Decarbonizing our activities

In late 2021, Ardian decided to seek major reductions in carbon emissions from its own operations as an asset manager. This is a vital step in our ongoing campaign of climate action, and it demonstrates to our portfolio companies and other stakeholders that we are fully engaged alongside them in the drive towards a low carbon future.

We have measured Ardian’s carbon footprint four times since 2015 and have already achieved a 32% reduction in our carbon intensity per employee between 2015 and 2019. Following the onset of the pandemic, our carbon emissions fell significantly. While emissions have since increased as activity resumes, our corporate carbon plan will ensure we continue on a downward trend.

We have launched a project using a science-based methodology to model the carbon reduction trajectory that Ardian must follow to meet the Paris Agreement. This work has given us a detailed understanding of the steps that we will need to take each year to play our part in limiting the global temperature increase to well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

At Ardian, we believe that it is essential to involve our employees in the drive to achieve our climate ambitions. To that end, we organized a series of workshops on business travel, energy consumption, waste and green IT. More than 40 employees representing Ardian’s different teams and countries gathered to brainstorm new initiatives, both global and local. We are finalizing our global carbon action plan, which will include impactful measures to address our main sources of emissions. Progress on our reduction path will be assessed regularly.

Because we know that we will not reduce Ardian’s emissions to zero, we are exploring offsets and carbon credits. Even though we make limited use of these schemes, we conduct thorough due diligence on the quality of all the projects we consider. We want to ensure they provide additional, permanent reductions in CO₂ that can be measured and independently verified. All carbon credits must be unique – and therefore sold only once – and all projects must also bring additional benefits for the populations they affect.