The One Planet Centre

The One Planet Standard is a tool we have developed for organisations of any size to help them manage the reduction of their ecological footprint to ‘one planet’.

It’s a helpful roadmap for organisational change that can be adopted by any type or size of organisation, whether public body, enterprise, corporate or community.

The Standard is backed by Jane Davidson, the architect of the Well-being of Future Generations Act in Wales, who calls it “an impressive tool to help people be confident in their emission reduction“, and Sophie Howe, Wales’ Future Generations Commissioner, who says:

“The Standard aligns and builds on my existing advice in the area of decarbonisation and enhancing nature resilience, and it can help not only the public sector but all organisations in Wales with practical actions towards meeting carbon emission and biodiversity targets.

“The Standard centres around the 5 ways of working and promotes long-term thinking; it is an easy-to-understand and useful tool that can help address the climate and nature emergencies, prevent the disaster we are currently heading towards and help ensure the well-being of our future generations and the planet.”

The key differences between this solution and most other systems for achieving sustainability are that:

1. your actions must be measurable and objectively verifiable
2. there is independent assessment, with an online tool
3. your targets refer directly to operating within planetary limits, and
4. you account for all of your impacts, positive and negative.

…otherwise it’s like trying to bale out a sinking boat with a colander!

The Standard is free to download and can be confidentially independently assessed by our partners Assessment Services Ltd. who have provided an online self-assessment tool.

Organisations can interpret the Standard’s requirements in a way that’s relevant to their activities.

We at the One Planet Centre can support you with training materials, case studies, solutions and advice. Both Assessment Services and ourselves have 30 years experience in our respective businesses.

Besides being independently assessed, the One Planet Standard will help organisations account for the entirety of the impacts of their activities, including social impacts.

Downloading it brings you two documents: the Standard itself and What It Means In Practice:

Costs and benefits

If you measure social & ecological costs & benefits to capture social value and natural value, as well as financial value, you can plan your activities to make yourself socially & environmentally net positive!

Why do it? We are used to thinking of costs and benefits as financial, desiring our cost-benefit balance sheet to be net positive.

But often the social and environmental costs and benefits of our activities get left off this balance sheet. This is largely why we have climate and nature emergencies.

The Standard explains how to account for all impacts, good and bad so you can be ‘net positive’. The tools that we can offer will help organisations to achieve this.

The Standard dovetails with the Sustainable Development Goals and the Well-being of Future Generations Act including its five ways of working.

It supports a process of continuous improvement.

Organisations set a timeline, with milestones, to reach a one planet footprint using measurement and verification tools.

The graph below shows the extent of humanity’s ecological deficit. It is over fifty years since we operated within the limits of what the planet can support. This is why every organisation needs to contribute to the urgent effort to reverse this trend:

The graph also shows the elements of the ecological footprint, which captures more than just the carbon footprint.

To download the Standard at no cost or obligation, please see its dedicated website.

To find out how we support organisations that choose to adopt the Standard, click here.