MAG Interactive’s process and considerations when offsetting their carbon emissions

Reducing your carbon emissions is an important part of becoming greener. But it can be hard to cut all emissions. Offsetting your emissions through green initiatives has been the way for MAG Interactive to make up for their negative impact on the climate.  

Offsetting is a way to compensate for the carbon emissions caused by your company. This compensation works by donating to or investing in projects around the world making it more sustainable. It could be anything from windmills in India or planting trees in the Amazon to climate-friendly stoves in Somalia. This way you help reduce emissions globally as a way to mitigate negative impacts caused by your own company. 

MAG Interactive, the Swedish mobile developer behind games such as Ruzzle and Wordbrain, has used offsetting as one of the company’s green initiatives.

“Climate issues are a burning matter for our management team – the founders are very passionate about this. This really helps me and my dedication for diving deeper into the issue and create impactful changes.” – Fredrik Sjöberg, HR Generalist, MAG Interactive.

 Fredrik Sjöberg, HR Generalist, MAG Interactive 

There are different approaches to how much to offset. You can offset based on your own emissions or you offset based on for example a specific economic amount. MAG Interactive chose to offset relative to their emissions, which meant that the first step was to set a baseline.

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Measuring your baseline emissions

There are different opinions as to what to include and how the calculations should look like when measuring your emissions. There isn’t yet some standard to follow for game companies. MAG Interactive chose to find a partner to help them choose the right way to measure their emissions. 

“We started by investigating what emissions MAG Interactive are creating on an annual basis, in this case specifically during 2019. In order to receive as valid data as possible, we used the help of GoClimateNeutral to create a climate report where we could assess our emissions. This report entailed how much CO2 MAG Interactive created in terms of flights, electricity, heat, servers and hardware”

Fredrik Sjöberg, HR Generalist, MAG Interactive 

Choosing the right offsetting measures

With the results in hand, the next step for MAG Interactive was to decide what to offset and how. The biggest impact was their flights, which was the first they wanted to offset. Next came emissions from their operations. 

Finding the right offsetting initiatives was important for MAG Interactive, which is why they had help from their partner to identify and make use of reliable and trustworthy initiatives.

“For MAG Interactive the most sensible place to start was neutralizing our previous emissions, in this case, the previous year, 2019. Our climate compensation was carried out in two steps, first for our flights and thereafter for our remaining emissions such as servers, energy and hardware. To ensure that these funds had the greatest impact possible they were put in Gold Standard Initiatives – which in this case supports three out of the Sustainable Development Goals.”

Fredrik Sjöberg, HR Generalist, MAG Interactive

While offsetting is a good way to compensate for a negative impact, it isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. Development, distribution and gameplay may still cause a negative impact. Therefore, looking for ways to reduce your carbon footprint is still important.

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Make next years emissions lower

As a part of MAG Interactive’s engagement in the Playing For The Planet alliance, they have, among other things, committed to reducing their carbon emissions as much as possible. Some of the things they have done already are to shift to green energy for their cloud servers and choose green electricity in their office in Stockholm. 

“As well as other coming initiatives we are looking into inviting our climate partner for a workshop to educate our employees and MAG Interactive in general on how we can reduce our individual emissions as well as the company’s.”

Fredrik Sjöberg, HR Generalist, MAG Interactive

Find a partner to help you get started 

Not everyone has the time to research or measure emissions when they want to start offset based on their actual emissions. A way to get started is to find a partnering company that can help along the way. For MAG Interactive this proved to be the best strategy.

“My advice is to really put in time finding a good climate partner. There’s so much information regarding climate compensation and efforts to reduce your emissions and few companies have the resources to hire a person 100% dedicated to sustainability matters – maybe in the future, who knows. So the partnership with your climate partner is in my mind essential for assuring that you get your money’s worth in your efforts becoming carbon neutral“

Fredrik Sjöberg, HR Generalist, MAG Interactive