The European Parliament (EP) wants to cut its carbon footprint by 30% by 2020 and commissioned an international tender won by the consortium Futureproofed / Deloitte Belgium.

What did we do ?
• Deloitte made the inventory of the EP carbon footprint (CO₂ emissions) based on the Bilan Carbone methodology of Ademe.
• Futureproofed formulated, practical, profitable reduction opportunities, based on existing, or near-existing technologies.

As for other projects, our overall line of reasoning here is that measures of energy efficiency (“negawatts”) lead to permanent, immediate and much higher environmental and financial return than any measure that is taken further downstream: . Therefore the sequence in our approach was the following:
• Reduce the need for energy and resources;
• Substitute the existing technologies, methods by more efficient and sustainable technologies;
• Offset the remaining CO₂ emissions.

To take on this challenge we used :
Whole System Design
Sometimes single-problem, single-solution approaches do work, but often optimizing one element in isolation pessimizes the entire system. We used this approach at the European parliament to identify hidden connections and turn these into an advantage.

• We designed for the whole system, taking all possible relations between subsystems into account;
• We looked at the right measures in the right sequence, (for instance: relighting can improve the lighting comfort and overall feel of a building, but will also reduce the internal heat gains, which in turn lower the required air-conditioning capacity and consumption. These gains can serve to partially finance the relighting project);
• Finally, we focused on measures with multible benefits: not only reducing CO₂ emissions, but also improving comfort and providing financial returns

With these recommendations the EP is now setting up an action plan to reduce its CO₂ emissions.