Our environmental impact in 2023

We reduce our own impact on the climate, stimulate sustainability actions at our partners and encourage the active recycling of electronic industrial waste through Digital For Youth.  

Our climate footprint for 2023: An overview 

DNS Belgium remains committed to sustainability and reducing its environmental footprint. For 2023, we calculated our total climate footprint at 124.69 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2eq). This comes down to 3.43 tonnes per full-time equivalent (FTE) or 0.072 kilograms of CO2eq per registered domain name. 

Our emissions are broken down into three scopes: 

  • Scope 1: Direct emissions, which account for 41.96 tonnes of CO2eq, representing 33.65% of our total footprint. 
  • Scope 2: Indirect emissions from purchased energy, which account for 10.18 tonnes of CO2eq, representing 8.16% of the total. 
  • Scope 3: Other indirect emissions, amounting to 72.55 tonnes CO2eq, representing 58.18% of total emissions. 

Although these figures provide an insight into our current environmental impact, it is important to note that we have fully offset these emissions. This is confirmed by our PAS 2060 certificate, which recognises our efforts to achieve carbon neutrality.  

In addition to offsetting emissions, we are continuing our long-term relationship with Planteenbos.be. We have been planting forests in Flanders through this organisation since 2017, in addition to offsetting emissions through PAS 2060 certified projects. And in November 2023, together with the board of directors, we also physically planted some trees. 

 

Carbon reduction measures 

Several measures were taken in the past to reduce our carbon emissions, many of which continued in 2023. Here is an overview of these measures: 

  1. Remote participation sponsoring for CENTR : We sponsored the remote participation for CENTR again this year. This allows more colleagues and staff from other registries to participate remotely in the working groups instead of travelling to the conference, thus significantly reducing travel-related carbon emissions. 
  2. Blue Bike Vouchers: We continue to use Blue Bike vouchers to allow visitors, interns and colleagues travelling by train to make the final journey by bike. This initiative promotes sustainable transport and reduces the use of cars for short distances. In total, Blue Bikes were used nine times in 2023.  
  3. Electrification of our fleet and mobility budget: We are continuing our electric fleet conversion policy and offering mobility budgets to employees entitled to a company car. This encourages the use of more eco-friendly transport options. 19 colleagues opted for a mobility budget in 2023, four colleagues swapped their fuel car for an electric car in 2023.  
  4. Bike leasing policy: Our bike leasing policy was further expanded in 2023. Three new bike leasing projects were launched this year, six projects were finalised and one project is ongoing. In all, colleagues commuted 15,179 km by bicycle , resulting in a significant reduction of carbon emissions. 
  5. Digital for Youth: 14,319 IT assets were collected through Digital for Youth, 5,679 of which laptops. 2,045 laptops were distributed to organisations working with young people. Their impact report (Dutch only) shows a reduction of 32.5 tonnes of carbon emissions. 
  6. Office: We have a green power contract for our offices. We also adopted several power-saving measures such as LED lighting. You can find out more about the impact of these measures in our climate action plan.

More information on our sustainability efforts and the decreasing trend of our climate footprint is available on our website: Our climate footprint continues to decrease year after year

We set ourselves the following CO2 targets for 2023: Produce a maximum of 0.10 kg CO2-eq./domain name and 4.83 ton CO2-eq./FTE. We successfully met these targets, achieving 0.072 kg CO2-eq. per domain name and 3.43 tonnes CO2-eq. per FTE in 2023.   

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With this article, we support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.