

“Professional service providers will play a critical role in the transition of every sector of the economy and society to net zero as the advice and services they provide can accelerate their clients’ implementation of change.”

Find out more: Read the full report, Catalysing climate action: The role of professional service providers in realising a net-zero future