Seite 2: Planetly: "With our solution, companies become #climateneutral".

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Anna Alex knows how offsetting works. She sits in the green courtyard of a four-story office building in Berlin Mitte and types into her Linkedin profile: "With our solution, companies become #climateneutral." In the Berlin start-up scene, Alex was long known as the founder of the online store "Outfittery." Since she founded "Planetly" in winter 2019, she has been invited on panels to explain how companies can use her software to measure their CO2 emissions and become climate neutral.

Behind her is the open office space of "Planetly. Of the 60 employees, only two or three sit there behind their screens. "When I wanted to calculate Outfittery's carbon footprint, I didn't find a software solution," Alex says. "We had a consultant who worked with an Excel spreadsheet and then sent us a PDF: 'This is your footprint now. But an Excel sheet is not made for transformation. It doesn't provide insights for decision makers and decision makers," Alex says.

CO2 calculators for businesses have been around for several years, but the difference with Planetly, Alex says, is that Planetly accesses data such as electricity use or business travel from customers' respective enterprise software, making the process faster and more accurate. "We look at what the quick wins are: Adjust travel policy, convert home office employees to green energy. Often that's 20 to 30 percent of emissions," Alex says.

Space start-up Yuri is also a Planetly customer

According to a company spokeswoman, Planetly currently has over 150 corporate customers. There is even a separate label "Carbon neutral + 2020. Planetly" is written in a blue circle on the pages of Planetly customers. One of these companies is the space start-up "Yuri." It emitted 141 tons of CO2 in 2020, according to Planetly. That's about as much as 31 cars emit on average per year.

I reach Yuri founder Mark Kugler via video call. In order to become "climate-neutral" with Planetly, he says, he sat down for two hours and worked out the figures for his start-up. According to Planetly's CO2 calculation, electricity and business travel were the biggest items. Kugler says they even tripled the CO2 emissions from the rockets as a precautionary measure to make sure they were offsetting everything. They have now switched to green electricity and no longer plan to fly on business trips within Europe, he said. Yuri offset the rest of the emissions - by donating around 1,000 euros to a solar energy project and a well construction project in the Philippines.

More than 100 companies, according to the Planetly spokeswoman, "have become climate neutral for a fiscal year that has already passed by offsetting." Furniture retailer home24 also claims to be "climate neutral" thanks to Planetly. 22,100 tons of CO2, it says on its website, have been offset for 2019. How much money the company has spent on this per ton of CO2, it does not want to reveal. At any rate, with its roughly 1,000 euros, space company Yuri has paid about seven euros for offsetting one ton of CO2.

Just a ten-minute walk from the Planetlys office is the Iota Foundation office. Iota launched in 2016 as a communication protocol that works much like a blockchain, but avoids some of the problems of many blockchains. While Bitcoins are being mined, Iota units already exist on the market. For every transaction an Iota user wants to make, she must verify two other transactions.

"I just like to design platforms."

Iota sees itself as a digital infrastructure on which all kinds of verified information can run. The "Internet of Everything. Since the end of 2020, the foundation has been working with "Climate Check" for this purpose. The company specializes in measurement, reporting and verification. The joint idea is to use IoT- via the Iota protocol- to collect verified data on CO2 emissions or savings of the devices in real time.

Mathew Yarger, Iota's Head of Smart Mobility, explains the system to me via Zoom from his desk in Austin, Texas. He's not a climate expert, he says. "I just like designing platforms," Yarger says. He opens a dashboard to show me sensors from a pilot project on Google Maps. With a few clicks, he calls up a digital model of a plant in Chile that captures and destroys greenhouse gases from a landfill. The plant has captured and thus reduced 27 tons of CO2 in the past 30 days, and 348 tons in the past 12 months.

"With a system like this, organizations don't have to spend weeks bringing an expert to the facility and then checking its performance. We can see from our desk if it's reducing and how much," Yarger says. In two to three years, he hopes, "a couple dozen partners could be using our code for projects like this." He himself is currently trying to convince the city of Austin to use the Iota system to track how much electricity Austin's solar arrays are feeding into the grid. "We hope to use this to create a real-time data set that investors can use to assess which investments are worthwhile and really reduce CO2, and which are not," Yarger said.

In the long term, Yarger hopes, Iota's dashboard can become a digital model of global CO2 emissions and reductions. The more CO2-measuring IoT devices that are connected to Yarger's pilot project, the more accurate it will become - and the more accurately we will know about the Earth's actual CO2 budget.