Firms urged to reduce carbon footprint

Lopez -led Energy Development Corp. (EDC) strongly urged businesses and individuals to pursue forging collaborative pathways for a decarbonized and regenerative future.

Company president Richard B. Tantoco explained that being regenerative means uplifting EDC stakeholders and the environment beyond compliance, especially in times of crisis.

This mission, he said, helped the company in attaining lower carbon intensity in its operations.

EDC’S carbon footprint, being a 100 percent renewable energy company, is only a tenth of an average coal power plant’s carbon footprint. This is on top of EDC’S efforts to be carbon neutral year after year, with its annual carbon sequestration of 3.9 metric tonnes of CO2 from the watersheds that it manages in its geothermal reservations and carbon emissions of only 865,652 tonnes from its operations.

It has been nine years since the company started reporting on its sustainability performance following the Global Reporting Initiative’s framework.

The framework is set forth by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) and seeks to go beyond organizational impact on the “triple bottom line” of people, planet and profit, extending to how the company intends to create value in the short to medium and long term. Apart from reforesting close to 10,000 hectares of land and planting over six million seedlings in the past 11 years, EDC has been able to partner with 178 various public and private organizations to help restore 96 threatened native tree species— making BINHI the country’s biggest and most extensive private sector- led greening programs.