You’re probably feeling increasingly uneasy about the unavoidable embodied carbon emissions your buildings produce…that’s understandable.

Offsetting these by obtaining credits will make it easier for you and your colleagues to sleep at night, and it’s difficult to put a price on this increased reassurance.

Information about the carbon credits you obtain is freely available to other people and businesses.

Buying credits can therefore be a valuable way of enhancing your general corporate reputation.

The fact that you’re backing environment-enhancing initiatives, via the purchase of carbon credits, can obviously be a very useful enhancement of your existing CSR activity.

Staff increasingly want to work for organisations that take steps to help the environment. This is especially true of younger employees, who will be the most exposed to any future adverse consequences of climate change.

Being seen to offset your unavoidable embodied carbon emissions can therefore be a hugely useful tool in attracting and retaining high quality staff, especially at a time of virtually full UK employment, as well as stimulating their motivation and productivity.

Your organisation may already have a policy of supporting projects that train and employ local labour, for example.

Given the wide range available, it’s almost certain that you’ll be able to secure carbon credits in line with this approach and therefore not only retain consistency but enhance your connection with this purpose.

It’s perfectly legitimate to shout about the credits you obtain and environmental projects you support.

Carbon credits thus give you one more weapon to fire in your war for customers with competitors, in battlefields such as PR and advertising.

The government already compels all UK quoted companies and financial institutions to publish plans detailing how they’ll achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Buying carbon credits would obviously be a legitimate element in such documents and it’s likely government and regulator demands for this kind of accountability will only grow and affect more organisations in the future.

Why, therefore, leave the field free for them to secure all the benefits of doing so?